part0013

Looking at the 20th century we can see it as a time when a search for roots for a sense of place was a common experience in the lives of individuals, peoples and nations. There seemed to be a longing for a pure place, a safe place especially in answer to existential crisis. For some this place was found in the “truths” of fundamentalist religion which saw a monumental rise globally. In some forms of this type of believing there was also the promise of material security through a prosperity gospel accompanying the sense of home within the given truths of the religion whatever religion that may be. For others this sense of place was a land, a place to call one’s own and in which to at least believe oneself to be safe. There is no doubt that a sense of belonging to one place is an important dimension of life and one that enables us to feel fully human and part of a society that has been forged through the interaction of people and place. For others there was a connection of two aforementioned aspects, the desire for land security and safety along with a sense that there was a divine truth in this desire for a certain piece of land and the sense of self and belonging that this sacred space alone can validate. This of course raises many questions amongst which is the relationship of the particular to the universal, how do particular local places relate to the whole and does God prefer one place to another, does God only become available to certain people in certain places and what happens to those who were previously there or wish to remain there and not hold the same convictions about the divine? The colonial history of the world is scattered with tragic examples of how this divine mandate to land has been worked out and many of the articles in this book demonstrate it very well.

Many contemporary scholars have addressed the issue by looking at whether a God would indeed make such land mandates for people and how this relates to notions of sacred and profane land. Can we speak of holy places or do we acknowledge that the whole world is sacred made as most claim by the Creator God? This may seem a simple question and to many attributing any kind of divine origin or spiritual significance to one nation over another perhaps appears antiquated. However, this can never be true for many believers who believe God to have gifted land, nationhood and divine purpose. Indeed, for many people throughout history the nation has been understood essentially as a religious reality. It is also true that clinging to one divine when one’s place in a land was under threat has also been a strategy of people throughout history.

We should not lose sight of the way in which the nomadic Jewish tribes had used monotheism that is as an identity statement amidst the cultures and religions in which they wandered. However, of course it is also true to say that scholars also believe that it was never a strict monotheism in that it did acknowledge the existence of other gods but rather wished to state the superior power of their own one God. There are additional issues of course such as does that God have power outside the land in which He wishes his people to dwell, this is shown when the Psalmist asks, “how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” What I am hoping to highlight is not that monotheism as a concept is wholly negative, as we see for the nomadic Jewish tribes it grew up from their experience and enabled them to remain within a meaningful identity. Of course it was not an exclusive identity since we note throughout the Hebrew Scriptures how intermarriage and the like took place and how cultures met not always in an antagonistic manner. There appeared to be room for integration into the Jewish identity and of course conversely scholars are now showing that with such integrations also came change in time. It is when these boundaries become fixed and impermeable that Schneider and others argue monotheism becomes the tyrant it appears to have been for centuries. When under the influence of state power, culture and philosophy the story of God becomes the story of totality, of a closed system, of the One that it excludes the “other” and becomes a rigid and impenetrable story of ONE (Schneider 2008 , 3 ). Monotheism came to signal civilization and advancement and it is in this capacity that it became a central component of empire in the hands of a variety of European states. Moltmann has argued that this is inevitable as monotheism sits best with theocracy, one cannot be without the other (ibid., 20 ). The logic of the One suggests that we are able to distinguish between the truth and falsehood which is ideal if one wishes to set up a theocratic society. It is also very useful if like Aquinas you wish to set down a substantial theology, influenced by the writings of Aristotle, which demonstrates that the world itself reveals the unchanging One, the Unmoved First Mover, the One that relegates all other knowing to fiction and myth in its supreme presence. Sameness becomes the basis for establishing what is real from what is unreal and theological ontology becomes reductive with the result that “the other” is lost (ibid., 88 ), given no existence or demonized. Stasis becomes the nature of the Divine, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, sustaining a world that is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. This is of course we have to acknowledge very appealing to many people who understand safety as the ultimate purpose of religion, they live in a world that does not change with a God who does not change and what they have to do is live by the rules that do not change. However it takes very little investigation to realize that none of the aforementioned is true, the world changes, the rules change both theological and ethical over time and one assumes that this implies the divine may change although this has been masked by dualistic metaphysics as our understanding changing. We may also wish to challenge the notion that religion is the ultimate security blanket as Goss demonstrates embodying love is rather counter to keeping safe. For Goss an ethic of what he terms “communal survivability” is not necessarily good enough in ethics and theology.

Of course the notion that the One dictates what is civilized and acceptable may be argued to be at play in the Jewish and Palestinian situation. I was struck when watching the film “The Land Speaks Arabic” by an elderly Palestinian man who was pondering on his life and the way it had so drastically changed since the Nakba; a time when those who had experienced an unimaginable trauma displaced those who were grafted on to the land through generations of interaction and storytelling. Looking back he said that he had Jewish girlfriends and people had got along in their country within a religious mix, the problem he felt was the introduction of European Jews into this Middle Eastern culture. For him this was not actually a religious question at all but rather a cultural one, these in-comers did not know the land or the people in it but they came with a sense of divine salvation and therefore justification in their hearts. Strangely in believing they were reclaiming a land that had been promised to them they believed through Bible stories they were using land and the divine in a way that it might be argued had not been used before. That is to say the One gives identity when land is an issue but land may also give room in the One for multiple dwelling. I am sure it has been argued many times before that at a psychological level having experienced what was so fresh and cut so deep those incomers needed to mould once again an identity so scarred and smashed and we know there was a European and American political agenda behind the move that was not necessarily pro-Jewish. And so I suppose we could be asking “in what ways do they sing their Lord’s song in a strange land?” In what way can those who have been planted in an environment that did not grow them begin to understand the divine still as one who gives them security and a sense of self but allows the same for others? I do not wish to address the question from a psychological or even purely political point of view rather I would like to examine what part strict monotheism played and plays in the situation and whether we may transcend this in a bid for a peaceful future.

Schneider believes she has an answer and that is that within the logic of the ONE there can be no room for multiplicity and one may even argue diversity (ibid., 192 ). For her the choice is clear do we settle for the world of categories and abstractions that the ONE presents us with or do we embrace what she calls the multiplicity which is the diverse nature of embodiment. An embodiment that refuses categories as bodies do not tend to come as one rigid category with one set of identity marks and ways of being in the world. Schneider points out that a fundamental goal of love and peace cannot be satisfied under the regime of the ONE. In accordance with other feminist theologians she suggests that love needs another, it cannot be without encounter and it cannot be ethical unless it recognizes the presence of others as they are. Heyward spoke powerfully of this saying that it was the desire to love and be loved that drew the divine from the heavens and into relation through incarnation. We do not see here any hint that a wayward people needed the outpouring of God in order to offer redemption, which may be understood as full and flourishing humanity, to the few. It was God’s desire to love and be loved that brought about this outpouring and it is the continued desire that means the divine will never retreat to the heavens and the place of Absolute Oneness, in such a move all relation is lost, all possibility of loving and being loved. For Schneider this way of seeing things signals a notion of the divine so based in love that it is willing to show up and fully risk, nothing less will do (ibid., 206 ). It is this and this alone that changes things, that brings peace. The ONE brings safety as we have seen but outpouring love changes things. Schneider speaks plainly when she says, “to follow God who became flesh is to make room for more than One it is a posture of openness to the world as it comes to us, of loving the discordant, plentipotential worlds more than the desire to overcome, to colonize or even to ‘same’ them’” (ibid., 207 ). Divinity is free, most of all from theology and doctrine and the sameness they impose while bodies however well policed are never free from divine trespass! Of course this is the language of a Christian theologian and so as it stands has little relevance except to those Palestinian Christians who are looking for new ways ahead. However, I hope to demonstrate later that there is a similar approach possible offered by the Hebrew Scriptures which of course have a different theological underpinning but offer radical ways ahead.

There have been many theologians who have addressed the issue of transcendence and all cannot be mentioned here but one who must be, if only briefly, is Dorothee Soelle whose work will never allow the divine to escape to the outer reaches of reality and who always understood theological questions to be both deeply embedded in the personal sense of identity but always political. This is relevant in the present context to counter the arguments of those who would say that if God has given the land then whatever injustice or even atrocity occurs in the pursuit of that end is of no consequence as it is the will of God. There are of course many biblical accounts that could be cited to support such a view but many who hold it see no need to argue beyond the perceived will of God regardless of biblical argument.

It is self-evident that Soelle’s work, much of which grew from reflection on her own people’s treatment of Jews and others during the Second World War, was dedicated to creating a new social order and this she did through political action but also through theological creation, a task she understood as crucial to counter dispassionate theological dogma and individualistic theology which she saw as a component of patriarchal theology and “capitalist spirituality.” We could see how both these components have played a part in the politics of Israel/Palestine with the overarching God of land offering it to the people who will “develop” it most! As Soelle’s work progressed we see the God of transcendence becoming a spirit of transformation among us, one who enables us to transcendent the places we find ourselves in to move to another way of liberative being. In The Silent Cry Soelle is planting theological seeds for a life that transcends popular understandings of both spirituality and politics. Here we see how a reworking of theology can indeed offer new ways to at once challenge the existing order of hierarchical monotheism with its divisions and categories and instead offer a model that will sustain the individual in their struggle through offering an empowering understanding of transcendence rather than a system that feeds other metanarratives. The repositioning of transcendence as a spirit amongst people which enables them to overcome existing orders can never play into the hands of metanarratives since the realities of lived experience do not fit such bounded and rigid categories. Indeed they are never stable enough to fit such large stories, that is to say what is placed amongst people is always changing and being temporarily molded by the spirit of the time, the breath of God in the midst of the fuller becoming of God and people.

In Soelle’s work traditional views of transcendence are seen as just as dangerous as the metanarrative of monotheism since it supplies a crucial component in that narrative- distance! If we are to keep the concept and think theologically then we must she insists see it as moving among us, a notion that Carter Heyward has more recently taken up. For Heyward transcendence is here and now in the lived reality of our lives as we move beyond limited and destructive ways of thinking into new ways- it is important to realize that there is no fixed and pre-ordered place to which we move, it is rather the ability to move, to change, to incorporate that is the vital part for theological thinking that is meant to change the world Heyward like others moans the combination of monotheism and transcendence since it brings in a static world, a world of the One God and his removal to a safe and indisputable distance. Like Soelle this is not the god Heyward knows but it is the One she sees that lies at the heart of discord and injustice. Of course this God that may not be questioned is not traditionally placed in a Jewish concept of the divine, a concept that allows for a lot of talking back and negotiating as we see in many parts of the Hebrew bible (Stone 2005 ).

In the approach of Soelle there is no challenge to monotheism as such although of course the location of the divine does change the face of monotheism significantly. That is to say if God is between and among us then we do have to think rather differently than if that God is above, beyond and untouchable and completely unknowable, but right in all things and for all time. It is the argument of Maaike de Haardt from the Netherlands that monotheism itself is the root cause of many of our ways of thinking and being and as such is a threat to our global relationality (de Haardt 2010 ). Just as Francis Fukiyama was signaling the grip of savage capitalism when he declared that history has ended, there is not space for development only repetition and the spread of one ideology so de Haardt argues that it is the singularity of the creator and creation that has set in place very destructive mono- thinking in the world leading to destruction and alienation. We become locked into what she sees as a unilateral relationality where the power is all on one side and does not reside in us as subjects. For de Haardt this is clearly demonstrated in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac which has become foundational for culture. For her the core problem is this unconditional absolute obedience to God as the only authentic way to express faith which sets in place a psychology of abuse. A psychology that does not question the hierarchy of obedience and suffering- one in short that can live with the consequences of the worst excesses played out in the name of God. The hierarchy of obedience to and suffering for that is inherent in this form of monotheism has been pointed out many times in the history of feminist theology for example but has not always led to questioning the ethical implications of continuing with monotheism itself (Korte & de Haardt 2009 ). What has been more usual is a debate around the notion of co-creation and co-creativity within a process model of relationality between the divine and humans. One in which it has been argued the absolute nature of God has been questioned and slightly altered. However for de Haardt this also falls short as it is she claims a largely male centered model which fails to move from the inherent problems of mono- generativity- she believes there remains an unequal notion at the heart of even the process model that leads to a system that actually takes for granted that hierarchy and therefore service and suffering are inevitable. That whatever the relationship there remains a core that is more equal than the other equal parts, it is this mono-centre that has to be obeyed whatever the consequences, appoint she illustrates by referring to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac.

It is in the work of Catherine Keller that de Haardt sees some way ahead from the mono-generativity of monotheism through an engagement with the Deep or the multiplicity of difference in relation that God is thought to be (see Keller 2003 ). Keller looks to Genesis and speaks of the tehomic ethics she sees at work in the early pages, a movement of the divine that is deep and dark and chaotic, one that does not set itself in place for exclusion and categories. Keller argues that the cosmos did not emerge from Platonic forms but rather from tehomic chaos, there was no blueprint, but rather the glorious outpourings of surprise and novelty. She offers a proposition for a tehomic ethic and it is that we bear with the chaos, neither liking it nor fostering it but recognizing that there is the unformed future (ibid., 30 ). This unformed future is made up of repetition but from very early in cosmic development this repetition always adds something new, in every repetition is a transgression, our bodies and that of the cosmos are in constant flux, as they regenerate they change, they are in essence transgressive. It seems little less than perverse to insert an unchanging God with a worked out plan into this enfleshed human and cosmic picture. This movement of the divine is far too wild for categories and far too deep for settling on ONE manifestation and world order. Keller offers an encouraging interpretation which rehabilitates much that has been excluded from theologies and world views due to being seen as chaotic and beyond what the divine may be. Not only that she points out that transgression is also a fundamental way in which both we as bodies and the world itself appears to work and this gives hope that even the most fixed and static categories in theology may be changed, if they refuse they appear to going against the nature of things. The absolute God seems at odds with creation.

Keller like Edward Said before her reminds us that beginnings are always relative, contested and historical whereas origins are absolute and power laden. Beginnings then give the theologian the chance to decolonize this space of origins in creation and the inevitable creator who sits apart and to challenge as Catherine Keller puts it “the great supernatural surge of father power, a world appearing zap out of the void and mankind ruling the world in our manly creator’s image” (ibid., 6 ). We are thrown back to cosmic beginnings, to void and chaos and we are asked to make our theology from that ground. To understand who we are and who we might be from tohu vabohu, the depth veiled in darkness. Once we give agency to void and chaos there can be no creation out of nothing as our power laden dualistic origin. Creation ceases to be a unilateral act laden with power and prohibition and the divine speech in the pages of Genesis is no longer understood as a command uttered by the Lord and warrior King who rules over creation, but as Keller tells us “let there be” is a whisper of desire and what comes forth emanates from all there is rather than appearing from above and beyond—from that place of absolute power. Keller offers the opportunity for people to re-think the way in which they are all related, in the dark in the depth of continued becoming rather than as the chosen of an almighty deity whose voice alone is the command for how the world should be arranged.

However de Haardt still remains uncomfortable as she feels even these theologies that she admires are attempting to find models that fit some pre-existing theological frame at the same time as attempting to overcome models that have dominance and power at their heart. It is here that she makes her main point which is that perhaps we need new practices that change the still dominant imperialistic abusive unilateral relations, language and reality under which we live. Practices because she is not sure to what extent ideas, concepts and theologies impact on social reality but of course she acknowledges that they do. The challenge to monotheism then that she offers is to a way of living that stems from deeply rooted notions that are so deep that they have largely been forgotten but still impact on the way society and international relations and economics are shaped. Of course we will always reflect and think but it seems for de Haardt that the way ahead is to “live” ourselves to a new space, a new shape of being that challenges the violence to women, children, “others” and the planet which might be argued to be the logical extension of mono-thinking. It is by placing ourselves in the now not under the yoke of an absolute and all powerful deity that we may move towards more relational ways of being together. Certainly de Haardt’s approach to monotheism seems very radical indeed seeing very little to recommend it and much that it has been responsible for in terms of dysfunctional living- it allows for too many unilateral relationships which rarely if ever satisfy all involved.

A relatively new voice in the transcendent debate is that of Mayra Rivera who approaches the question through a postcolonial theology of God and speaks of the touch of transcendence. Right from the start she makes her position plain God is beyond our grasp but not beyond our touch just as we find in human touch, we touch but can never fully grasp the other creating what she suggests is a “intimacy of transcendence” (Rivera 2007 , 2 ). Situated as her argument is in postcolonial theology she demonstrates how the dominant imperial theologies have never acknowledged anything beyond themselves. While using the disembodied nature of the ONE God to set in place the masculinist imperial symbolic it at the same time stops the world, both physical and symbolic, at its own narrow vistas. Rivera of course is also aware that falling into the untouchable, vertical transcendence that usually follows on is no place to go for those who sit beyond this vista, those who have not been seen or acknowledged as inhabiting land and ways of life that fall beyond. It is precisely because of this that she sees the need for a form of transcendent theology that breaks down the mono stranglehold. For her there is nothing abstract about transcendence as in the hands of the powerful it even controls the creation of time and our spatial perceptions. Her argument is that western industrialism needed to move beyond the rhythms of natural time and impose a universal time in order to maximize the profits it wished to extract and to disconnect people from their land and their natural ways of being. While she is not speaking directly to Palestine I think the connections are clear to see. This also separated the public and private sphere with the private time being seen as feminized and trivial while public time was of the greatest importance, the masculinized time of uninhibited production and detached transcendence (ibid., 8 ). Perhaps too we can see how the hard working Jewish immigrant to Palestine was seen as male while the original inhabitants were somewhat feminized in the view that they were lazy and unproductive, more concerned with relationality to land and family than to the “real” world of production.

Rivera also argues that horizontal transcendence has divided space itself with what is north as being understood as closer to God while the south is nearer the depths of stagnation and even depravity. In accordance with Derrida she believes that such overarching systems of knowledge produce rather than discover all encompassing foundations, they create the illusion of totality and suppress anything that is at odds or as Rivera sees it anything that is beyond. It is this view of the world she wishes to challenge but she does not wish to assume transcendence is external to the world and therefore human flourishing is subordinate to higher divine principles. Nor does she believe that talk of immanence denies and makes small talk of transcendence. She states her hope in “the ineffable affinity that links all creatures in open relations of mutual transformation which may help us to envision the beyond in the world without losing sight of the transcending character of all creation. This world is indeed more than it appears, calling us to apophatic alertness. God, the creatures and even we exceed all our representations” (ibid., 38 ).

Along with Gutierrez and others she is happy to declare the profane no longer exists but contrary to how this has been understood it is not an elimination of transcendence but rather a refusal to understand it as identifying God with the status quo. A very important notion when considering questions of the divine and the delegation of rights to land. Transcendence is understood to be in history because if we see God as external then any theological claim that salvation lies in a re-making of history, undoing injustice and replacing it with inclusive and just systems in the here and now is a false hope and an empty theology. It is the possibilities lying in the living of history in the material body that allows for the great hope of human kind, things may happen that have never happened before, “newness is not just discovered as being already present in nature, nor is it externally imposed upon reality. Genuinely new things come into existence from the actualization of possibilities through collective choice” (ibid., 43 ). Rivera claims that this notion of historical transcendence found in the work of Ignacio Ellacuria is dynamic allowing for contextual structural difference without implying dualism and for intrinsic unity without strict identity categories imposed. In this understanding Jesus can be said to be the supreme form of historical transcendence as he is present in material form as the dynamic outpouring of God, signaling that divine transcendence is not distance and absence but actual material presence. As Rivera says we should “aspire to a love that overcomes its consuming impulses and opens itself to be touched by the other” (ibid., 140 ). This seems to be a call to theology as much as to individuals. Theology should be touched by what transcends it and thus be transformed it should live in the “unceasing symphony played by the infinite creativity of life” as Gebara puts it and always reach not beyond but deeper and wider (ibid., 141 ). Derrida and Spivak refer to “hauntings” by which they mean encounters with those who are not present, those who are dead or not yet born, as places where we are called beyond ourselves and asked to embrace possibilities for the future. Ethics, politics and theology all seem to need such haunting in order to understand what is missing from our great schemes and metanarratives, who is not present and what difference consideration of them would make. It could well be argued that the land itself in Palestine/Israel has inherent in it those hauntings, those calls to a different futures based on those who have lived there and those who wish to live flourishing lives in that land. As testimonies suggest there is a time embedded in that land when identities were not the main issue, when people who lived there related to each other and the land as co-inhabitants. There would be some contemporary theologians who would suggest that listening to the land itself may well be the place to begin a new way of living together.

The historical understanding of transcendence is a great deal better than the traditional and the notion of the touch of transcendence and the intimacy thereof is very appealing both being suggestive of breaking through totality into a face to face encounter that changes systems. Of course there is still the problem that face to face may enable humans to think differently but those who wish to appeal to a divine authority may still find themselves appealing to an unchanging absolute whose commands and desires are set in stone. However, I believe that Genesis 32 is just one example of where a different understanding of the divine may be found, one that opens up possibilities. Here we find the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel which is commonly understood to be the divine, it is a fierce struggle in which both are altered.

This passage which has so often been read as fixing the nature of the divine does not actually read “I am what I am” but rather “I will be who I will be” a statement made in the midst of a struggle, a fight between a named person [Jacob], through naming we do assume some level of identity, and a stranger one who appears terrible and even terrifying in “his” otherness, almost beyond all that humans may know, an angel. They exhaust one another in this struggle and the human has a wound inflicted which means that he is unable to walk as he once did, but there is no real conclusion to this struggle and the name asked for by the human is as open ended as the struggle “I will be who I will be” no commitment to a fixed essence or even one implied in naming but an open flow of becoming in answer to a question that sought fixedness. Far from setting anything in stone least of all the God who is commonly understood to be the angel in this story there are endless possibilities placed in the telling, there is agency but openness to the movement of becoming that is relational. Relational and far from simple, there is struggle and even menace in this becoming for both the divine and the human, threat is ever present and no satisfaction in the end, indeed we may even say there is no end. No name is ever given and the human is left physically changed, not crippled, but not able to walk as once. The encounter has actually meant that his relationship with his body has been alerted and he is set a challenge to incorporate this into his future of physical landscapes. How is he to navigate his way now? The encounter with this stranger has left him less sure footed and it may be argued more aware of his own body and environment which now has to be considered when making a journey. Further of course Jacob also undergoes a name change, to Israel, a name signaling he has striven with God and with men. It is something to ponder that this struggle with God and men resulted in a change of name, a change then perhaps of how one sits in the world given the importance that names are felt to have in many cultures and particularly at the time of the story. Yet the angel, God, remains a form of becoming not a fixed identity through a naming. In many ways a representative of what Braidotti ( 1994 ) calls nomadic subjectivity because this becoming is capable of taking form and engaging within concrete contexts but remains fluid and untamed- there is a note of defiance and energy in the “I will be what I will be” that is not present in “I am who I am” which seems more resigned and static. I would dare to say there almost seems a relief that no identity is being imposed on the divine and the freedom to be and to change is allowed in that struggle.