The question of how one should imagine space is by far one of the most complex questions facing the world today. Space continues to be ever further enclosed inside the economic and political calculations of nation-states and corporations. Yet how one imagines space is inseparably bound to how one imagines peoples and their places in the world. Although the history of Christians in the colonial West shows the difficulty of people imagining space and peoples together, Christianity itself offers hope of their joining.1
To capture this new possibility I return to an old theological question. How are the people of God constituted? How is their identity established, given the boundaries that attend group identities today, whether they be nations, ethnicities, or peoples? Who are the people of God? Attempts to define the people of God always open up deeper confusion.2 If space and race go together in the making of modern peoples, then what would be involved in the spatial and racial unmaking of modern peoples, that is, the remaking that should be the constitution of Christian people? This question poses a seeming impossibility, the transformation of social imaginations shaped in the fragmenting of place as private property and the slicing of human existence in racial vision. While neither race nor space is an easily abandoned imaginary,3 the constitution of the people of God points to a remaking that could move the world away from historical uprootedness and discontinuity.4 Walter Brueggemann offers some of the key notions involved in this remaking: “Biblical faith begins with the radical announcement of discontinuity which intends to initiate us into a new history of anticipation. It challenges and contradicts a consciousness of land loss and expulsion as false consciousness. That is not the way life is intended to be or can finally be, because the power of anticipation rooted in the speech of God overwhelms the power of expulsion. A new history begins in that discontinuity and initiation.”5
Uprootedness coupled with anticipation of something new, discontinuity coupled with continuity, land loss and expulsion coupled with rerootedness—these notions point to the themes that have shaped my examination: displacement, translation, and intimacy. They also point to the actual frame of reference within which one must imagine the constitution of the people of God: Israel, the hermeneutic horizon on which one comes to understand not only the deeper significance of displacement, translation, and intimacy, but also the possibilities of a rerootedness, continuity, and life-giving newness.6 Up to this point, I have operated with a nonspecific referent for the designation “Israel.” I have had in mind throughout this book both biblical Israel or, as one theologian designates it, “canonical Israel” and living Israel, the Israel that is Judaism, the practitioners of its living faith, as well as the communities of memory that claim deep and abiding familial connection to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their God.7 I have also had a view of Israel as an ethnic, cultural, even racial reality.8
Christianity and Christian theology are unintelligible without Israel. While very few Christian writers and Christian communities have historically disputed this, Christians have interpreted Israel as an antiquated element in the wider revelation of the Christian God who has elected a new people, the Christians.9 An increasing number of theologians recognize the problem of supersessionism for Christianity and are now reading the theological traditions of the church in light of acknowledging this historical shortcoming.10 So it is an important advancement in Christian theological imagination to return to Israel, recognizing its continuing importance to Christian existence.11 However, the deeper challenge is whether Christian theology can explain how Israel is important to Christian existence. Indeed, Christian theologians have yet to capture the depth of the supersessionist problematic as it expressed itself in the New World of colonialism.12
There was already in place with the colonialist entrance in the new worlds of the Americas and Africa a failure of recognition equal to their failure to recognize the complexity and majesty of life marked by place. This failure of recognition was far more than simply forgetting Israel by claiming that Christian communitas surpassed their common life. This failure was more than poor knowledge of history or memory loss. The historic failure of recognition brings Christians to the threshold of Israel’s existence with a basic, life-altering question: How did we get here in the first place? where is here? The here is outside Israel, outside the conversation between biblical Israel and its God, outside the continuing conversations living Israel has with that same God. Gentiles, the goyim, are outside Israel, lacking intimate knowledge of the ways and struggles of life inside.13 Yet to even know that we are outside, that we are Gentile, that we are not addressed in the conversations of biblical Israel with its God is already to admit an entrance. Someone allowed us to draw close enough to hear that there was a conversation going on between God and a people in the first place.
To recapture the original situation of Gentile existence one must address what amounts to the racial unconscious that continues to shape Christian readings of biblical Israel and Christian interaction with living Israel.14 In approaching biblical Israel (hereafter simply referred to as Israel), one must attend to the overarching intertextual dynamics at play when one reads what one theologian calls the church’s “standard canonical narrative” of Israel.15 By recapturing the original situation out of which Gentile Christian faith must always think and imagine itself, one also captures the powerful social analog that emerges from the recreation of humanity in Jesus Christ. The first step is remembering Gentile existence.16
Christians arrived to Scripture through the mediation of a person, Jesus of Nazareth, and we Christians care about Israel’s Scriptures because they tell us about the Savior of the world. But at another level, Jesus’ life positions us at the door of Israel, its stories, its practices, its interactions, its hope, and its dreams. Even if we don’t want to look, even if we don’t know what we are looking at, even if we don’t know what to do with what we are looking at, we still must see Israel even as we behold Jesus.
Several crucial angles of perception are involved: (1) we are Gentile readers reading the biblical narrative that is the story of Israel; (2) we are Gentile readers positioned to read the story of Israel as a result of the life of Jesus; (3) we are Gentile readers who should perceive living Israel through the lens provided by biblical Israel; (4) we are Gentile readers who should read our own existence by the lens provided by the Jewish Jesus. These angles of perception all presuppose a fundamental spatial reality—we read existence from within Israel’s space.
When we read the Scriptures we are entering the space of Israel. It is first a space constituted through literacy with an entrance enabled through translation. As we enter the story of Israel we are being drawn into their land, their hoped-for place and their life in that space. Yet what constitutes that space is centrally neither land nor literacy, but God. Israel’s story opens to all people not simply the very nature of humanity, but the drama of peoples in the presence of the living God. With breathtaking power, biblical Israel performs humanity. The stories of biblical Israel also set the stage for God, drawing our attention through nothing less than a rupture in our knowledge. Israel’s God ruptures the way peoples imagine their collective existence, reorganizing what they know about God and how they should understand themselves in their land and in the world. If we exist in a world constituted by Israel’s God, then we exist not merely as readers of Israel’s story but as participants in that story. It is exactly Christian inability to maintain the reader-participant bond that creates problems in how we understand the representative power of Israel’s story for us.
Jesus introduced us to a God who promised to Israel the land of its ancestors—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and the eternality of its Davidic kingdom. God’s revelation was bound to Israel’s life, which meant Israel’s journey toward becoming a landed people was the drama through which God announced divine intentions for the entire creation. This was a drama in which we found out that Israel’s God, YHWH, is the creator of all. The terror of this revelation only intensifies once it is seen in its powerful placement inside Israel:
For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him. From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, while you heard his words coming out of the fire. And because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them. He brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves, to bring you in, giving you their land for a possession, as it is still today. So acknowledge today and take to heart that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. (Deut 4:32–39)
The priority of Israel noted in this biblical text and best captured in the idea of divine election was not simply a historical marker establishing a point of reference for a God who would very soon quickly transcend any real connection to Israel. The election of Israel, as has been articulated in many strains of the Christian tradition, is a matter of divine grace, divine initiative. It is not dependent on any intrinsic characteristics of Israel. In fact, Israel is created out of election. As Jon Levenson notes, Israel’s history is first its theology. It exists only by the will of God: “It is significant that the Torah’s promise to Abraham predates the existence of a people Israel, which indeed comes into being only as a result of YHWH’s mysterious grace and the equally mysterious but edifying obedience of Abraham. By making the theology earlier than the people, the Torah underscores ! ‘the necessity of viewing the greatness of the nation in light of the greatness of her God.’ Indeed Israel exists only because of God’s choice, and apart from God, it has no existence at all…. Israel has no profane history, only a sacred history, a history of redemption, of backsliding and return, punishment and restoration.”17
The idea of Israel’s election, however, quickly destabilized inside Christian thought. The fact that Israel’s election was a matter of prevenient grace, of divine initiative, came to signify the freedom of God from Israel, detachable from Israel and thereby attachable to other peoples. With the colonial moment, the idea of election entered the currencies of the new transatlantic economic order with its burgeoning nationalist operations energized within vernacular biblical translation. Divine election bound to the church trickled down to its various nation-state subjects, so that their prosperity and unchallenged power yielded an irrefutable conclusion: we are chosen by God. In truth, the election of Israel never significantly entered into the social imagination of the church. Israel’s election has not done any real theological work for Christian existence.
Israel’s election, however, announces more than the disclosure of divine freedom. It also disrupts the connection of all peoples to their gods, drawing their attention to this drama. Israel’s life in its land will be the stage upon which the Creator will speak to the creation. Unfortunately, by emphasizing divine freedom in Israel’s election, Christian theology was able to decouple divine disclosure from the specifics of Israel’s life and land and thereby help make possible a novel reading of Israel—not as God’s people but as an ethnic group.18
The reading of Israel as an ethnic group remains a powerful imaginary. This means that the modern sensibility of land as possession (by a people) shapes the way Christians continue to read the standard canonical narrative. In this schema, Israel, as a coherent (even multicultural) ethnic group, journeys in search of a land to possess by any means necessary. Such a reading can only turn Israel’s election into ethnic ideology.19 However, if one can resist this modernist sensibility, one might discern in some of the key identity-constituting moments of their journey to the promised land the unfolding of a different process of identity formation for Israel centered in God’s involvement with them.20
The alternative to reading Israel ethnically is not reading Israel idealistically. Indeed, one could easily see not just one Israel in Scripture but many Israels corresponding to their historic moments. One could also immediately register the danger of the notion of election given its historically situated social and political problems. If the deployment of a notion of election was problematic for modern nations formed from the colonialist moment, why would that same notion not be just as problematic when witnessed on the pages of the Bible?21 Yet this is precisely where biblical Israel’s life in its multiple historical displays and a notion of election are intended to create problems. Reading Israel’s story is intended to be disruptive, especially for Gentile existence. Given human existence on the other side of the refashioning of the world, and the formation of modern peoples, Christians live with a powerful temptation to resist or domesticate Israel’s story and the God depicted therein. However, if we domesticate this story we risk losing sight of the important work God was doing in Israel, which has direct implications for human existence.22
Centrally, YHWH repositioned the importance of land for Israel. Through the story of Israel, God stands between them and the land, constantly showing divine sovereignty over the land as its creator. God announced the divine intentions to Moses to fulfill the promise made to his ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, on ground made holy by divine presence and holy fire. YHWH presented the land as subservient to the divine will. If there is a close connection between people and land out of which come material culture and the identity created therein, then YHWH challenged the identity of Israel formed in Egypt. This was done through disruption of place and the disorientation of its signifying capabilities. Israel’s God challenged the identity formed in the place of bondage by disrupting the deep connection of people with the land. In so doing, God brought into judgment and ultimately into submission the powerful claim of that land upon Israel’s being.
One can see this in the way the story describes the disruption: God mutilated every aspect of life in the land of Egypt. The so-called ten plagues, or the signs and wonders, or, as Carol Meyers designates them, the “nine calamities and the one plague,” inflicted on Egypt are intended to force Pharaoh to free Israel. They are aimed at breaking the connection of identity to land by challenging faith in the land to sustain life through human powers.23 Through these signs and wonders God challenges Egypt, the superpower of the ancients.24 Yet more to the point, they deconstruct a matrix of identity bound to specific practices in a particular place. The characteristics of this absolute disruption are visible in the loss of life-sustaining Nile water to the profound interruption of daily life with the oppressive and overwhelming presence of frogs, gnats, and flies. That disruption continued with the loss of life-sustaining food by the death of livestock, and the presence of boils on the Egyptians and their animals. The land itself could not yield food for the Egyptians with the coming of the thunder and hail, the locusts, and the darkness. Finally, God challenged the most central ancient symbol of prosperity in a land —the emergence of the first fruit, the firstborn. By killing the firstborn of Egypt, both humans and animals, YHWH signaled that life in the land was completely under divine power. No future is possible without the creator of life. Yet if these events were signals to hardhearted Pharaoh, they were also powerful witness to Israel that its God stood between them and the land, forever reordering their connection to place.
This aspect of the story of Israel reveals a God who draws death and violence into the divine sphere of influence, drawing death into a circle of contest.25 Death asserts its power through the hands of the Egyptians, showing itself as the absolute arbiter between peoples. The power of death through violence divides the powerful from the powerless, the victors from the victims. Death refashions peoples, weaving its power into their collective being through memories of its horrifying display. But the God of Israel reveals that death and violence are less powerful than God’s divine will.
This revelation intensifies the problem of a violent God, making of it an epistemological crisis. However, in order to recognize Israel’s God as an epistemological crisis for us we must consider another crucial aspect of Israel’s story, the journey to and in the promised land. Freed from Egyptian bondage, the children of promise sojourned toward its fulfillment. But from the beginning they displayed the struggle of reorientation, of entering a new relationship with land and a new identity. From Mount Sinai, through the revelation of the law, through the rehearsal of the covenants, through the eruptions of disobedience, the story reveals a God who stands between the land and Israel.
This God enfolds the holy people in the truth that YHWH, not the land, is the giver of life; YHWH, not the land, defines their identity; YHWH imparts into their collective life the divine dabarim, the divine word and demands they live by that word. Divine word certainly precedes land. But word and land are bound together as the realities that constitute the stage of life for Israel. They live between the word spoken and the land given. Torah and land flow out of the divine will for Israel. Their story shows a demanding God who yet sustains their life even in the wilderness and through their times of disobedience. Christian theology has rightly discerned the representative nature of Israel’s journey. Israel is not simply a people coming into full existence in the presence of the living God, but the human creature in sojourn with the Creator God, striving to hear, obey, and live.
This representative character, however, also extends to the other peoples who surround Israel in the story. Here is precisely where Israel’s God presents a moment of crisis for us. The narrative brings us to a God who demands that Israel invade, occupy, and slay the inhabitants of the promised land. From almost any angle of vision this act looks like the workings of statecraft.26 The representative character of Israel’s life with God suggests, however, a different angle of perception not simply for their acts of conquest but for the divine demand of obedience.27 If the story of Israel’s life in the land is first the ideological justification for conquest, then its representative character is simply a matter of repetition. That is, Israel represents yet another example of the ways in which peoples use God to justify their greed, desire, and ambition in using violence to impose their will on other peoples. But if the representative character of Israel’s life with God entails the encircling of violence, drawing it into an ever-tightening sphere of divine sanction, then something quite powerful is taking place in Israel: YHWH is seizing the reins of violence and bringing it into subjection to the divine word.
This, however, is not yet the full reality of the representative character of Israel at play here. There was a profound scandal for other peoples slowly being formed in the story of Israel. Israel’s God drew an irrepressible distinction between the elect and those outside Israel. The distinction was not first a boundary of difference but a marking of entrance. Indeed, the distinction between the elect and nonelect, between those of Israel and those not of Israel, is not easily discerned in the Scripture. The issue, however, in terms of representation is not the question of distinct identity—who is Israel or who is not Israel?—but the question of distinct space: where is Israel to be found or where is Israel not to be found? All those who entered Israel’s land entered the space of God’s claim. It may seem an intellectual sleight of hand to call the Canaanites’ land Israel’s land, but divine presence is the central interpretive element in the story. The land changed possessors, but more decisively the land served as the occasion for the disclosure of its Creator. In this place of God’s claim, life or death hung in the balance.
If Israel’s God was the one true God, then only this God gives life and takes it away. For those outside Israel and for all Gentiles, the horror of violence was not weakened by this revelation, and the stench of death was no less pungent. No justification for Israel’s conquests could be given. Israel’s very existence questioned every other alleged theocracy. Inside the space of Israel, no one could stand in judgment of the Creator or the Creator’s demands for life or death. There was no ethical space, no plateau of moral truth on which to stand in judgment of Israel’s actions. Such a space was already occupied by Israel’s God. However, the deepest aspect of this scandal received scant attention in the history of the church’s theologies: Gentiles may never claim for themselves what was true only for Israel.
The theological justification for conquest was an unrepeatable act.28 What was repeatable, however, was the clear implication for Gentiles: YHWH announced divine claim from the land of Israel on all land and all peoples. Of course, the story of Israel in the land is far more complex than simply the divine announcement of ownership. The story was also the stories of internal strife, conflict, violence, and oppression patterned to some measure through divinely sanctioned social hierarchy, patriarchy, and slavery. Their story is also the story of human failure in the struggle of faithfulness to the covenants with the sorrows of land loss—exile, oppression, and occupation. The struggle for biblical Israel was one of identity. As T. F. Torrance noted, it was the struggle to live into their destiny and calling as God’s people, rather than to enter the logic of being just another people trying to establish its eternal existence, an ethnic Gentile destiny.29 We have failed to read Israel’s story as in part a struggle against internalized Gentile identity precisely because we have read their story as Gentiles who have forgotten that we read as Gentiles. Thus, we have misapprehended our participation in the story. We have failed to see their story as the struggle for the emergence of a people beyond the agonist vision of ethnic destiny.30 Thus, reading Israel’s life is also profoundly reading our own unacknowledged plea for help and the unanticipated answer from God.
Israel suffers because they are not Gentiles. Torrance suggests three senses in which they suffer. First, Israel suffers through the illumination of their sin and faithlessness. Second, Israel suffers because the light of righteousness cast on it by YHWH reflects outward upon other peoples. If Israel is a light to other nations, it is a light that occasions unwanted exposure. Third, Israel suffers because other nations reject Israel’s theological claims for the sake of their own gods.31 Torrance’s threefold sense of Israel’s suffering is a highly suggestive reading of a more complex and multileveled history of Israel’s interactions with its neighbors and other peoples.32
Israel presents a reorientation of truth for Gentiles. Israel’s life was not simply an example of human life but the very ground on which God inscribed the nature of our lives.33 At the threshold of Israel’s land, in the presence of Israel’s God, the story of every people ruptures, cracks open, revealing a second layer, an underlying layer of reality bound to this God. This second layer of reality was there all the time, yet it remained hidden apart from the revelation in Israel of the Creator who made covenant and whose character was slowly being exposed over the vast landscape of Israel’s odyssey.
What we know of our collective selves, of our peoples, and of our ways of life is not eradicated in the presence of Israel’s God, but that knowledge is up for review. Indeed, some of the stories, practices, and fragmented memories that lay hidden in the shadows of our peoples must now be moved to the center of life. Other truths of our people, time-honored, irrefutably powerful, aiming toward eternality are irretrievably weakened in the presence of Israel’s God. However, we are confronted with that God not as the One who thundered divine word from Mount Sinai, but as the One who cried in a manger and on the lap of his mother, Mary.
Jesus is Jewish, and it is a sad and grotesquely ironic reality that the supersessionist moment in Christian theology was enabled through Christian reflection on Jesus Christ. Rather than focus on the christologically based mangling of Israel, I will retrieve the organic connection between Israel, Jesus, and Gentile existence. I want to deepen our reading of Israel from an alternative subject position: as Gentile readers of the Jesus story. By taking this alternative subject position, I am to a certain extent bypassing some of the prevailing issues and interpretive architectonics of contemporary New Testament study, such as issues of historicity in relation to the life and sayings of Jesus.34
The life of Jesus, like all of life, is open to multiple interpretations.35 Indeed, this multiplicity of interpretation is not of necessity a problem but is inherent in the revelation of a God who speaks to and with the human creature. However, ideological uses of Jesus begin with the fundamental decoupling of Jesus from Israel’s life. The story of Jesus becomes, through ideological deployment, a social cipher for any and every redemptive vision of a people. There is, of course, an intrinsic applicability of his life, an important connection for all humanity. But the way to that connection requires that we turn our attention back to his relationship with Israel. In so doing we must resist the temptation to read Jesus as though we are his disciples before we are Gentiles. As Gentile readers who lack precise intimate knowledge of the Torah, the ability to discern the differences of voices in Israel, and the history of listening and obeying, we are positioned to see what an outsider can see, namely, God speaking.
Jesus’ election witnessed in Mary becomes the stage on which Israel’s God will make known the intensity and depth of the Holy One’s journey with Israel and God’s great love for the elect people.36 From the womb of a virgin, God will announce a reality of newness placed in the midst of Israel’s conventional cultural realities. The scandal of this claim is bound tightly to the scandal of Israel’s existence as the people of God. Jesus’ election is not an election next to or in competition with the election of Israel, but an election in the heart of Israel’s space, displaying the trajectory of the Holy One toward communion with the elect.37
Just as Israel’s election ruptures Gentile space (and time)—breaking open knowledge and reorienting truth —so does Jesus’ election bring to Israel a rupture. This rupture, however, is not the destruction or eradication of Israel’s knowledge, its theological truth. This rupture breaks open their story and reveals a deeper layer for how Israel should understand birth, family, and lineage. Jesus is both Son of David and the Son of God. The God who created the first family Israel is now in Israel recreating the family. This reading of the organic connection of Jesus and Israel could be construed as a collapse of Israel into Jesus and a loss of the distinct reality of Jewish life inside a Christian theological vision. However, such a conclusion would have to bypass not only our rehearsal of the inherent logic of the scandalous reality of Israel itself in Jesus, but also the trajectory of Jesus’ work. He comes for Israel, for Israel’s sake in the world.
Jesus is Israel for the sake of Israel. We can see his recapitulation of Israel not only from the initial announcements of his election with Mary and the biblical accounts of the beginning aspects of his life, but from his journey in the wilderness.38 Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured the social implications of Jesus’ temptations.39 Bonhoeffer suggested that our temptations are not our own, but of Jesus’ body and its members. The implications of this stunning insight are far-reaching.40
Jesus in the wilderness is Israel in the wilderness. From within the urgency of need and facing the exhaustion of energy and life without sustenance, Jesus faces the fears of all peoples. Jesus in his temptation is enacting the social realities not only of Israel but of all peoples—the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires of all peoples. In this wilderness, the true power of the tempter can be seen only if one imagines the seduction of the many, not simply a single sojourner through life.41 The tempter offers Jesus what every people wants, especially peoples oppressed and despised, especially people caught in the urgency of need and held in the gripping fear of the exhaustion of energy and life without resources.
The temptation is fundamentally one of an isolating self-sufficiency that heeds no other voice and that needs no other voice than the internal voice that speaks only what would be good and right for the survival of a people. Every people, every nation wants to be self-sufficient, to feed its own, to turn its stones into bread. And Jesus was told to enter this self-sufficiency, to allow the urgency of need to determine his course of action, his obedience. “Obey me and follow my advice,” he is told. His response, however, builds from the central truth of Israel in the land. They are not sustained simply in the face of any urgency by the land but by the words of God. The second temptation then builds from the first.
The tempter presses Jesus to prove the divine care of his life, proof of holy protection. With this temptation, the Word of God is deployed to support the test. This is the longing of all peoples to be safe and secure, to be freed from danger, to be supported on all sides by angels, to see their collective existence as ordained by God and secured by the divine will.42 Collective existence, the existence of a socially imagined community only intensifies the knowledge of our weakness in the presence of forces we cannot control. Jesus, however, once again invoked Israel’s story and deepened it in the moment of its invocation. He speaks the holy name in intensified commitment of his life to God’s care. He will not test his father and his God.
At the third temptation, the devil parades his power, showing the nations already bound to his deception and under his power.43 The devil, the prince of this world, enacted a direct line to worldly power through himself. Now, he presents to Jesus a straight shot and a short route to world victory. This is a temptation too powerful to pass up for almost any people. If given the chance, any people would want to rule the world and guide all other peoples in its own national vision of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Any people could rationalize its purpose for world domination and leadership—for the sake of world safety, world peace, for the good of every people, we must lead. Every people wants to stand on the world stage “in splendor,” as a global player, and not be ignored, mistreated, or disrespected. Jesus’ response is a flat denouncement of Satan’s power.
If the one danger is to collapse Israel’s life into Jesus, then the reciprocal danger may be to rob Jesus of his own temptations. The gospel story does in fact give us the temptations of this one man, the temptations of Jesus. They are his temptations, the temptations of his own body and of his life. But he did not wander into the wilderness for his own sake. He was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. He was driven in the journey of all peoples to reestablish the reality of Israel’s faithfulness for the sake of the world. And here is where one can discern the intertextual realities of Gentile existence: Jesus is alone in the wilderness, but we are there with him.
We are there in failure, as the ones who have succumbed to temptation. Again and again we have fallen, joined gladly in alliance with the tempter’s desires. The temptation narrative does not underwrite a Manichean vision of an eternal, divine struggle against evil. The narrative draws us to the awful condition of our collective weakness, yet the wilderness struggle and victory anticipates a possibility: a people joined to the body of Jesus who can overcome the temptations of evil.
Jesus’ ministry was aimed at the lost sheep of Israel, not at the goyim, not to us. This is a reality of his story that never truly did its work in the social imagination of Christians. Israel was constantly read as a permeable reality of the gospel story, allowing us to completely read through Israel to imagine divine direct address to us, the Gentiles. However, to weaken the connection of Jesus to Israel is also to miss the actual mode of connection he draws to us. The story itself gives us the clues to our presence. We are the ones who believe the word of God to Israel. We were present in the story of Israel but we are also present in the Jesus story. We are those outside of Israel who ask for a gift intended for Israel. We ask for Jesus’ help.44
We are in the story through a prohibiting word to his disciples, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans” (Matt 10:5b). We are in the story in the form of humble requests, for example, as the centurion who, recognizing, even if through the lens of military hierarchy, the distance between himself and Jesus, asks Jesus to heal his servant (Luke 7:1–10). We are also in the story as desperate pleas for help, as with the Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21–28), which rehearses for us the dynamic of Israel and the Gentiles, yet with a profound difference.
The story of the Canaanite woman is especially provocative as it carries with it the clear sense not only of Israel’s election, but also of the undomesticated God of Israel, one who cannot be approached except on the terms established by the divine word. The Canaanite woman pleads for her daughter’s deliverance from the evil one, and the disciples have little patience with her plea. Here is where the incessant supersessionist tendency shows itself in our constant habit to confuse our subject position in this powerful story.
The colonialist moment helped to solidify a form of Christian existence that read this text as though we were standing with Jesus looking down on the woman in her desperation, when in fact we, the Gentiles, are the woman, not we, a generic humanity, but we, those who are outside Israel. The fact that this is a woman interceding for her daughter should not escape our reflection. It is precisely from within the logic of this gendered social hierarchy that we may begin to see the path that draws us to the body of Jesus. This path does not escape the horror of this woman’s debasement in front of Jesus and his disciples, but intensifies it.
All peoples become the Canaanite woman and her tormented daughter. It would be a profound theological mistake to seek to escape the ugliness of this episode or its clear intertextual connection to the priority of Israel. We must enter fully into its scandal. All peoples face a future under the assault of the tormentor, and all peoples are in need of the deliverance Jesus brings. Jesus’ initial response to the woman is the prohibition—his gifts are of Israel and for Israel, not for (Gentile) dogs.45 The Canaanite woman stands in for all Gentiles who would presume on the grace of God. Yet, more important, she marks the path forward.
She takes onto her lips the words of Israel. She enters their story, reciting their words of worship, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She is not pretending to be Israel. She is to be counted among the goyim and she knows it. Her daughter is of the goyim, and she knows it. Yet she recognizes that even those outside of Israel may benefit from the gifts of God for Israel. Through the faith of Israel in their God her daughter is freed from the tormentors and healed. The path marked out by this nameless woman in the story is the way of Gentile inclusion.
Jesus’ Israel-centrism is bound to a power that will break it open. If he draws into himself the social hierarchies of his people and among his people, he also displays the power to release people from them. We see in him the sharing in our realities for the sake of our healing. As Gregory of Nazianzus stated, “That which he has not assumed, He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.”46 He recapitulates the reality of Israel in a fallen world in order to overcome the power of the world in Israel. By calling Israel to receive the presence of their God through his teachings, he is also asking them to witness to its absolute embodiment in him. And the Gentiles from the centurion to the Canaanite woman overhear. Gentile inclusion is born out of this overhearing. The overhearing, however, comes with a price.
A separation is occurring with Jesus, a breaking of political arrangements and social bonds and a tearing asunder of allegiances.47 His hearers are offered a choice: remain as you are or follow him. Jesus is offering an alternative way forward for Israel. Yet to know that way will require the greatest of sacrifices in Israel. The children of Israel must choose to form a new family in Israel. Jesus will challenge the very foundations of social life by challenging the power of the kinship network, which organized the central social, economic, and geographic realities of life in Israel.48 Jesus entered fully into the kinship structure not to destroy it but to reorder it—around himself. Again, the story in Mark points to this shaking of the familial foundations. He announces that his family will be those who do the will of God (Mark 3:21–22, 31–35).
Jesus reveals a wholly new determination for the life of a child of the covenant. He is defined by his people, yet determined by his God. He is one with their story, but he has become the new storyteller. This is the ground from which the Christian idea of the triune identity grows, yet it is crucial to see how this ground was being ruptured and reoriented. The world of his people will be turned upside down if they enter inside his words. This will be the new inside Israel that cannot be placed inside old interpretation—new wineskins are demanded for new wine (Mark 2:22; Matt 9:17; Luke 5:37–38).49 The more specific implication of the new is the reconfiguration of patterns of belonging around Jesus himself. He presents a new intensity of covenant love greater than the power of death, love that leads to new life. This new must be chosen. It requires social death for the sake of new life (Matt 10:32–39).50
Jesus does not intend the destruction of Israel, only its rebirth in him. But he must be chosen, and the choosing demands that those in Israel cross the “killing field” of kinship. If Joshua at the entrance to the promised land demanded that the households of Israel choose to serve YHWH as his household would do, now Jesus demands that those in the land of Israel choose this new household with God his father. To break the power of death, the power of the kinship network would have to be rerouted through the very life of the Son of God. Jesus did not seek to destroy kinship, to undermine its defining power rooted in story, memory, and cultural practice. Rather, he drew it to a new orientation, a new determination. The family must follow him. The one family must follow from him—flow from his life as its new source.51
The kinship network in Israel would now be profoundly qualified. Jesus came first—not husband or wife, not mother, father, sister, brothers, not familial obligations and demands, not cultural conventions, and not social responsibilities. If the strongest bonds of relationship were qualified through commitment to Jesus, then the entire socioeconomic and political structuring processes deeply woven inside these bonds came into qualified view and ultimately unrelenting challenge.
Jesus drew a new communion together in Israel. This new communion carried of necessity the distinctive marks of his scandal.52 To follow him, to even at times be seen with him required awkward, painful, and even dangerous negotiations with one’s primary alliances and allegiances, familial, cultural, social. This is why the rabbi Nicodemus came to Jesus at night (John 3:1). The point here is that there is a social and cultural instability engendered by involvement with Jesus before there is the formation of a new coherent community.
There is a communion taking place in the gathering of listeners to Jesus. For some the desperation of life, the torment of the evil one, and the signatures of death drove them to seek out his words and his power. Others sought the deliverance of Israel, its emergence as a self-determining political power, and freedom for authentic, unadulterated worship of the one true God, the God of Israel. Others simply heard that something new and unheard of was at work in Israel, and old hopes and dreams might be planted in fresh soil. So they sought out Jesus, and in the seeking, in the straining to hear and see him, they were forced to stand together. Those who under normal circumstances would never be together must be together to find Jesus of Nazareth, to hear him and gain from him their desires. Jesus, in forming a new Israel in the midst of Israel, positioned himself as the new source of desire.
Not negating their desire, he drew it more deeply toward himself. Jesus, as it were, captured the power of consumptive practices to form collectives and imagine the social by positioning himself as the object of desire, individual and collective. He was the bread that must be eaten. He was the source of living water that must be asked for. Jesus placed his body between the many and their desires. Indeed, he understood unordered desire as being bound to Gentile existence.53
In contrast to nations trapped in the chaos of desire, his body was intended to break the power of the tempter who played in the desires of the many. Jesus positioned his body between Israel and the world, between Israel and Gentile (ethnic) existence, and called the people of God into the scandal of choosing him and thereby choosing a new reality of kinship. Such a call was heard throughout the valley of the shadow of death, and the Gentiles came, having heard that bread was being given. Even if it was meant only for the children of Israel, they could in fact have some of the crumbs.
Rather than follow a historical construct that posits the Jesus movement as simply a reform movement in Judaism or follow a vernacularization thesis that isolates the gospel message into its essential components, which were then re-seeded in the cultural/ethnic matrices of various peoples, Roman, Hellenistic, and so forth, I suggest an advent of a new form of communion with the possibility of a new kind of cultural intimacy between peoples that might yield a new cultural politic.
Christian identity pivots on the resurrection of the same Jesus who presented himself to Israel as its reconstitution. The story of Jesus never leaves Israel. This is not the denial of the universality of Jesus’ life. However, universality, as we have seen throughout this book, is a highly dangerous concept that, bound to the legacies of supersessionism and whiteness, did and continues to do strange things to the story of Jesus.54 I suggest a commitment not to an abstract idea of the universal or even of the universal applicability of Jesus, but to follow Jesus’ own trajectory toward the many in Israel and through Israel to the many in the world.
The resurrected Jesus described a future for the disciples that would solidify the reconfiguration of kinship and establish the ground for the reformation of social life in Israel. There in Jerusalem they were to wait for his Father, who was also their Father, to baptize them in the Spirit. This was the promise of the continuation of communion. In response to this announcement the disciples asked a crucial question for any people whose leader intends to reconstitute the fortunes of his people: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom of Israel?” (Acts 1: 6b).
The disciples rightly understood what the resurrected Jesus meant for Israel’s fortunes—the reign of its God was now visible in the world through his Son who had overcome death. Thus, their question is exactly right. Is now the time when you will overturn the world order through Israel? They assumed that Jesus’ victory over death must ultimately mean victory for Israel over the Roman Empire. They rightly sensed in Jesus a new thing emerging in Israel, its rebirth in him. Thus, the Spirit of the Father would be given, and Jesus would be glorified as the inauguration of a new age for Israel.
If in fact the book of Acts presented an idealized vision of the beginning of the church, then the coming of the Spirit upon the disciples in Acts 2 failed to offer great ideological service for any hopes of world dominance. Indeed, the presence of the Holy Spirit presents a profoundly counterhegemonic reality in which the sign of the Spirit’s coming is language imposition (Acts 2:2–12). Furthermore, the presence of the Spirit drew the followers of Jesus into the language systems of other peoples. The sign of the new age was the disciples of Jesus speaking the languages of other peoples.
What joined these diverse peoples together was their faith in the God of Israel. They are “devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). This is indeed an auditory miracle—they each hear their native sound. Yet, if we see this only as a miracle of hearing, then its embodiment in the disciples of Jesus becomes inconsequential; that is, it simply prepares the ground for an abstract universal. What the day of Pentecost would then mean is that the message of Jesus may be translated into every tongue, its universal applicability assured by the Holy Spirit. In such a paradigm of interpretation, the sign of the new age would be embodiment without joining. Each people would hear the gospel and glorify God in their own way, in their own language. Unfortunately, this continues to be the dominant reading of the miracle of Pentecost.55
If, however, one recalls the significance of language for entering the world of another, then the work of the Spirit in Israel begins to signal a powerful new reality of relationship. Here the disciples dramatize not simply the miracle of hearing and the claim of the God of Israel on all peoples, but, more significantly, they dramatize the joining of bodies and lives in the worship of the God who was witnessed by Jesus. The speaking of another’s language signifies a life lived in submersion and in submission to another’s cultural realities. Nothing is as humbling as learning the language of another in which the very rudiments of daily life must be identified in the signification system of another people. Such learning inevitably involves learning either directly or indirectly the land out of which the language came to life in the operation of everyday practices. Language is bound to landscape as the essential context of identity.
The disciples performed a gesture of communion, a calling to all peoples that the Spirit of God would have them join together, and together they would worship the God Jesus reveals. Just as Jesus, driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, enacted the reality of the many in facing the tempter for us, so on the day of Pentecost the Spirit descended on the disciples and drove them into the languages of the world to enact the joining desired by the Father of Jesus for all people. This is the coming of the one new reality of kinship. This is not only the continuation of Jesus’ work of forming the new Israel in Israel, but the full disclosure of the desire of Jesus for the entire world. This in effect is the Creator reclaiming the world through communion.
In Jesus, Israel’s election does a stunning work by opening the possibilities of boundary-shattering love between strangers and enemies. The election of Jesus turns Israel’s election outward. This election enabled desire to be formed between Jew and Gentile, a desire that drew them together in longing for him and in turn invited them to desire one another. It is precisely on the disciples who awaited the beginning of Israel’s new age as a world power that the Spirit presses this gesture of communion. This was indeed the rebuilding of Israel.56
Those who heard the words of cultural intimacy on the day of Pentecost were invited to act on the meaning of this event. They must choose Jesus and be baptized in his name. The narrative in Acts shows that this early church event remained fundamentally in Israel, so that the first disciples did not realize the ramifications of speaking the languages of others. Such wider implications were muted, given the overarching reality of the Jewish identity of those listening. Indeed, one learns in this story that this moment of language acquisition did not necessarily mean relationship or communion, for language acquisition, as is well known, may serve (and in many cases has served) as a means of cultural imposition and destruction more often than as a means of communion.
The disciples would begin to see these wider implications only as the Spirit of God continued to impose on them gestures of communion. One of the most important episodes in the book of Acts beyond the episode of the day of Pentecost was the vision and action of Peter in Acts 10 and 11, which culminate in the first church council noted in chapter 15. This dynamic story, often sterilely referred to as the event of Gentile inclusion, reveals not merely the word of salvation in Jesus taking root among Gentiles, but also a new order of relationship for Jews and Gentiles coming into being rooted in the life of Jesus.
A vision from God prepares Peter to enter the space of Gentile existence. Peter, in a moment of spiritual intimacy, of ekstasis, of being “out of himself” in a trance, is brought by the Spirit of God to the threshold of receiving into himself a new reality, Gentile life. In the vision, God places in front of him food prohibited by ancient command and demands he prepare the food and eat it. The vision draws Peter not into negation of Torah but into reception of the most intimate kind. That which God offers him (Gentile food, signifying Gentile existence, Gentile difference) he must take into himself as vital to his existence. The vision prepares Peter to receive a devout God-fearer named Cornelius, a Gentile—a centurion who had patterned his life according to the theological practices of Israel. Indeed, Acts 10 is first and foremost set as the story of Cornelius in which Peter acts as its inner logic. The vision from God and the subsequent instruction from the Spirit of God guides Peter to the household of Cornelius, where Peter utters the seminal words that announce a new trajectory for Israel: “And as he talked with [Cornelius], he went in and found that many had assembled; and he said to them, ‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. Now may I ask why you sent for me?’” (Acts 10:27–29). Even at this moment Peter is unclear why the Spirit of God had brought him to this space and time. Slowly, as Cornelius informed Peter of his own vision in which God told Cornelius to contact Peter, did he begin to sense the new thing God was doing in and through Israel: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34–35). From this point in the story Peter rehearsed the drama of Jesus—his words and his life sent to Israel for its deliverance and the reordering of the world through his reign. This story in Acts then turns to what was completely unanticipated by Peter and the disciples who accompanied him but was intensely implied from the moment they chose to follow Jesus and entered the reality of the Spirit’s imposition: “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, ‘Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days” (Acts 10:43–48). Peter and the other “circumcised believers” were astounded. They witnessed a moment of divine repetition in which the Spirit for a moment reversed the subject position of Israel and the Gentiles and made Israel recipients of the gesture of communion. The Spirit drew the Gentiles into the language of others just as had been done with the disciples. Israel, signified in Peter and the other Jewish believers, hears the Gentiles “speaking in tongues and extolling God” (Acts 10:46).
God was also making real the implications of Gentile election: they stood in the presence of Israel and called back to them a sharing in communion with the God of Jesus in the Spirit. The one communion in the Spirit illumines the obvious for Peter: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47). Together they shared in the baptism in Jesus, and the deepest transgression of cultural boundaries was solidified in that moment.
Now Peter, in accordance with the work of the Spirit, received the invitation from the Gentiles “to stay [with them] for several days” (Acts 10:48). This invitation, this simple gesture, symbolized a trajectory of new belonging enacted by the Spirit. Yet none of this was of Peter’s own accord. This event was fundamentally counterhegemonic, holding within itself the potential to reorder the world. If a centurion and his household could be drawn into a new circle of belonging, then its implications for challenging the claims of the Roman state were revolutionary. If Israel could be drawn into a new circle of belonging, then the implications for how it might envision its renewal and restoration were equally revolutionary. If a world caught in the unrelenting exchange system of violence was to be overcome, then here was the very means God would use to overcome violence—by the introduction of a new reality of belonging that drew together different peoples into a way of life that intercepted ancient bonds and redrew them around the body of Jesus and in the power of the Spirit.
The disciples and Jewish believers in Jerusalem, however, were not ready for the revolution of the intimate signaled by the events in Cornelius’s home. Gentile conversion engendered a crisis for the people of God. How would common life for the Jewish followers of Jesus be defined vis-à-vis these Gentile believers? In Acts 15 the church sought clarity on this question by rehearsing the essential characteristics of covenant identity in Israel. Some suggested that continuity of identity was rooted in the polity of God’s people, Israel. They argued therefore that Gentiles must be circumcised, “according to the custom of Moses [or they cannot] be saved” (Acts 15:1). Paul emerges in the book of Acts as one of the key characters in the narrative. In Acts 15 his was a crucial voice in the discussion, and he represented along with Peter and others an alternative consideration for the Gentiles. Peter, speaking the mind of what would be the consensus, suggested that Gentiles not be brought into the intricacies of Jewish polity.
The power of this decision grew from the central insight Peter gained from the Spirit’s work in and with him as well as from the testimonies of Paul and Barnabas regarding Gentile conversion: “And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us” (Acts 15:8–9). James affirmed Peter’s recommendation, suggesting that Gentile conversion was in continuity with ancient prophetic utterance. The prophet Amos saw the rebuilding of Israel bound together with the turning of the Gentiles to their God. Thus the decision was to recommend to the Gentiles a posture toward the world that mirrored the posture of Israel. So in their letter to these Christians, the council of Jerusalem required Gentiles to shun the markings of a pagan world (Acts 15:28–29).
On the one hand, these pastoral recommendations present a breathtaking assault on the ethnocentrism that was embedded in Israel’s perspective on the Gentiles. However, on the other hand, Peter’s comments also indicate the disciples’ inability to enter fully the trajectory of intimacy intrinsic to this new spatial dynamic of faith in Jesus. The limitation meant that Peter and the disciples as depicted in Acts 15 could at best only imagine parallel theological universes in which the Gentiles imitated Israel’s contra mundi posture as the fundamental signature of their newfound faith in the God of Israel through Jesus Christ.57 This limitation in their social imagination also meant they did not yet grasp the trajectory of the Spirit’s work in their lives. It was the Spirit of God who was driving Israel toward the Gentiles in the space constituted by Jesus’ body. It was the Spirit who drove the Gentiles toward Israel and into the languages of other peoples. In Acts 8, it was the Spirit who drove the Jewish believer Philip to join himself to the chariot of an Ethiopian eunuch who was trying to understand Torah. There Philip explained Torah, introducing the eunuch to Jesus, and then Philip baptized him. These actions of the Spirit have often been interpreted in disembodied ways, so that the placement of the message (about Jesus) becomes the only point.
The Spirit’s actions do not imply a God interested in inserting divine word without communion. The disciples understood that the advent of Torah constituted social space in which God’s people would live together under divine command. The ongoing ministry of Jesus in the Spirit was found precisely in the drawing of peoples together around his words. There would be in such an endeavor no vision of a floating message dropped into the language of other peoples outside of Israel. The disciples did not imagine a form of life together in which Gentile life could be enfolded into their life of obedience to the Torah and their life of obedience could be enfolded into Gentile existence. They did not see a Spirit-led process of bilingualization inherent in the speaking of other tongues as their future. This meant they did not imagine the reformulation of ways of life (Jew and Gentile) established in the spatial reality created by Jesus himself.
It would be a mistake to call this a sinful failure on the part of the disciples in Acts 15. It was simply the exposure of the tremendous challenge toward intimacy created by the presence of the Spirit of God.58 It would, however, not be a mistake to say that the church has failed to capture this trajectory coming out of the New Testament toward communion. The tragedy here is cumulative. If the struggle toward cultural intimacy was not faced by the church as inherent to the gospel itself, despite the constant work of the Spirit to turn Israel and Gentiles peoples toward one another, then over time the only other option was the emergence of a Christian segregationalist mentality. The best Christian theology has been able to suggest this side of the epochs of conquest and the Shoah is a return to the original social imaginary of the earliest church groping to articulate separate yet faithful existence, a theological Jim Crow existence for Jews and Christians.59 Christian theologians are still unable to capture the spatial implications of life with the Jewish Jesus, that is, a Spirit-directed joining of peoples constituting a new space for Israel, but drawing out of Israel a new identity for both Jew and Gentile. In effect, there would be a rebirth of peoples in the expression of a new cultural politic.60
In his letter addressed to the Gentile church at Ephesus, Paul recounts the original situation of the Gentiles in relation to Israel and then elaborates on the changed reality created by the life of Jesus (Eph 2:1–10).61 He notes that death indicates more than the inevitable reality of each individual. Death points to the captivity of all peoples to a world of violence and unrelenting contention.62 We are captured in a destructive kinship network vivified by the spirit of the evil one that signifies us as “children of disobedience.” Our desires lack a central redemptive focus, and we are as peoples subject to the power of the evil one. But the mercy and love of God are revealed in Jesus, who became a new space of existence for us. We are made alive in him and “raised up with him and seated…with him in the heavenly places.” From this new space our history forward will take a new direction as witness of the immeasurable riches of God’s grace and kindness for us in Christ Jesus. The multiple histories of peoples continue in this new spatial reality but are now situated in the story of Israel:63 “So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called ‘the uncircumcision’ by those who are called ‘the circumcision’—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands—remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:11–12).
The power of this account of Gentile status radically undermined any distinction Gentiles held for themselves vis-à-vis other peoples. It is the ultimate deconstructive statement regarding Gentile ethnocentrism. If Jesus constitutes a new space for Jew and Gentile existence, then in that new space a common life must ensue that allows the formation of a new identity. Space here is both a relational practice and that which is created by a relation between Israel and Gentiles: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it” (Eph 2:13–16). The spatial dynamic metaphorically at play here is of spaces (for example, temple space or land) separated but now joined by the removal of a fundamental boundary. This transformation of the space from two to one implies the transformation of peoples from two to one. This does not happen simply in the removing of the boundary but in the reconfiguration of living space itself around a new center. If there is a moment at the heart of Christianity in which something is superseded it may be found precisely here.
It is not the usurpation of the people of God, Israel replaced by the church, but of one form of Torah drawn inside another, one form of divine word drawn inside another form—that is, the word made flesh. If Torah was inseparably connected to the living of life in the promised land, then Torah’s transformation into the living word of God in Jesus continues its central purpose. Just as Torah formed Israel’s identity, establishing human life in the presence of God, so Jesus intends the formation of new humanity in his presence, listening to his speaking through the Spirit. This new biracial humanity, Jew and Gentile (metaphorically speaking), would be the basis for peace. Jesus marked an alternative path away from violence and toward peace through his own body, in which he constituted a new space of reconciliation. In a powerful inversion of the power of death, Paul claims that Jesus, through his death, put to death hostility.
A space built on Jesus of Nazareth and the claim that he is indeed Israel’s Messiah, their Christ, is a space that cannot protect itself from any critique or ridicule. It is a space open to the nations and their desire. It announces a kinship network that cannot be verified but only enacted through discipleship and living together in communion with God. On the one side, this network of kinship exists as a painfully weak space that positions itself as a site of Israel and for Israel. It is a network that presents interlopers as family and strangers as kin who claim their connection only through the voice of a single one in Israel, Jesus. His life is the slender thread that holds Gentiles inside Israel as authentic not exclusive inheritors of its legacies.
On the other side, this network of kinship exists in abiding tension with other kinship networks that demand adherence. This new network must face the power of naming and claiming inherent in any world of kinship. The identities being formed in this new space are constantly challenged by worlds of kinship that see Jesus and anyone who follows him only “according to the flesh” (2 Cor 5:16). That is, these worlds see people only within the structures of cultural belonging and its concomitant social and political commitments. They see people only through the binary of adherence or betrayal of culture, nation, or people. These worlds generate unrelenting resistance to the possibility of living life formed in and through new discursive systems and spatial rearrangements. That is, these worlds resist their recreation, a new creation (2 Cor 5:17).
The worlds of kinship can easily exact a terrible price from those who dare challenge their absolute determination of life. They may draw on the tempter’s violent power to kill the one who has joined to the body of Jesus in this new space. They may, through the fear of either physical death or social death, constantly seek to undermine the reformation of identity in this new communion. This new space has no inherent power to prevent their threats. In fact, the new space, when viewed from the longevity, stability, and power of the old worlds of kinship, never looks as safe, secure, or honorable as the old places of identity and belonging. The space of Jesus’ body carries forward the characteristics of his body, a body that was, as Isa 53:2 states, of “no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Jesus was the “rejected cornerstone” (Luke 20:17). He was the one whose presence gave no confidence of a future that peoples could build on.
Life inside this new space, then, carries uneasiness and even a discomfort as those within it attempt to negotiate powerful cultural claims of kinship. It is in the face of these tensions that Paul’s declarations of a new citizenship (Eph 2:19) indicate profound risk taking for anyone who wishes to claim identity in the new space, that is, to claim being Christian. This claim, in light of its risk, points to the essential nature of the new cultural politics inaugurated by Jesus’ life and announced by the Spirit. This new cultural politic is a complex new configuration of social alliance and political allegiance bound up in life together with the many. The implications of this new space in which a new cultural politic emerges are breathtaking.
Imagine a people defined by their cultural differences yet who turn their histories and cultural logics toward a new determination, a new social performance of identity. In so doing, they enfold the old cultural logics and practices inside the new ones of others, and they enfold the cultural logics and practices of others inside their own. This mutual enfolding promises cultural continuity measured only by the desire of belonging. Thus the words and ways of one people join those of another, and another, each born anew in a community seeking to love and honor those in its midst.
The new people formed in this space imagine the world differently, beyond the agonistic vision of nations and toward the possibility of love and kinship. Aesthetics preceding ethics, these disciples of Jesus love and desire one another, and that desire for each other is the basis of their ethical actions in the worlds of allegiances and kinships. This enfolding is done not through isolated individual bricolage, but in the everyday realities of life together with others. Moreover, this enfolding process issues in a new network of kinship that transgresses life-threatening and life-diminishing boundaries. It also upsets the particular ideological arrangements of nations, peoples, and corporations, enabling resistance to the temptations of all peoples toward violence in pursuit of their survival, safety, and world power.64
What characterizes the communion of this new space is not the absence of strife, contention, or division but its complete capture. Just as Jesus drew into himself the energy of a violent world in order to heal that energy and turn it toward the good, so the communion envisioned by his body draws into itself the agon of peoples in order to turn strife into desire. This communion also helps us envision a relationship between living Israel and the church built on more intimate possibilities.65
The church is always turned toward Israel by its very life. If, in fact, the church has come to be precisely through the witness of Israel to the world through Jesus, then by implication Israel by its life always witnesses the true God, a witness forever acknowledged and received by the church. Therefore, the church stands between living Israel and its witness to the world. Living Israel stands between the church and its witness to the world as the reality that makes the church’s witness intelligible. The organic connection between Israel and church is simply Jesus, the space that joins and the space that draws.
Both church and Israel witness to the world of the one true God. The communion that constitutes Christian life and identity should echo something strangely identifiable in living Israel. It should echo not a stolen imitation of the original but prophetic utterances now embodied—of many Gentiles drawn toward the “dwelling of David” (Acts 15:16) in order to learn of the Lord and his ways. Such an echo should provoke an invitation for relationship and never a compelling demand, unless in the midst of it the Spirit speaks to the many in Israel, saying, “Go join yourself to them.” Given the history of Christian existence, this is an invitation not much offered and justifiably an echo rarely heard.
If Christian social imagination is ever going to be turned back toward the possibilities of communion, then it must be brought back into the original relationship —of Israel and the Gentiles. But by this return I am not simply affirming interreligious dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, although such dialogue is close to the heart of the matter. A painful hollowness characterizes much Jewish-Christian interreligious dialogue precisely because it builds on the naturalization of the racial imagination. Until we clearly reckon with the awesome power of the racial calculus deeply embedded in the theological vision of the Western world, no amount of exacting exegesis, careful theological clarification of doctrinal differences, or parsing of the connections or distinctions between Jewish and Christian historical liturgical trajectories will bring us to the deepest possibilities of communion.66
The return to the original relationship of Jews and Gentiles is blocked by the advent of whiteness and its deeply embedded social performances in the pedagogical, economic, and cultural relations of the Western world. The return I envision brings us back to bodies, and the formation of racialized bodies. We must think through to the utter limits of the racial calculus to expose its deepest fault lines. We must do this in order to tear open racial identity so as to reveal the original relation —exposing it afresh to our social imaginations. If whiteness became the facilitating reality, as that form of identity inside of which all other identities could be imagined, then walking away from or renouncing or questioning existence within white identity is no simple matter. There are, however, two bodies inscribed in the racial calculus that exists in a crucial position in relation to its utter limits and its fault lines, the (racialized) Jewish body and the black body. The way forward for a renewed Christian social imagination will be greatly aided by meditating on the racialized bodies of blacks and Jews in modernity. Such a meditation would allow us to peer through the cracks of the modern racial calculus and discern fragments of the original situation of Israel and Gentiles, of Israel and a Gentile church, of the Jewish body and the Gentile body joined.
The implicit though powerful question that emerges from the historical transformation of peoples into races was, where does one fit in the racial imagination?67 By their being virtually consigned to the lowest rank of race—those furthest removed from salvation, transcendence, or humanity—the black body presented the shame concealed inside whiteness, its bloody journey to power.68 If the black body presented the truth of racial existence, the racialized Jewish body presented its lie, the usurpation of a deep theological truth, of election, of covenant, and the concealment of the actual state of things—we (Gentiles) have no hope and are without God in the world.
Black body and Jewish body did indeed fit inside the racial imagination, yet there was from the beginning a problem with their fit. “Blacks” and all reckoned as like them entered racial space but showed themselves incapable of complete transformation into whiteness. Even by generating powerful approximations through dress, language, habit of mind and body, and miscegenation they remained black. Black bodies by their very presence exposed the edge of racial covering, its pure will to power. This exposure was rarely interpreted as such; rather, it supposedly indicated deep and abiding failure of black being, its pathology.
Unfortunately, the only bodily presence within the racial imagination powerful enough to affirm the black body’s exposure of the edge and to in fact expose the truth beneath that covering was itself being placed under the same cover. The Jewish body also exposed an edge by exposing a false theology that energized the racial imagination, a Christian vision of election drawn inside whiteness and performed through European colonial power. Jews’ failure to fit within the racial imagination was not simply on account of their racial appearance or of their religion, but owing to something deeper. Their lives bound to Torah and its powerful echoes of Israel’s priority sharpened fundamental differences from European Christian civilization, creating ruptures in the racial imagination that could not be easily closed. Jonathan Schorsch in Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, a study of Sephardic Jews, notes that whiteness became a powerful tool of social inclusion for Jews: “The specific usefulness of Whiteness for Jews inhered in the fact that Jews could include themselves in the dominant culture as Whites in a way they could not as non-Christians…. Whiteness provided entrée into the dominant class to Jews who believed they belonged there by dint of the quality and antiquity of their civilization; such was their hope, in any case.”69 This hope stood in stark contrast to the realities of the Iberian racial caste system, with its virulent and infectious Spanish obsession with limpiezas de sangre, purity of blood. For the Spanish Jewish Diaspora spread throughout the colonialist world, the fear of being identified with the black body informed their eager participation in discursive practices that affirmed the “constellation of significations surrounding Whiteness [which] linked it to noble status, purity, and good looks.”70 Schorsch suggests that Jews participated in the colonialist refashioning of the world even as they carried forward deep anxieties about their abilities to remain hidden inside whiteness: “In seventeenth-century Sephardic Amsterdam…the intellectual, emotional, and theological prioritization of Whiteness, worries about perceived Jewish Blackness, increasing colonial opportunities and mind-sets, and the anxiety of some congregants over the visibility of Black and mulatto slaves within their own community led to an increased application of Black/White discourse” (emphasis added).71
Schorsch’s important insight points to the slow, steady surrender to the theological power of whiteness and how it became determinative of the true (intelligence), the good (morality), and the beautiful (aesthetics). Much more, however, is at play here than the pathos of assimilation. The Jewish body and the black body signified the space of struggle for the overturning of the racial imagination and the reassertion of the theological framework necessary for the generation of an authentic Christian social imagination. Yet this central truth was never grasped. However, the space of struggle remained, not hidden but not clearly identified as a salvific possibility, the reassertion of a new reality of communion with God. That space is currently characterized by three kinds of relations between blacks and Jews—the sociopolitical, the literary-artistic, and the exilic—each of these currently suffers a lack of serious theological meditation, but each carries the potential of exposing the identity of the one whose despised flesh is the salvation of the world and the true but hidden desire of all nations.
As the nineteenth century drew near its end and the twentieth century dawned, blacks and Jews entered into the dominant conversation that defined and continues to define their interactions and perspectives on each other: the discourse on survival. By this period, the legacies of atrocities and the shadow of death hung over their social spaces like circling vultures. Blacks and Jews became convinced that the Enlightenment project gave them reason to believe that social uplift and political engagement bound to assimilationist strategies held the key to their flourishing.72 The end of slavery saw, for the first time, the children of African slaves conceiving life on the trajectory toward whiteness.
Although the reality of racial identity was powerful, many within black communities believed that the possibilities of the nation-state contained the tools to break down the oppression of blacks. This belief, fueled by the idea of American equality, stood in contrast to the idea that the only way to overcome racial identity was to take on the realities of white identity as best one could.73 White identity was the common denominator, definer, and the ground-leveling reality upon which blacks could be judged solely by their abilities.
The most obvious yet most complex obstacle to growing the emulation tactical branch and its assimilationist tree was that blacks could not find uncontaminated soil in which to plant the tree. The power of the racial imagination permeated the American landscape both figuratively and literally. Thus, blacks struggled mightily against the centuries-old overgrowth of mental and visual images of black inferiority rooted in extremely powerful optic and discursive practices. One of the most powerful categories of images was the black minstrel.74
Assimilationism was not working well for Jewish Americans either. David Levering Lewis notes that during this time “what Jewish and Afro-American elites principally shared was not a similar history but an identical adversary—a species of white Gentile.”75 The America of this period confronted black and Jewish bodies with a racism and anti-Semitism seemingly joined at the hip. What the civil rights movement meant was the most powerful counterattack on both racism and anti-Semitism that was simultaneously the most absolute surrender to the theological vision of the racial imagination.
The civil rights era brought recognition that there were now in place enough black people and Jewish supporters within some structures of power to lobby for structural changes in the nation-state. The power of the civil rights movement lay in its ability to manipulate the process of re-presentation and thereby appeal to the themes of white American self-identification, that fairness and equality are at the very heart of who we, as Americans understand ourselves to be.76 The power of the civil rights movement for blacks and Jews lay in the fact that for a brief moment the movement tapped into the space existing between the black body and the racialized Jewish body. Each shook the racial imagination, sending ripples through the social imaginary of America that continue to widen to this day.
The deep commitment of many Jews to the civil rights movement did not mean a placidly collaborative history of joint social engagement by the two communities. Indeed, the political engagements of blacks and Jews before, during, and after the civil rights movement indicate an important and oftentimes intense argument over their respective dilemmas and destinies in America. Yet many Jews supported the civil rights movement because they implicitly understood what was at stake in it for them.77 Unfortunately, the vision of the movement was quickly drawn into the supersessionist logic of whiteness and fashioned in the form of a truly American schema. In this schema, what made America was the American ability to judge a person on his true inner reality as opposed to the external factors of race, cultural history, or ethnic tribe. How one performed in America was the true measure of the person, a performance gauged by the logic of capitalism.
The civil rights movement’s raison d’être came to be the affirmation of a white fiction: that America was from the beginning the new Israel, a place of opportunity, of empty spaces, where people could by their own merit and hard work move forward in life in new and creative ways. And this self-revelation of America is always ready to break forth in the minds of Americans, and this is what makes America the experience, America the experiment in democracy, so great. This particular discursive arrangement that slowly but surely wove itself inside prevailing accounts of the civil rights movement is born of survival, anguish, and hope.78 But it resists a deeper theological power that lay dormant yet within arm’s reach, a power concealed in and often to the black church (in its multiple forms) and living Israel. That power resides precisely between social existence and social death and is bound to an abiding question: what would give us life now and forever? It is indeed the question of life eternal and not merely survival on the American landscape that fuels the social hope of the collective black body and the Jewish body, and the black church and living Israel. That social hope cuts through the racial imagination and gestures toward its transcendence. Such gestures have been powerfully and beautiful expressed in the second kind of relational space between blacks and Jews, the literary-artistic.
If one were going to speak of an American artistic soul, he or she would have to imagine that soul as shaped between black and Jewish bodies. Their artistic performances unleashed a power and a freedom that became not only central to the intoxicating spirit of America but also compelling to a wide swath of immigrants seeking to discern the American identity and approximate it.
The literary art of black and Jewish writers in America, especially since the dawn of the twentieth century, was indeed a matter of self-expression refracted through complex and dangerous modes of self-representation.79 The realities of suffering, struggle, and marginality created a context within which they could display the contours not only of their humanity, but of humanity itself. Black and Jewish writers, from within the specificities of their lives and sometimes their lives together, painted portraits of the human condition. Such portraits invited readers to see themselves reflected in the pages of texts, and in this way black and Jewish existence could be imagined as a suitable carrier for anyone’s self-understanding or even someone’s self-expression.80 Indeed, they established a kind of mysticism between the black and Jewish body, naming it as a mysterious space generative of the dreams of humanity, as the writer Isaac Rosenfeld showed in his autobiographical novel, Passage from Home (1946): “Why was he a Negro and I a Jew? Why not the other way around? Or both of us Negroes or both Jews? There was something between us that neither of us might grasp, some understanding of which we had only the dimmest impression; who knew what this was, or what the design was into which we had been cast? The connections between things were too fine to be discovered.”81 Writers did venture to discover that connection, always marking it as an elusive center, a center worthy of endless investigation and exploration. One of the most powerful explorers of that mystical nexus was James Baldwin. He saw the density of the connection in both its theological and racialized dimensions. Consider this passage from his essay “The Harlem Ghetto,” from 1948, in which he captured the linkages between black Christians and Jews: “The Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of Egypt. The hymns, the texts, and the most favored legends of the devout Negro are all Old Testament and therefore Jewish in origin…. The birth and death of Jesus, which adds a non-Judaic element, also implements this identification. It is the covenant made with Abraham again, renewed, signed with his blood…. The images of the suffering Christ and the suffering Jew are wedded with the image of the suffering slave, and they are one: the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.”82
Baldwin, because of his Christian background, saw the relationship between racial and theological identities for blacks and Jews. In his essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” (1967) he captured the deep connection of whiteness to Christianity and how the complexities of white identity operated within black and Jewish relationships: “If one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.”83 Baldwin, however, like many writers, did not surmise the implications of the deeper resonance of that mystical-theological connection.
Michael Alexander, in his brilliant study Jazz Age Jews, explored the ways in which Jewish actors and musicians took on the racial identity of others, in this case blacks. Alexander sees most profoundly that this was done as a theological act: “In blackface, Al Jolson became a symbol through which Eastern Jewry in America understood itself. To a people who imagined itself fundamentally as Other, a Jew painted as an African American was an image of magisterial striking power. To the Jews in America, its symbolic power must have compared with that of the prophet Ezra, swallowing a Torah scroll in an age when to be a Hebrew meant to embody the Law. That comparison is not made glibly or without the counsel of the Yiddish journalist who thought Jolson’s burnt cork had superseded the talis…. The people of the book have also become the people of the fringe. Marginalization has become a core component of American Jewish identity.”84 If Jewish identity could be signified through the artificial re-presentation of black identity, then it exposed a power of vicarious existence, to will one’s voice to be heard within another’s voice, to shade another discourse behind the bright light of a dominant one.85 One should not press this ability too strongly within the derogatory reality of minstrelsy and in the social habit of presenting black flesh as grotesque flesh.86 The larger reality here speaks on the one side to the ability of Jewish identity through the arts to re-present racial identity—white, black, or other—as a theological act signifying Jewish existence, and on the other side to the ability of black identity through those same arts to take the givens of racial identity and refashion them as expressive elements within black life.87 Together these powers form the ability to call forth the image of humanity in its complexity.
One of the most powerful examples of this is the formation of American jazz. Jazz was decisively shaped at the intersection of the creative powers, social vicissitudes, and racial struggles of blacks and Jews. The history of jazz is in fact the history of the creation of a Jewish/black immigrant improvisational space within which one could not only survive in America but also refashion it into a creative extension of oneself. Jazz music developed and moved forward through extended kinship networks of blacks and Jews that crisscrossed and intersected at different moments in which there was unprecedented cross-pollination of ideas and some genuine hybridization of racial identities.
A history of the inner life of jazz from the vision of the space constituted between black and Jewish bodies has yet to be written. Consider the importance of Tin Pan Alley, the home of some of the most important Jewish writers of American music (for example, Gus Kahn, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin) and the source of many foundational jazz standards; and the significance of the caring Jewish surrogate family for the young Louis Armstrong, the undisputed creative font of modern jazz improvisation.88 One could also think of the collaborative relationships that gave birth to so many musical stars, as when the clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, hired Billie Holiday and, later, Roy Eldridge; or the collaborations of another Jewish clarinetist and bandleader, Benny Goodman, when he hired the African American Fletcher Henderson as a pivotal arranger for his band and drew from the talents of a number of other African American arrangers, such as Mary Lou Williams.89 One could consider as well the founding of the incredibly important Blue Note Records by two German-Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany, Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, who collaborated with, documented, and recorded a vast array of black jazz luminaries, too numerous to even begin to identify.90
As is obvious from this brief though not inconsequential listing, the collaboration extended into the performance itself, establishing a vision of improvisation that is not primarily of an individual musician imbued with the spirit of modernism engaged in a wholly democratic and creative performance, producing musical pieces ex nihilo. Rather, jazz performance from its origins presented artistic interpretive traditions and communities of interpretation moving in and out of one another. Jew and black interfaced on the rough seas of representation, drawing other peoples and their cultural expressive traditions out onto the choppy waters, and in the process signifying both their existence as bodies engaged in emancipatory performances.91 While Jewish and black musical expressive traditions indicate a challenge to the racial imagination, they also point to the power of the racial imagination to forge even tighter essentialist chains between artistic expression and racial type.92
For my purposes, however, the significance of literary-artistic expression is that it draws power from word and voice, yet it cannot capture sight of whose word and voice it draws power from. It dances in the awesome reality of vicarious existence, but it has not entered the depths of that representative reality that stands beyond the human constituted within the strictures of the racial imagination. There, in the depths of that representative reality, one gains sight of the possibility of a new humanity that draws the expressive traditions of all peoples to a new space of communion, a holy city not made by hands. Most important, this historically collaborative literary-artistic expression presents an opportunity for the church (and especially the black church) and living Israel to explore together why each sings the songs of Zion in strange lands. That is, it opens up the possibility of exploring together the implications of the formation of identities through the worship of the God of Israel considered against the backdrop of the racial imagination. Rather than dialogue that simply reflects on Christian and Jewish liturgical traditions, there is a history of collaboration between Jewish and black artists that exposes profound theological conversational possibilities. That possible theological conversation may yet yield sight of a truly Pentecostal reality—the speaking of the language of another by the power of the Holy Spirit. However, it is exactly the singing of songs in strange lands that leads finally to the deepest kind of relation characterizing the space between Jewish and black bodies, the relation of exile.
Woven through the relations, both sociopolitical and literary-artistic, is the reality of exile. Exile here is not primarily the absence of a land or of a space, but of home, of a place constituted in peace, safety, and prosperity. Exile in this regard is a matter of consciousness, born of the long histories of scattered existence.93 This need for place born of Diaspora existence is not only a material one but a conceptual one for blacks and Jews. Both enter the challenge of narrating their lives and histories in the face of suffering and the unrelenting continuous dance with violence and death. If most people on the American social landscape are aware of the Shoah and the Atlantic slave trade, the horrors of these historical realities have been sequestered into museumlike intellectual exhibitions that people simply move through to be reminded of the generalities of human evil, the depths of suffering, and the indomitability of the human spirit. Yet they announce legacies of ongoing struggle which demand, especially for blacks and Jews, the hard work of making sense of the absurdities of their situations. Christianity and Judaism thus share in a profound challenge of presenting theological identities that speak to the deepest realities of black life and Jewish life.
This is an exceedingly difficult task because of the complex, ongoing struggles that attend the inheritors of these troubled sojourns and also because of the strange career of Christianity’s effects on both. Indeed, many blacks and Jews look impatiently at Christianity and Judaism, respectively, asking very serious questions about and sometimes of God. This is not simply a matter of needing a theodicy for their peoples or a compelling account of their histories to situate concretely their struggles. What might be at play here is the possibility of a theological narration of life bound to a theological identity that is compelling. Such a compelling narration wed to a robust and powerfully articulated spiritual identity that presses deeply into the inner logics of black and Jewish life remains an elusive goal.
Few have captured an insight similar to that of the Jewish theologian Peter Ochs, who said that living Israel must learn to read and study Scripture in light of the Shoah and learn to write theology by “reexamin[ing] Scripture through the witness of Torah scholars who survived the Shoah, who studied Torah during and after the Shoah.”94 Ochs’s insight could be echoed for Christian scholars, who must learn to reflect theologically with those who bore and continue to be marked by the deepest effects of the colonialist moment.95 The need for Christians to learn to reread Torah alongside living Israel, attending carefully to Christianity’s deep involvement in the Shoah, follows compellingly from examining the tragic legacy of the colonialism. Learning to reread Christian existence and relearn Torah, however, stand in contrast to the emergence of a twofold problematic faced by both living Israel and the black church. On the one hand blacks and Jews face the formation of cultural nationalisms that imagine theological identity wholly contained inside ethnic identity. On the other hand we face complex pedagogical challenges. Those challenges are different, to be sure, but they share the same taproot of trying to narrate theological identity within and sometimes against historical accounts that question the efficacy of belief. Again Ochs captures the situation for living Israel:
(a) We Jews know the God of Israel as the God of history through the way we study Scripture from out of our immediate communal and historical context.
(b) However, long before the Shoah, modern Jews fell out of the habit of reading Scripture this way, as Scripture (or Torah), and read Scripture instead as a record of what they considered “past events” and “traditional beliefs.” But neither past events nor traditional beliefs contained any precedents for knowing God from out of the context of Shoah, as total destruction.
(c) After the Shoah, the theologians of modern Judaism were therefore unprepared to consider the God of Israel the God of this history of Israel; they therefore tended either to speak of Israel independently of God, or to speak of God independently of Israel in history. In fact, Jews do not yet know the identity of the God who was God during the Shoah, because they have not yet studied Scripture from out of the context of that terrible time.96
If Jewish theological pedagogy faces a challenge within this twofold problematic exacerbated by the horror of the Shoah, then the black church carried forward a theological pedagogy that has been thwarted by a historical reality: It has limited social reach. Black Christians sought to make sense of a colonialist world in which Christian practices, including theological reflection, had limited import in effecting change in that world. Despite their limitations, Christian practices were useful for the uplifting of the race, the sustaining of hope, and the cultivation of joy in the midst of sorrow and frustration. But, as we saw with Equiano, Christian pedagogy lived and grew in very tight spaces.
The constant reminder that a robust Christian pedagogy made little difference in the social situation profoundly challenged theology’s importance. This meant that a Christian pedagogic regime’s ability to exert decisive power on the intellectual imaginations of blacks has always been severely complicated. Born of a racially bifurcated and socially hampered Christian pedagogy, a Christian intellectual life has always been a difficult road to mark out for black Christians. Black intellectuals raised in the church and entering the academy entered with a sense of Christian pedagogy’s importance but its limitation. That limitation connected to racial segregation, and white supremacy became deeply coupled with theology’s marginalization in modernity. The effect has been an ever-widening intellectual and spiritual bifurcation.
This bifurcation has made it difficult for black intellectuals to reconcile the unabated character of black suffering and public displays of black piety. If all intellectual work must eventually come to the fiery brook of violence, suffering, and death, then black and Jewish intellectual life never moves too far out of sight of these realities. Sight, in this regard, is the crucial issue. How do blacks reconcile what we see with what we believe? African and African Diaspora Christianity, for example, exposes what some consider a growing absurdity: what does it mean to say, as some historians, sociologists, and theologians do, that the center of Christianity is now in Africa (and Latin America), when Africans are dying at a monstrous rate through violence, hunger, disease, and natural disasters, the blows of which could be softened?97
The African (church) situation exposes deep but undertheorized connections to black Christian life around the world and the global economic situation. The sense of absurdity that connects African Christians to all black Christians might be stated in a question: how can there be in black communities growing churches, robust attendance, and vital piety coupled with intractable, cancerous social conditions? Most people in America know very well many of the ways in which black people in this country live out the disproportions, from crimes experienced and convicted of to diseases carried and left uncured, from low salaries earned to informal social benefits denied. Yet an analogous disproportion attends the Christianity of black peoples. We are in greater numbers earnest, faithful, compliant, hopeful, attending Christians.98 These disproportions confront a Christian intellectual witness with a serious task of interpretation.
The situation for Jewish intellectual life, intellectual life deeply informed by Torah, is equally, if not more, complicated. The rise of the Jewish nation-state now profoundly articulated through Zionism created a challenging context for the articulation of a theological identity. Faithfulness to the Torah appears to be joined to the problem of ethnic violence, death, and the temptation of worldly power.99 Thus, the question for living Israel and the church is not, how do we form faithful people, but what does it mean to form faithful people, given the complex social situations for our theological pedagogies?
The need to establish a powerful theological pedagogic vision that reaches deep into the social imagination of a people is not a new one and certainly not one limited to blacks and Jews. However, their exilic existence decisively marks the modern situation, naming a pedagogical challenge for theology, Jewish and Christian, unmatched by its social intensity. Indeed, God sought to address exilic existence by bringing the people of God into the desert and through the wilderness that they might learn the truth of their existence—they are not ethnoi, but laos. The truth of this lesson required that it be repeated. There was a man, born of Israel, who faced the needs of all peoples for the sake of many and who offers to Israel and to the Gentiles a similar word, you are not ethnoi, but my laos.
By carefully attending to the realities of modernity constituted around and signified by the black and Jewish body Christians might be able to gather what they are in desperate need of, namely, a clear, unobstructed view of a redemptive word spoken to Israel and the Gentiles. However, the significance of these bodies will be fully understood only as Christians allow black and Jewish situations to illumine the white body and the constructing realities of whiteness. The irony of the history of Jewish-black relations is that in the midst of sociopolitical and literary-artistic collaborations and with a parallel sense of the challenges of exilic existence, both groups have yet to reflect together deeply about the reality of Jesus’ body, why this body figures into our histories and for many of us haunts us daily. Instead, the body of another has remained at the center of our relational imagination, the body of a powerful, white, Western man, the image of self-sufficiency, social power, and self-determination. If Jewish-black relations are marked by the absence of serious reflection on the body of Jesus, then Jewish-Christian theological dialogue is marked by the absence of serious reflection on that racial body, the body of the centered white man.
If the deeper theological conversation ever begins to happen, then maybe there can be an interreligious dialogue for Christians and Jews that draws them to the real risks of faith, a risk found only in the space of possible joining, and a destiny marked by love. We are in need of a vision of the journey of faith imagined as the joining of peoples now separated by violence, poverty, or race. Where, however, is this space of joining and of communion? Is it only mental space, space conceived but never lived? Is it only a possibility? Given the constant displacement of peoples from land and the ever-increasing transformation of land into private property in the social imaginations of many peoples, it seems that a space of communion that binds people to place, whether new or old, can be only a dream, a possibility.
If place has become in our thinking, that is, in the thinking of peoples deeply touched by the multiple legacies of the colonialist moment, nothing more than the raw materials of potential development, of the constant turnings of spaces inside commodified existence—from residential sectors, to business sectors, to religious sectors, to education sectors, or back to “natural habitats”—then we can refer to the space of joining and communion only as having a possible corner inside commodified space. Yet if the space of joining and of communion is not first a possibility but a reality unrealized inside the identities and potential relationships between different peoples who have been convinced of the power of Jesus’ life, then this space may become a profoundly visible place on surprising spaces that give sight of a different world.
The space of communion is always ready to appear where the people of God reach down to join the land and reach out to join those around them, their near and distant neighbors. This joining involves first a radical remembering of the place, a discerning of the histories and stories of those for whom that land was the facilitator of their identity. This must be done to gather the fragments of identity that remain to learn from them (or at least from their memory) who we might become in that place. This must also be done to discern the ever-present processes of commodification and transformation of place. We must learn the history of a place that has entered into the state of transition, because therein lies our point of departure for imagining a future by remembering a past. Yet such learning helps prepare us for interface with the processes of commodification and transformation. Such processes must constantly be engaged, analyzed, and sometimes resisted so that land is never simply released to capitalism and its autonomous, self-perpetuating turnings of space inside commodity form.
This joining also involves entering into the lives of peoples to build actual life together, lives enfolded and kinship networks established through the worship of and service to the God of Israel in Jesus Christ. Such kinship networks would, of necessity, come into contention with the permeation of class and economic stratification inherent in the transformation of land into private property. The space of communion draws into itself the social divisions enacted by and facilitated through that stratification in order to overcome them. The identities being formed in the space of communion may become a direct challenge to the geographic patterns forced upon peoples by the capitalistic logic of real estate. We who live in the new space of joining may need to transgress the boundaries of real estate, by buying where we should not and living where we must not, by living together where we supposedly cannot, and being identified with those whom we should not. Thus the new space may betray the logics of geographic commodity form by drawing local communities and their myriad of designations (for example, residential, business, commercial, and so on) into a wider, even global kinship network.
For us in the racial world, the remade world, a crucial point of discipleship is precisely global real estate. Where we live determines in great measure how we live. Where we agree to the spatial configurations of land inevitably means a tacit agreement to the racial formation of the world. We must enter the struggle of land acquisition, space and place design, targeted housing development, buying, and selling which constantly reestablishes and strengthens segregationist mentalities and racial identities.100 We must, for example, disrupt the smooth formation of global real estate brokers and entrepreneurs formed in a process that deepens the logic of displacement and tightens the connection of space to commodity form, yielding the further naturalization of distinct living spaces for peoples with varying degrees of capital.101 Our imaginations must be drawn to new possibilities of living arrangements that capture our freedom in Christ and turn them toward desiring a journey of joining enabled and guided by the Spirit of God.
For some, my account of Jesus-space and of communion will seem idealistic, a denial of Christian failure and the realities I rightly pointed toward in the previous chapters. If my account of space looks like an idealist account, it is precisely because it is an account held in stark contrast to the utter inversion of the Israel/Gentile relation. If my account of communion looks like an ideologically naïve ideation, it is because the very fragments of memory of Gentile existence have been altered and reconfigured to make room for other identity-facilitating realities. In the remade world born of the colonialist moment, Christian possibilities of communion and cultural intimacy have been subverted to draw all people toward an existence marked by the reversal of its telos. In this regard, my account of space and communion seems at odds with the order of things precisely because a perverted version of space and communion drawn from Christian logics pervades many parts of the world. My hope is for a joining of peoples not only to each other but also to the God who calls them to touch his body. For some, this deeply erotic image is disturbing. But it should be far less disturbing to us than bodies that never embrace, that never walk together on a moonlit night awaiting the dawn of a new day.