Interpretation. A Journal of Bible and Theology. July 2010

In This Issue

Volume 64 Number 3 July 2010

Scandalous Particularities: Jews and Christians in Conversation

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GUEST EDITORIAL

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PRINCIPLE, STORY, AND MYTH IN THE LITURGICAL SEARCH FOR IDENTITY • LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

As a self-conscious religious collective with minority status, Jews seeking recognition in the modern nation-state have had to fashion not just principles of belief, but also a narrative to articulate the historical essence of their existence. The most common narrative of the twentieth century has been a story, not a myth—a story, moreover, with limited capacity for interfaith dialogue. By the end of the century, that story began to lose its compelling quality. The twenty-first century demands a return to myth, with the promise of more promising theological conversation across faith lines. 246

A CHRISTIAN ORDO? • MARTHA MOORE-KEISH “Ordo,” as it has come to be used, suggests the basic structure of Christian worship that centers on table, font, and pulpit, and the shape of Christian living that flows from these centers. It is a commitment to that which grounds and guides our lives in the world.

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RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE • PAUL D. HANSON This article grows out of and hopes to remain a part of a conversation in which Jews and Christians ponder over the manner in which they can contribute to the public good from the richness of their Scriptures and traditions. It suggests a thoughtful hermeneutic that is simultaneously faithful to ancestral traditions and open to the contributions of all thoughtful individuals and groups within a diverse society.

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JUDAISM, MULTICULTURALISM, AND THE POWER OF POLITICS: RECONSIDERING JUDAISM’S ROLE IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE • RANDI RASHKOVER It is the central argument of this essay that this profile of persons as ordered and affirmed by the difference between the divine and the human presents a different conception of power than that presupposed by multiculturalism. BETWEEN TEXT & SERMON

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Isaiah 11:1–11

Major Book Reviews 294

– Christopher Leighton &

– Bernard M. Levinson

Adam Gregerman 290

Hebrews 1:1–4

Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology by Michael Fishbane

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– Carol Steele

Beginning from Jerusalem: Christianity in the Making, Vol. 2 by James D. G. Dunn – Michael J. Gorman

306

Revelation: A Commentary by Brian K. Blount – Mitchell G. Reddish

310

God and Earthly Power: An Old Testament Political Theology by J. G. McConville – Paul D. Hanson

312

Short Book Reviews and Notes

O F F I C E S TA F F

DEBRA REAGAN Managing Editor WILLA JACOB Subscription Manager NAROLA AO MCFAYDEN Editorial Fellow & Office Assistant

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Guest Editorial The contributions gathered in this issue of Interpretation were originally given as papers at an interfaith colloquy that the Institute of Reformed Theology (Richmond) conducted in conjunction with the Institute of Christian and Jewish Studies (Baltimore). What attracted the facilitators to embark on this enterprise was the prospect of creating a conversation that would not be aimed primarily at "fixing problems" in the relationship between Jews and Christians. Obviously, any dialogue between the two religions has to ponder a number of fundamental questions: how conscious should Christians be of the fact that, historically, their religion is rooted in Judaism? To what extent should it matter to contemporary Christians that Jesus was a faithful Jew? Is there, in a Jewish mindset, any deeper significance to the existence of Christianity? Does it matter to contemporary Jews that the origins of Christianity fall into a period that had a tremendous impact also for Judaism itself, namely the second und ultimate destruction of the temple in Jerusalem that had been the center of Judaism since the days of Solomon? Finally, looking at the co-existence of Jews and Christians over two millennia, how does one approach the fact that, for the most part, Christianity acted from a position of cultural hegemony and that, as a consequence, the coexistence of Judaism and Christianity was repeatedly overshadowed by non-understanding, intolerance, hidden and overt forms of discrimination and violence? Notwithstanding the importance of these questions, the goal of the colloquy was to explore whether there was a starting point that would allow Jews and Christians to engage in a conversation about issues that pertain to the life of both religions. An idea for such a starting point emerged during the extensive preparation phase and eventually gave the colloquy its name: “The Scandal of Particularity.” A word of explanation is in order. “Particularity” has become one of the catchwords in late-modern (or postmodern) sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. After what has been called the breakdown of the modern confidence in universal notions of rationality and reason, overarching visions of the good life, and also in the existence of a divine being to which the major “world religions” refer in their specific ways—after the breakdown of all of this, “particularity” has emerged as a new paradigm in human sciences. The shared assumption is that particularity is not merely a surface phenomenon that one has to overcome in order to find the core elements in all of human existence. Rather, particularity is regarded as something irreducible that marks both the starting point and the end of one’s philosophical, sociological, or theological inquiries. One might think that Judaism and Christianity should benefit from the decline of modern universalism, precisely because being Jewish or Christian starts with the assumption that one is a part of a community with particular sets of beliefs and practices that may or may not be shared by the rest of culture. However, despite its liberating promise, religious particularity seems to be no less ambivalent, precarious, and even dangerous than the modern vision of religious universalism. Postmodern theorists of culture, such as James Clifford, Kathryn Tanner, and Homi K. Bhabha, have highlighted some of the “blind spots” in current assumptions about religious particularity. According to these theorists, one has to realize that, in Western societies,

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particular identities take shape by insinuating specific belief systems and practices into an already existing cultural framework. The notion is that the broader culture provides the “space” in which particular identities can find their individual “niches.” This again presupposes that particular identities make their peace with the fact that, to a lesser or larger extent, they are secondary to the culture in which they are embedded. Christian theology typically addresses this as the problem of “secularism.” How can one know and to what extent does it matter if religious beliefs and practices are irreducibly genuine or “just” variations of shared cultural patterns? This uncertainty about the status of one's identity has been characterized as one of the underlying causes of a different type of particularity, namely religious fundamentalism. It seems that the loss of world certainty has triggered a quest for religious and moral foundations—a quest that does not shy away from radical dogmatism and intolerance and that one finds in different shades and facets in all three monotheistic “world religions.” There seems to be a perception that religion is the last remaining bastion that, after the decline of public morality and the belief in the common good, can withstand the postmodern tendency towards relativism and social atomism—a bastion that needs to be defended, even by means of persecution of and violence toward the Other. One of the key assumptions that guided the “Scandal of Particularity” colloquy was that both Judaism and Christianity see themselves confronted with the challenges that arise from secularism on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. This brings us to the second term of the colloquy's title: the scandal of particularity. This term, in its Greek form, “skandalos,” figures prominently in the language of the New Testament. Literally, it means “edge,”“obstacle,” or “pitfall.” Paul and the author of 1 Peter use it to highlight specifically those emerging Christian beliefs that are not only different from but incommensurable with the beliefs outside Christianity, especially the salvific meaning of the “word of the cross.” According to Paul, this is a “folly” to the Gentiles and a “scandal” to the Jews (1 Cor 1:18–23; cf. Rom 9:30–33; 1 Pet 2:6–8). Interestingly, both Paul and 1 Peter refer to two passages from the Hebrew Bible to support their claim that the uniqueness and particularity of Christian faith cannot expect and does not depend on the approval of those outside their communities. Isaiah 28:16 uses the image of a rosh pinnah, a “corner stone,” which God has laid down on Mount Zion as a foundation for those whose faith and trust is in him. Psalm 118:22 uses the same imagery but adds that what God chose to become the corner stone had been discarded by others (“The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner”), indicating that faith in God will necessarily and unavoidably be worthless, meaningless, or even “scandalous” to those on the outside. One can hardly ignore the triumphalist overtone in these biblical references about the fact that the world has been and always will be largely ignorant of what the texts see as the hidden truths of faith. This suggests that the notion of “particularity” does not merely describe the perception of Judaism and Christianity by the larger culture but that both religions make explicit claims to particularity as part of their own identity. Put in more provocative terms, could it be that being “scandalous” is not at all an unwanted fate but is in fact a self-chosen characteristic of Judaism and Christianity? The contributions gathered in this issue focus on both aspects of religious particularity, the

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self-definition of Judaism and Christianity and their place in the public square. Martha MooreKeish’s and Lawrence A. Hoffman’s papers were originally presented in a section of the colloquy devoted to the role of liturgy in Judaism and Christianity and the ways in which liturgy shapes religious practices and religious life in general. Asking what provides the church with a center, which is nonetheless open to the world, Moore-Keish focuses on the notion of “ordo” as a way of organizing Christian life around table, font, and pulpit. For the Jewish side, Hofmann asks whether a contemporary Jewish identity should be rooted in “principle” or in “narrative” and argues in favor of a revival of “myth” as a basis for both liturgy and ethics. The contributions by Randi Rashkover and Paul D. Hanson reflect on the role of Judaism and Christianity as a minority report in the cultural and political discourse of the modern period. Based on her analysis of the public perception of Judaism in European history, Rashkover outlines her own concept of the “politics of praise” as a way for Jews to develop a hopeful and constructive view of their religion even in unfavorable and potentially hostile cultural contexts. Acknowledging the constitutive differences between Judaism and Christianity, Hanson suggests a comprehensive, five-step “theo-political hermeneutic capable of guiding a faith community committed to living in the world as agents of God’s compassionate justice.” In their ensemble, these contributions aim at providing both faith communities, Jews and Christians, with an awareness of the challenges, risks, and promises that are involved in crossing the boundary that separates the inner core of these faith communities from their embededness in the public arena. At this boundary, religions transition back and forth between their indigenous beliefs and practices and their contribution to public life. The crossing of this boundary has the potential to create hope or frustration among faith communities and, as such, to energize or radicalize them. It is precisely because of this ambivalence that the “scandal” of being particular poses a challenge to both synagogue and church. Andreas Schuele, Aubrey Lee Brooks Professor of Biblical Theology Dean McBride, Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpretation Union-PSCE Richmond, Virginia

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Simon Marmion, (c.1425–1489). David, Matthew, Isaiah, Luke. Back of the right wing of the Altarpiece of Saint-Omer, 1459 (detail). Oak, each panel 56 x 147 cm. Grisaille. Inv. 1645A. Photo: Joerg P. Anders. Location: Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y.

CONTRIBUTORS LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN is an ordained Reform rabbi and the Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He has authored or edited over thirty books, and his articles have appeared in eight languages and on four continents. In January 2004, he received the North American Academy of Liturgy’s Berakhah Award for outstanding lifetime contributions to his field. He serves also as cofounder of Synagogue 3000, a trans-denominational project to envision and implement the ideal synagogue "as moral and spiritual center" for the twenty-first century. MARTHA MOORE-KEISH is associate professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. She is the author of two books: Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology (Eerdnmans, 2008) and Christian Prayer for Today (Westminster John Knox, 2009). Moore-Keish received her Ph.D. in theological studies from Emory University. She continues to pursue research interests in theology, sacraments, and interreligious dialogue. PAUL D. HANSON has taught at Harvard since 1971, and was Lamont Professor of Divinity until July 2009, when he became Lamont Research Professor. In his teaching and research, Hanson has focused on Hebrew prophecy, Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period, the religion of the ancient

cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and biblical theology. He is currently working on a book examining the interplay between religion and politics, with emphasis on American faith communities rooted in biblical tradition. Hanson has explored some of the same themes in a recent publication Political Engagement as Biblical Mandate (Cascade, 2010). Among his many other books is The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible (with a new introduction, Westminster John Knox, 2002). RANDI RASHKOVER is Director of Judaic Studies at George Mason University. Her areas of research include Jewish philosophy, Christian theology, and Jewish political thought. She is the author of Revelation and Theo-politics: Barth, Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Praise (London: T & T Clark), and the editor of both Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption (Eerdmans, 2007) and Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader (Eerdmans, 2008). Rashkover’s most recent book is Freedom and Law: a Jewish and Christian Apologetics (forthcoming, Fordham University Press, 2011).

Principle, Story, and Myth in the Liturgical Search for Identity LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion As a self-conscious religious collective with minority status, Jews seeking recognition in the modern nation-state have had to fashion not just principles of belief, but also a narrative to articulate the historical essence of their existence. The most common narrative of the twentieth century has been a story, not a myth—a story, moreover, with limited capacity for interfaith dialogue. By the end of the century, that story began to lose its compelling quality. The twenty-first century demands a return to myth, with the promise of more promising theological conversation across faith lines.

S

ome two hundred years after winning the rights of citizenship, Jews are still discovering that modernity raises self-consciousness and self-consciousness destabilizes identity. What never goes away, it seems, is the challenge of navigating the hyphen between Judaism, on one hand, and the nation state, on the other. The same divide subverted Christian certainties, when secularized governments reduced Christianity to the status of just one religion among many. The movement toward neutrality was in opposite directions, of course: Judaism, finally recognized as equal, was catapulted upward; Christianity, stripped of official dominance, was hurtled downward. But the result was the same: two religious communities negotiating their role in a secular state and their relationship to one another. This political equality has taken a couple of centuries to develop and is not over yet. Even in America, where church and state are separated by law, an old-guard Protestant power structure dominated until the 1960s.1 But the writing was on the wall as early as Spinoza and Mendelssohn, two Jewish philosophers of entirely different sensibilities, who concurred in sounding the death knell of religious power. In modernity, only the state may exercise coercion; religions settle for moral suasion. Being Jewish, both Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) spoke as prophets who were heavily implicated in their own prophecy.2 Spinoza was excommunicated by

1 See especially the classic accounts of E. Digby Baltzell,The Protestant Establishment Revisited (ed. and intro. Howard Schneiderman; New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), 81–83. 2 For brief overviews of their lives and work, see E. M. Curley, “Spinoza, Benedict (or Baruch) de,” Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation 2 (K-Z) (ed. John H. Hayes; Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 498–99, and P. Culbertson, “Mendelssohn, Moses (Moshe Ben Menahem),” Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation 2 (K-Z), 145–46.

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his own semi-autonomous Jewish community that recognized the impact his political philosophy would have on them as well, insofar as they constituted a “Jewish government” within, and protected by, the ascendant Protestant one. Power is power: Christian or Jewish, it does not easily concede defeat. Indeed, American Christians are still very much divided on acknowledging that judgment, as are Orthodox Jews in Israel. But barring a cataclysm beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, the long-term shift that these two philosophers predicted seems inevitable, as does the need for each group to redefine itself against the reality of religion becoming something of a cultural luxury that people can accept, reject, reclaim, recover, redefine it or simply ignore. The Christian loss of civic power and the Jewish gain of civic responsibility are what brought about interreligious dialogue in the first place. Under medieval conditions, dialogue was disputation with a predetermined outcome. Only when the two religious communities became reconciled to political neutrality, did it become both feasible and desirable to listen to each other. One of the things they listened to was the question, “Who exactly are you?” This communal quest for identity deserves more attention than it gets—it may even be the most promising avenue of dialogue. Since it is given liturgically, I ask here how Jewish prayer books portray Jewish peoplehood; and how that portrayal furthers or impedes conversation with Christians.

I D E N T I T Y C R I S I S P O S T- W O R L D W A R I I The decline of the WASP3 establishment went hand in hand with the rise of Jewish self-confidence. Before World War II, anti-Semitism had flourished, mostly in subtle ways, such as university quotas on Jews. From 1920 to 1940, for example, the Jewish population of Columbia Medical School dropped from 50% to 7%.4 By contrast, from 1945 to 1960, the Jewish intellectual presence in universities had become so dominant, that literary critic Leslie Fiedler remembers finding himself “at the University of Bologna as one of four Americans chosen to tell the Italians about American Puritanism,” and realizing “all four of us were Jews.”5 None of them was religious, however. If there was a Jewish brain drain, it was away from synagogues, not toward them. Synagogues were multiplying anyway, and most Jews joined, even if they did not religiously attend. Their agenda was political (the nascent, and needy, state of Israel abroad) and liberal (civil rights in the 1950s, student activism and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s). Churches, too, were being politicized, but they had also been shaken religiously by Vatican II and its impact even beyond Catholic circles, especially liturgically. Nearly every liturgical denomination in America wrote a new prayer book at the time.

3 Baltzell (The Protestant Establishment Revisited, 91) introduced the term as a positive description of the oldline American aristocracy, raised, as Woodrow Wilson said, “to serve the nation.” 4 David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews,and Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 81. 5 Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: David R. Goodine, 2001), xi.

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Jews, too, were caught up in the liturgical excitement, not at the denominational level at first, but among a small corps of grass-root worshipers, impacted by the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The effort was aided by the introduction of “Xeroxing,” the highlevel low-cost capacity to write a new liturgy by Thursday, pray from it Friday or Saturday, throw it away on Sunday, and start again on Monday. At stake was the post-war definition of a Jewish self.6 Liturgy is, in any event, a reliable barometer of a community’s search for religious identity, but all the more so among Jews, where intellectual curiosity joined Leslie Fiedler and friends in Bologna, and theological debate was still not quite the Jewish thing to do. A regular entry in these experimental services of the 1960s and 1970s was “Why I am a Jew,” a litany of one-line affirmations by Edmund Fleg.7 “I am a Jew,” he says, because (for example), “where there are tears and suffering, the Jew weeps . . . where the cry of despair is heard, the Jew hopes. . . . Israel’s promise is a universal promise.”8 Completely assimilated for most of his life, Fleg had awakened to Judaism with the trumpedup trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew framed for treason in1894. In 1929, Fleg eventually published Why I am a Jew, a thin but influential manifesto dedicated to “my grandson who is not yet born.”9 He remembered regretting “my college years spent in the study of philosophy, German culture, and comparative literature.” Instead,“I should have studied Hebrew . . . to attach myself to something . . . that others had begun and that others after me would carry on.”10 Most of the book, however, is not his “I am a Jew because. . .” declarations, but an implicit Jewish story line that occurred to Fleg while wandering through a museum and admiring “the pictures and statues and furniture . . . that someone of my ancestors may have seen, touched, or admired.” As he walks from room to room, he muses, “Here is the door of the synagogue of Geneva through which my father entered to pray. . . . The grandfather of the grandfather of his grandfather was [perhaps] the weigher of gold in this ghetto of Amsterdam, painted by Rembrandt.”11 Fleg awakens to the realization that he belongs to a people of history, its traces through time displayed in museum showcases. The Dreyfus affair and the Zionist idea—he attended a Zionist Congress in Basle—resurrected the showcase relics, reminding him that “all these fathers have transmitted a truth to me which ran in their blood”; and he wonders, “Must I not transmit it with my blood, to those of my blood?”12 Fleg thinks he inherits Judaism through blood, but knows blood is insufficient. That is why he insists on finding transcendent meaning in his legacy: the “I am a Jew because,” propositions that give it value, both for him, and, he hopes, for whatever grandchildren he will have.

6

Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Creative Liturgy,” Jewish Spectator 40.4 (Winter,1975): 42–49. It has since been formally included in official denominational liturgies. See, e.g., the new North American Reform Mishkan Tefilla (2007), 203. 8 Edmond Fleg, Why I Am a Jew (New York: Bloch, 1929), 94. 9 Ibid., xiii. 10 Ibid., 41. 11 Ibid., 95–96. 12 Ibid., 97. 7

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Identity, like geology, comes stratified. On the surface is mirror recognition, seeing our reflected image as ourselves. Below that is the identity people nowadays “steal,” the official record to which we answer “Present.” Deeper still is Freud’s ego that integrates the self. Then, finally, truest and deepest, is the relationship we have to the good. To know who you are, says Charles Taylor, is “to exist in moral space, [where] questions arise about what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance . . . and what is trivial and secondary.”13 Profound identity is this deepest self that we want others (and ourselves) to admire: the moral space we choose to occupy. Fleg personifies the search for Jewish identity as moral space.

R O O T I N G T H E M O R A L S E L F : P R I N C I P L E A N D N A R R AT I V E This rooting of the self in moral space can go in two directions: principle and narrative. Philosophers prefer the first. A Marxist announces, “I am a socialist,” having in mind such principles as false consciousness and class struggle. In part, that is Fleg’s route to identity—his “I am a Jew because.” But “Why I am a Jew” is predominantly what Fleg takes to be Judaism’s history. From his Zionist experience, he has extracted an outline of what he wants the Jewish people to have been. This is a second route to identity: a selective narrative. (Fleg omits Jews who were horse thieves, zealots, and ascetics.) Taylor’s “self in moral space” identifies not just with principles but with the narratives behind them. The self, says Daniel Dennet, is “the center of narrative gravity.”14 Taking responsibility for our historically related self moves us from what sociologist Robert Wuthnow calls “a mutable self ” who “makes decisions based on what feels right at the moment” to an “embedded self ” that “acknowledges both its relationship to the community and its need for autonomy.”15 I used to call this a sacred “myth,” because, while it may not be altogether true, we transmit it to our children more or less as if it were. It is our essence, we say, even, at times, worth living or dying for.16 I now prefer the term “narrative,” because I want to divide narrative, my second route to identity, into story (on one hand) and myth (on the other). Story is pretty much any narrative we cite to explain who we are. Myth is harder to define and the pertinent literature is considerable.17 For our purposes, however, we can say that myths presup-

13 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 28. The third of the selves I name, the one people steal, is my own addition. See also, idem, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 40–41: “Only if I exist in a world in which history or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial.” 14 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Imagining our story as a set of pictures, we can say with Iris Murdoch, “Man is the creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture” (The Fire and the Sun [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 65]). Italics my own. 15 Robert Wuthnow, American Mythos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 49, 54. 16 Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 75–148. 17 Study of myths can be divided into four categories: philosophical, evolutionary, psychological, and political. The classic instance of the first, although coupled with the second, is Ernst Cassirer, a student of Hegel, for whom myth illustrated “spirit” playing itself out in history as an early form of symbol-formation, eventually succeeded by language, art and mathematics. The purely evolutionary approach is best exemplified by Etienne Levy Bruhl, who explained myth as “participation mystique,” a prelogical stage of human evolution, in which primitive peoples, unable to differentiate

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pose a world other than, but in contact with, our own. Myths portray the inhabitants of the other world intervening in our own18—what Mircea Eliade called a hierophany, a “sacred appearance.” To call something a myth is to say nothing about its truth value. The Greek Gods inhabit Olympus and travel to earth, variously helping, challenging, goading, or punishing humans. Moses meets God in a fiery bush or on a mountain. Jesus, the son of God, given through grace, also climbs a mountain for enlightenment. As I say, any or all of these may be true. They are, however, certainly out of tune with modernity’s melodies, and emancipated Jews were rabidly in love with modernity. So their Jewish narratives tended to be stories, not myths. How then should we define Jewish identity today: by principle or narrative? Principles are insufficient. As universals (the golden rule, for example), they fail to establish precisely what is needed: allegiance to a particularity. That is why Fleg provides a narrative. But did Fleg’s grandchild even read his grandfather’s identification tale? Are new generations of little Flegs still reading it as their own? More to the point (never mind the Flegs), do any Jews today have a narrative to tell? My thesis here is that the narrative Jews now use is generally a story, not a myth. It read convincingly throughout most of the twentieth century but is uncompelling for the twenty-first. We need a return to myth.

MYTH IN THE TRADITIONAL HAGGADAH By my criterion for “myth,” traditional Judaism has had one, carried especially in the Passover Haggadah, the time par excellence intended for the Jewish people, corporately, to remember family origins. The Haggadah, which has grown with time, contains several versions of the myth, all beginning with Jewish ancestors rescued from degradation. “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” goes the first. The second recollects Abraham leaving idolatry. Yet a third recalls Jacob as “a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt and sojourned there.” The Passover Seder is a family photo album, which we flip through annually to remember whence we have come. The rabbis extended the biblical album to include the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. They saw that tragedy as a traumatic end to meaningful history, a rip in the cloth of time that would be restitched only in the messianic future. Until then, we have been relegated to the limbo of non-history, where what happens is of no importance. All that matters is keeping the commandments, without which the Messiah will never arrive. By the tenth century, yet a fourth version of Israel’s sacred tale had come into being.19 We

themselves (as subjects) from the world (as objects), could link things together without constraints of time and space. His original title (1910) reads Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societes Inferieurs. C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Karen Armstrong represent psychological approaches, Jung explicitly, Campbell, Eliade, and Armstrong implicitly; Jung, Eliade, and Campbell are romantics, imagining myth as a pathway to psychic fullness that modern men and women must recapture (see Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999]). Armstrong denied our inability to return to mythic thought, but agrees that we need something to take its place. Derrida offers a political explanation, when he applies myth to any discourse that serves an ulterior motive. 18 Cf. Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara, From Homer to Harry Potter (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006). 19 Opinions on dating vary. An alternative view dates it in the second century, possibly as a response to an antiJewish diatribe by Bishop Melito of Sardis. See Lawrence A. Hoffman and Davis Arnow, eds. My People’s Passover Haggadah, Vol. 2 (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 2008), 66–67.

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know it as Dayyenu. It, too, starts with the account of servitude and relates God’s saving acts, each one a separate line, punctuated with Dayyenu, “It would have been enough for us.” If we picture the lines as photographs—splitting the sea, giving us the Sabbath, revealing Torah, and so forth—we can appreciate each one as an entry in the family album, a separate chapter in Israel’s sacred biography. Tellingly, after a detailed account of the exodus from Egypt and desert wandering, Dayyenu rejoices that God brought us into our sacred land, and then leaps ahead to the temple where sacrifice atones for our sins. What happened thereafter is irrelevant, because when the temple fell, history went on vacation. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were happy with the Haggadah’s historical recollection that stopped at the year 70 C.E. By the late eighteenth, and certainly the nineteenth, century, however, that changed, as Europeans (emancipated Jews among them) turned to the romantic search for origins and the celebration of national identity. Bagpipes, kilts, and tartans came to Scotland only then. France first proclaimed Bastille Day in 1880. Only in the 1880s did Prime Minister Gladstone insist that the Queen act like royalty.20 No less than other Europeans, Jews too reinvented themselves. Their efforts found their way to America, where, in 1907, Reform Jews rewrote the Haggadah with an extended Dayyenu. After acknowledging the Temple, they thanked God for sending “prophets of truth and great leaders in each generation to bring all hearts nearer to the divine kingdom of righteousness and peace.”21 The Reform Haggadah was coming about just when Edmund Fleg was rediscovering his Jewishness. Both Fleg and the Reformers were romantics, but following Hegel, they saw the hidden hand of spirit (Geist) operating through time. So they translated Jewish messianism into worldhistoric terms. For Fleg, “Israel’s promise is the universal promise.”22 For the Reformers, it is Israel’s “mission” to “perfect the world under the divine kingdom of the Almighty in truth and righteousness.”23 They differed, in that Fleg had found Judaism through Zionism, the Jewish nationalistic search that scandalized the religious Reformers. But they agreed on the importance of Jewish history beyond the temple’s demise; and they saw that history as moralistic, heading toward a culminating moment in the spirit’s evolution. The Reformers, however, are religionists: they therefore give us a myth, not a story. Their Haggadah concurs with the traditional recollection that, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt”; but then draws the explicit moral of their mythic account: Israel was appointed the messenger of religion unto all mankind. . . . In spite of the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of our people; despite the cruelties that

20

Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1983. The Union Haggadah, 1907, 23. Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 94. 23 The Union Haggadah, 1907, 32. 21 22

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Israel has suffered throughout the ages . . . Israel has not endured in vain. . . . Our sublime mission shall at last find fulfillment throughout the world.24

This narrative route to identity has been preferred over the philosophic one, ever since the age of reason gave way to romanticism. Except for philosophers, not many people read, much less cite, Spinoza today. Narrative, which must be told to someone by someone else, requires a group, and thus has the further benefit of building consensus. For secularists, it as an added appeal: it can be story, not myth; it does not demand theism. Anyone can tell stories, even stories that ostensibly invoke God, since the reader can affirm the human element in the tale, while winking the presence of God away. So, identity formation not only has three modes of attainment (principle, story, and myth), but also three kinds of audience to whom they appeal. Principle suffices for rationalists who argue their way to behavior. Stories and myths appeal to the romantic yearning to belong. The story variety is preferred by secularists. The mythic option is evident in the traditional and the early Reform Haggadah. We want to know which one best suits interreligious dialogue. EASTERN EUROPEAN ETHNICITY AND THE STORY OF JEWS AS A RISEN PHOENIX Before turning to that question, however, we need to return to the 1950s, when story, not myth, became the commonplace mode of Jewish identity formation. The reformers we have been observing so far arrived in the mid to late 1800s from central Europe. For convenience sake, I refer to them as German. But most American Jews trace descent from the massive eastern European migration (I call it Russian) that swamped the German one at the turn of the twentieth century. We might wonder how these eastern Jews changed their Haggadah; and the answer is, very little. Unlike the Germans, they settled for the traditional account, served up most often in a version of the Haggadah that was offered in grocery stores by Maxwell House Coffee.25 It was a simple paperback edition of the traditional text with facing English translation, and a few drawings thrown in. It targeted children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who were one step removed from the traditional world of their parents. That was in 1934. The amazing thing is that the next generation also used it. One can hardly imagine suburban Jews in 1950 reading through the lengthy stilted English, and they lacked the Hebrew skill to rattle through the equally cumbersome original Hebrew. So they did not really read it at all. For most of these third-generation Jews from eastern Europe, reading the Haggadah had become a symbolic gesture. They began it, tired of it, and quit soon into the evening. The puz-

24

Ibid., 24. Passover’s connection with coffee came in 1927, when rabbinic opinion pronounced the coffee bean more akin to berries than to beans, beans being a legume and, therefore, not edible for Passover. Maxwell House marketed the Haggadah to boost sales of its kosher l(pesach (ritually fit for Passover consumption) coffee. When it later turned out that ordinary decaf coffee (which is made with a process that uses alcohol) may not be kosher l(pesach, Maxwell House invented Sanka. See Carole B. Balin, “Good to the Very Last Drop: The Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah,” in My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries, Vol. 1 (ed. Larry Hoffman and David Arnow, eds.; Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 2008), 85–91. Reprints of the Maxwell House Haggadah are still available. By 2008, it had sold six million copies. 25

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zling question is why they did not compile their own modern text the way German Reformers had. Why was it only western European Jews who felt the lack of a compelling Jewish story line? The answer lies in ethnicity. German Jews had arrived with a triple identity. They were American by citizenship, Jewish by religion, and German by culture. The religion part stemmed from Napoleon’s insistence that only as religionists could Jews claim citizenship in the modern nation-state. Ethnicity characterized immigrant churches too, not just synagogues. German Christians and Jews adored Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. But German ethnicity faltered when western European immigration dried up, and was dealt a fatal blow in World War I, when Germany ended up on the wrong side of the war. By contrast, eastern European Jews had largely been excluded from enlightened Russian and Polish culture. They associated it with the anti-Semitic masses who had unleashed one pogrom after another upon them. And Napoleon had never reached Poland, so except for an enlightened few, Jews there never found out they were a religion. They still thought of themselves as a people, Jewish mostly by ethnicity. Some maintained religious allegiance when they arrived here, but many came as socialists, and many more dropped any pretense to religious scruple the day they discovered that, in America, they could. They built and joined so many synagogues because American mores said they should, particularly during the Eisenhower years, when their second and third generations were reaching maturity, achieving economic independence, and moving to the suburbs.26 I mention Eisenhower specifically because he said outright, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” But he defined faith loosely as, “honesty, decency, fairness, service, that sort of thing.”27 Critics like John Courtney Murray (for Catholics), Reinhold Niebuhr (for Protestants), and Will Herberg (for Jews)28 cringed at Eisenhower’s feel-good blandness but missed the point: Eisenhower’s religious faith was something that (in his words) was “deeply felt,” not deeply argued, reasoned, believed, or otherwise cognitively affirmed. In his folksy way, Eisenhower converted religion as belief into religion as feeling, thereby heralding America’s newest romantic era. But American romanticism differs from its European predecessor in that the European variety mixed historical recollection with philosophical principle. The early Reform Haggadah, recall, updated Israel’s narrative, but with an accompanying theological lesson. More than it told Israel’s story, it preached it. Even the mode of telling was rationalistic: its ritual (what we call classical Reform) remained staid, unfeeling, and formal. Eastern European Jews found this Germanic formalism cold and somber, since theirs was a Judaism of the heart not the mind. They had been influenced by Hasidism, and even when, as secularists, they rejected Hasidic thought, they accepted its accent on feeling. The

26 For an introduction to public religion, see the survey by Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006). 27 Ibid., 176–77. 28 Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land (New York: Penguin, 1985), 419, 423.

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religion of the mind as portrayed in classical Reform ritual—the centrality of a sermon, the logicality of space and time, and the reasoned organization of worship—chased them away. Anxious to control where these Russian Jews got chased to, German Jews created a new kind of Judaism specifically for them—the Conservative Movement. We can now rephrase the question: Why did Conservative Jews not rewrite a Haggadah? For one thing, theology didn’t matter to Eisenhower’s public religion, so why bother? For another, what held eastern European Jews together was not religion, but ethnicity. People attended the Seder for family togetherness. It was sufficient to put up the pretense of reading the text of the Maxwell House Haggadah, and then eat—like going to the Philharmonic for the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, and then running out for dinner. German Jews had been flirting with assimilation all along. As religionists of the mind, they could as easily have professed some form of German Protestantism (and many of them did). They needed a compelling reason to remain Jewish. But it had never dawned on Russian Jews to become Orthodox Christians. You can change your mind, not your heart; trade in religions, not ethnicity. Eastern Jews saw Orthodox Christianity as a foreign religion and ethnic identity. Given the lack of options, they needed no religious reason to retain Jewish ethnicity, and given their experience with “the nations,” the last thing they could imagine was trading it in. German Jews expected to join Christians as coreligionists in the long march of civilization. Eastern Jews, by contrast, were locked in mutually antagonistic ethnicity with Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other native groups that only a dictatorial Soviet system would be able to hammer together into an unwilling coalition of states. Post-World War I nationalism only confirmed these Jews’ fears of never fitting in, as newly created ethnic states like Poland and Czechoslovakia turned out to have little room for them. Just a little over a decade later, Hitler drove home the point: Jews were racial pariahs. Neither the nationalist states nor Hitler cared what religion Jews espoused. To explain their bitter fate, postWorld War II Jews (nearly all of them eastern European by origin) developed the theme of being the ever-dying people, the quintessential Phoenix rising from history’s ashes—without any help from God, they would have added. And with that, the post-war Jewish story was born. In the 1970s and 1980s, the story of the Jewish Phoenix was officially recorded in new Reform and Conservative Haggadahs.29 The Reform version pairs Anne Frank’s pathos-ridden hope that “it will all come out right”30 with Israeli poet laureate Chaim Nachman Bialik’s claim, “We are . . . the last generation of slaves and the first generation of free men.”31 But side by side,

29

Rachel Anne Rabinowicz, Passover Haggadah: The Feast of Freedom (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1982). Herbert Bronstein, ed., A Passover Haggadah (New York: CCAR Press, 1974), 45–46. 31 Ibid., 46. 30

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we get its classical Reform emphasis on theological mission. “The People of Israel lives . . . [in] ‘the new light which rises over Zion,’” but the goal of “living” is to “renew the hope of redemption.”32 Not so the Conservative Haggadah where the secularized version of the Phoenix predominates entirely. The Egyptians remind us of “calculated [Nazi] genocide.” Slavery to freedom connotes “Auschwitz to Entebbe in a single generation.” The Holocaust has given birth to a heroic age, we are informed, “nowhere… as unmistakable as in the State of Israel.”33 What theology we get is former Israeli Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s version of the phoenix: Israel reborn as “the land of holiness,”34 side by side with Herzl’s secular prediction that “The Maccabees will rise again”35— as the Israel Defense Forces. The same story, but fully secularized, characterizes most Israeli Haggadah texts as well, especially those hastily typed and mimeographed on the field of battle during World War II, with drawings of Jews hanging by the neck or trapped in barbed wire fences either in concentration camps or in Cyprus—it is hard to tell. An unpublished 1943 Haggadah likens Moses to Herzl. Another, from 1945, remembers, “Millions of our brethren . . . in the cemeteries of the gas chambers”; then resolves, “to have done [with] slavery and wandering”; vowing instead to “meet our dear ones in our re-built homeland.”36

S T O R Y, M Y T H , A N D I N T E R FA I T H D I A L O G U E I am personally moved by these narratives. As a Jew cognizant of history, how can I not be? Herzl as Moses; Holocaust to Israel—a third Jewish Commonwealth, some 1,900 years after the second one ended, and almost 3,000 years after King David established the one before that. After the Holocaust, who can argue against “Never again!” as a watchword of Jewish faith. (Am Yisra)el cha)i (“The People of Israel lives!”) was the song my children and I sang in the days before the USSR collapsed, and we marched annually down New York’s Fifth Avenue in support of refuseniks, Jewish prisoners of conscience behind the Iron Curtain. But any narrative based on Jewish persecution and self-help can only go so far. What dialogue is possible if Christians remain identified merely as yesterday’s anti-Semites; and Christianity the root of it all? The trope of Jewish victimhood has run its course. How can Jews develop a ritualized narrative that does not limit Christians to the role of eternal persecutor? Jews need that change for themselves as well. Once upon a time, the Jews-as-phoenix story explained even the rise of Israel. But in 2007, Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel’s parliament

32

Ibid., 77–79. Rabinowicz, Passover Haggadah, 110, 111. Ibid. 35 Ibid., 97. 36 Haggadahs in the collection of Stephen Durchslag, Chicago. I am grateful to him for opening his Haggadah collection to me. 33 34

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(the Knesset) and leader of the World Zionist Organization conceded “that the . . . founding narratives of . . . Israeliness were over.”37 Similarly, it explained the Soviet doctors’ plot and Six Day War. But it cannot account for the iron curtain’s fall and the growth of Israel to maturity and power. Nor is it responsive to the decline of ethnicity and the replacement of the secular baby boomers by their spirituality-seeking children. Jews need a new narrative. The success of the Phoenix story required persecution on one hand, and ethnicity on the other. With insufficient anti-Semitism to supply moral justification from without and with no ethnic glue to provide adhesion from within, why stay Jewish? Unless, of course, you actually believe in a transcendent purpose to Jewish Peoplehood. Persecution is contingent on history. God-given purpose is not; but it is, of course, a myth. So Jews today are in need of a myth. From the perspective of interfaith dialogue, too, myth is preferable, because myth is patently about God, and is open to theological conversation. But Jews who have lost contact with myth will find it difficult to return. Isn’t it obvious that as soon as you know it is a myth, it gets hard to admit choosing it? How can we believe what we know is not “true”? We should look more carefully at the impediments to belief. The assumption that we must believe only what is evidentially true follows from the triumph of science and the secularization of the modern mind. But insofar as we are talking about myth, it depends also on a prejudgment we make about the mythmakers. Classical western education introduced Greek mythology as obviously worth knowing. Parallel stories by tribal subjects of anthropological forays in Africa or Asia were granted less dignity, in part because Greek myths were literary (and so assumed to be advanced), while tribal tales were oral (so, “obviously,” preliterary, that is to say, backward). Also, the Greeks gave us Socrates and Plato, while the Ashanti and Nuer did not. Greek myths were cultured, deserving appreciation; native myths were backward, defying logic—a judgment that led to the retrospective theory that the tribes themselves must have been backward, which, in turn, explained the myths. Could you expect anything other than backward myths from backward peoples, or (as the circular argument went) backward peoples behind backward myths? On the face of it, there is absolutely no difference between the Jewish Torah, the Christian Gospels, and Hesiod’s Theogony. Their respective advocates come to them already believing that somehow they are true. We bring that judgment to the reading; we do not deduce it from what we have read. I asked before if it is possible to believe something that we know is not true, and the

37 Avrum Berg, cited in David Remnick, “The Apostate,” New Yorker (July 30, 2007): 35. “After some fifteen or twenty years in political life . . . I realized that the three founding narratives of . . . Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narrative.”

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answer, apparently, is, “Yes,” if we come to the task intent on doing so. We interpret our texts until they become believable. Sociologist Peter Berger famously called the conditions required for believability a “plausibility structure.” The plausibility structure of the Phoenix story has broken down. Our new historical, social, and psychological conditions predispose us to belief in myth. To begin with, secular culture has taken up spiritual seeking. Also, postmodernism invites us to entertain ideas we once dismissed. And our era of self-help suggests almost an obsession with well-being. Does Judaism have a myth for such a time—a myth that offers moral space from which Jews can find a meaningful response to all this? I think it does, and it begins where the Bible does: Adam and Eve in Eden. Why, we should wonder, is that tale included altogether? We need the creation story to indicate God’s universal sovereignty and the origin of the universe; we then need Adam and Eve all the way through Noah to demonstrate the need for God to choose a given people as the best chance of achieving the world’s purpose. But why the extended tale of Adam and Eve in Eden? Christians have classically used it as the source for “the fall.” Not so Jews, however. How might Jews find in it a mythic model for Jewish identity? Jews need Eden to foretell the Bible’s overarching metaphor of exile. Adam and Eve prefigure Babylonian exile. To balance Adam and Eve and exile, we get Abraham and Sarah, who, noticeably head home from Ur, the prefigured Babylonia to the east—precisely what Ezra and Nehemiah will do when Babylonian exile ends. In between these two biblical bookends, we have a recurrent tale of expulsion and homecoming; and a God who never abandons us even in our darkest moments of wandering. Abraham and Sarah come early on to our attention for welcoming strangers to their home—again, a reference to the larger plot line of home and homelessness. For the homeland to be inherited, God provides Isaac, and expels Ishmael, Isaac’s competition. But God attends Ishmael in exile, as God will attend Isaac’s exiled progeny later. Jacob, too, is exiled into near-servitude with Laban, again to the east, toward Babylonia; and his family ends up in Egypt as slaves, “strangers in a strange land.” Moses calls his first child Gershom, “stranger there.”“Do not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of a stranger,” we are adjured, not just once but several times (Exod 22:22[21]; 23:9; Lev19:33–34). No other

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biblical commandment is echoed with such frequency.38 Israel’s biblical mission is to model life in exile, awaiting redemptive homecoming. Moses rescues Israel, but only after personal exile, as an infant abandoned in the Nile and an adult in flight from Pharaoh. Israel will come home after forty years of wandering. The DavidicSolomonic monarchy suggests the promise of homecoming, but reality sets in when the population is split into rival kingdoms, both of them eventually exiled. The prophets do virtually nothing but promise homecoming at some distant end of time, and exilic comfort until then. The rabbis update the myth to reflect a second exile, promising that God attends our exile, crying with us, comforting us.39 That surety maintained our medieval forebears. Daily we prayed for ingathering. At weddings, we smash a glass as a mimetic model of exile’s fragmentation, and pray for the day when joy will again be “heard in the cities of Judah”—a line from the wedding ritual, that, tellingly, has a second theme as well: bride and groom as Adam and Eve. Metaphysical “home” is the memory of Eden and the hope of Zion, bookends now of actual history. Modern times extended the myth, sometimes doing it in by demythologizing it into story, as the Phoenix account in various modern Haggadot. But modernity also invented the autonomous individual, with inalienable rights like Jefferson’s “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—“inalienable,” note, the opposite of being alien, a “stranger in a strange land.” With modernity, then, physical geography became existential metaphor. To be at home existentially is to believe in inalienable rights to personhood; and the promise of metaphoric homecoming into a state of wholeness, meaning, and well-being. We all suffer from exile that is metaphysical; each of us is potentially a Richard Corey who had everything, but “came home one night and put a bullet in his head.” Sixteenth-century kabbalists anticipated this. Spanish exiles had come “home” to the land of Israel. But as émigrés against their will, they thought of themselves “in exile” nonetheless. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Polish Hasidism personalized the notion of exile, making it a metaphysical part of the human condition. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, preached especially by Reform Jews, focused on exile that is not just metaphoric—those who suffer on the streets, fields, and battle fields here and around the globe. The Jewish myth of exile and return, speaks to both. It insists that Jews know the pain of a people with no homeland, and people with no homes. It speaks also to the human identification with Adam and Eve, exiled through history, physically or metaphorically, but holding hands with God, insisting that even in exile, we are on our way back home, all of us together. With help

38 39

Lev 19:10; 23:22; Deut 5:15; 10:19; 15:15; 23:7; 24:17–19, 21–22; 27:19; Jer 7:6; 22:3. Cf. Lam. Rab., Proems 2, 24.

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from God and one another, we may experience the strangeness of life, but, at least, not as strangers. Here is a mythic account of Jewish identity that justifies the choice to be Jewish, while, simultaneously, opening lines of dialogue with Christians, who have their own mythic tale of crucifixion and resurrection. Both are narratives with the scope required to face our future as two allied peoples of God, committed alike to a deep and compassionate response to human suffering.

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A Christian Ordo? MARTHA MOORE-KEISH Assistant Professor of Theology Columbia Theological Seminary “Ordo,” as it has come to be used, suggests the basic structure of Christian worship that centers on table, font, and pulpit, and the shape of Christian living that flows from these centers. It is a commitment to that which grounds and guides our lives in the world.

O

ne of the questions posed to me regarding Jewish-Christian relations was “What are the distinctive ways in which Jews and Christians encounter God through their worship?”1 This relates to a lively debate within Christian liturgical studies today, namely, what is the distinctive way in which Christians worship? Can we talk about Christian worship as a unified whole, or does such a project inevitably mask the multitude of differences that distinguish, say, Pentecostal Christians in Kenya from Syrian Orthodox Christians of South India from Norwegian Lutherans in South Dakota? In recent years, liturgical scholars have paid increasing attention to the diversity of practices that have existed within Christian communities from the beginning. Scholars such as Paul Bradshaw have devoted entire volumes to refuting an earlier generation of liturgical historians who sought to reconstruct “the original structure of Christian worship” or “the original (and therefore best) eucharistic prayer.” Now we celebrate the diverse voices represented by the four gospels, for instance, as showing us four different early Christian communities that did not share identical worship practices. We also recognize diversity in worship practices in the fourth century, a time when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus came under increasing pressure to follow standardized orders of worship. Scholars are much more conscious now of the dangers of making universal statements about what Christian worship has always been and therefore always must be. The present topic is therefore both enriched and complicated by the huge diversity within Christianity itself. Yet, I will argue that we can see a very basic structure of Christian worship that can help us address the question of what marks a distinctively Christian mode of worshiping. Bearing in mind all of the cautions about positing a universal metanarrative, I think we can discern historically and cross-culturally a basic shape of Christian worshiping. This is what some Christian scholars have come to call the “ordo.”

1 This essay is adapted from Martha Moore-Keish, “The Importance of Worship that Centers on the Ordo” in Liturgy 21.2 (2006): 15–23.

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What is the ordo? This is a descriptive task, pointing out a very basic structure that has characterized Christian worship from its inception Why should Christian worship follow this basic ordo? I will suggest a number of reasons, historical and theological, why Christians follow this basic worship structure. Here, I move from being simply descriptive to making normative claims about Christian worship. As a theologian deeply interested in liturgical practice, I am not just an antiquarian, but someone committed to lively and faithful worship today. To put it another way, I am a Reformed theologian interested in continuing reform in liturgical practices in ways that honor but do not simply repeat historical practices. How should Christian worship follow this basic ordo? My own particular perspective is as a Reformed Protestant theologian with a deep interest in liturgy and with ongoing ecumenical and interfaith commitments. My commitment is to the broad conversations but from within a specific Christian family that traces its roots to the early church as interpreted by sixteenth-century reformers, especially John Calvin.

W H AT I S T H E O R D O ? A friend and former colleague of mine once wondered aloud about the use of this term ordo. “Isn’t ‘ordo’ how pretentious liturgical scholars say ‘order’ while showing off that they know at least one Latin word?” he wondered. “Isn’t this just a fancy word for order?” It is crucial that those of us who live and work in the area of liturgical theology translate our lingo into the vernacular so that we can communicate our passion for worship of the triune God to all of God’s people. There are many times when a good sturdy English word will do just as well as, if not better than, an abstruse Latin or Greek phrase. Yet in this case, the term ordo has a history and a range of meaning that makes it a better choice than the term “order,” if we can clarify its intention. The term “ordo” has been used since the medieval period to refer to particular liturgical texts together with instructions for their use, such as the Ordo Romanus Primus, the early seventhcentury document that describes the Latin mass during the time of Gregory the Great. Since the late twentieth century, however, the term has come to refer more broadly to the basic structure of worship that underlies the many particular Ordos in existence. Alexander Schmemann, the wellknown Russian Orthodox liturgical theologian, was largely responsible for this shift in the use of the term ordo. In his Introduction to Liturgical Theology, he states that in the Orthodox churches,

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ordo refers to “the collection of rules and prescriptions . . . which regulate the church’s worship” and that are set forth in official books.2 While Schmemann acknowledges that the term ordo has been used to refer primarily to the texts themselves, he argues that it more properly refers to the basic structure, the underlying principle of worship. What is the basic principle of the church’s worship through the ages? What is it that unites Christian worship across time and space? The search for this basic principle is what Schmemann calls the “problem of the Ordo,” and it has fundamentally shaped the use of this Latin word in liturgical theology ever since. Lutheran liturgical scholar Gordon Lathrop develops this understanding of the ordo as basic structure in his trilogy Holy Things, Holy People, and Holy Ground. In Holy Things, he defines ordo as the “ritual ordering and ‘shape of the liturgy’ that has united Christians throughout the ages.”3 Like Schmemann, Lathrop searches for the core structures of worship, recurrent patterns that he discerns from the earliest Christian communities to the present day. These patterns he identifies as the ordo. He goes on to argue that the ordo consists of five basic pairs of terms juxtaposed to one another: Sunday and the week; Word and table; praise and beseeching; teaching and baptism; and Pascha (Easter) and the Christian year.4 Meaning emerges through the juxtaposition of these terms. So, for instance, setting the seven days of the week side by side with the Christian “eighth day” (Sunday) introduces a fruitful tension that points toward creation and new creation, death and resurrection, the goodness of this world and the hope for the world beyond this one. It is juxtaposition, to use Lathrop’s preferred term, that produces meaning in the ordo. Though he elaborates five pairs of terms that constitute the ordo, Lathrop focuses particularly on the three central practices of baptism, proclamation, and Eucharist, or, as he prefers to name them (evoking their primal symbolism), “bath, book, and meal.” In another essay, he makes this focus on the three central elements especially clear: “This ordo organizes a participating community together with its ministers gathered in song and prayer around the scriptures read and preached, around the baptismal washing, enacted or remembered, and around the holy supper. The ordo is these things done together, side by side.”5 So in its most basic form, Lathrop suggests that the shape of the ordo is triadic: the people gathered around the waters of baptism, the Word proclaimed, and the Supper of the Lord. The patterns of time (weekly and annual) frame these central symbols, and prayer (both praise and beseeching) infuses them, but the symbols of table, font, and pulpit may be regarded as the three anchor points of the ordo. One of the most recent uses of the term ordo comes from Presbyterian scholar Arlo Duba. Duba agrees with Lathrop and Schmemann that ordo refers to the basic structure of Christian worship that has endured through the ages. In addition, like Lathrop, he seeks to expand the

2 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwood, N.Y.: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 33. 3 Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 33. 4 For development of these themes, see Holy Things, chs. 1–3. 5 Gordon Lathrop, “Knowing Something a Little: On the Role of the Lex Orandi in the Search for Christian Unity,” in So We Believe, So We Pray: Towards Koinonia in Worship (ed. Thomas F. Best and Dagmar Heller; Faith and Order Paper No. 171; Geneva: WCC Publications, 1995), 40–41. Emphases in the original.

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meaning of ordo to include not only the patterns of worship, but also the patterns of Christian living as a whole. The ordo plumbs the deepest meaning of the liturgical tradition and of worshipful life. It includes the ordering of public worship and the verbal expression of prayer and praise. It also encompasses sacramental practice, both in the context of public and private prayer, and it carries a burden for addressing justice issues in the world. . . . Ordo represents the total ordering of the Christian life as it expresses itself in the assembly and as it leads to and flows from that assembly.”6

This is the meaning of ordo that I intend here: not narrowly restricted to the written texts of liturgies, not even restricted to the ordering of worship in the assembly, but signifying the shape of Christian life as a whole, formed by patterns of worship and flowing both into and out of that worshiping center. Before embracing the grand vision of ordo as the total shape of Christian life, we need to pause and consider an objection to this proposal. Is there actually a single ordo? What does it mean to speak of the ordo? There is a real danger in speaking of one fixed order, as if Christian worship has been practiced the same way in all times and places. Methodist liturgical historian James White voices this concern when he says that talking about the ordo implies that this ordo is limited and closed, including only those practices that arose in the early church and have endured to the present. Focusing on ordo often ignores Christian communities who practice ecstatic worship, for instance, as well as worship practices that have only emerged in recent centuries.7 Though this is a danger against which we must guard, the term ordo need not rule out attention to new liturgical practices or even ecstatic forms of worship, which as White points out “may have been the most prevalent form of Christian worship at mid-first century and may again be predominant at mid-twenty-first century.”8 The ordo, in its attention to basic structures, admits of great flexibility in local practice even as it embodies the enduring patterns that have characterized Christian worship since the earliest centuries. White himself, despite his critique, attempts to name perennial structures and services of Christian worship in his discussion of the history of liturgy. Nevertheless, as we seek to embrace those things that Christians hold in common, we need also to attend to those liturgical practices that we do not hold in common, asking what we might learn from one another in our differences as well as in our convergence. Fundamentally, to affirm the historic ordo is to focus on the liturgical elements that have characterized Christian worship through the ages, and particularly to focus on those events that tran-

6 7 8

Arlo Duba, “The Ordo: The Center of Liturgical Reform,” in Liturgy 20.2 (2005): 10. Emphasis mine. James White, Introduction to Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 19–20. Ibid., 20.

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spire around table, font, and pulpit, as well as the processes that lead to and from these centers. With apologies to my friend, I have to argue that the English word “order” does not communicate this as precisely as “ordo.”“Order” carries with it a broad range of meaning, suggesting careful organization, temporal or spatial arrangement. “Ordo,” as it has come to be used, suggests the basic structure of Christian worship that centers on table, font, and pulpit, and the shape of Christian living that flows from these centers. Commitment to the ordo is not about liturgical mania that concerns itself with ritual precision to the exclusion of the world. It is, rather, a commitment to that which grounds and guides our lives in the world: the patterns of proclaiming radical good news to the poor, of demonstrating a new way of life and inviting others into that way, of feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger. It is commitment to the realest of real life: the life we discover in Jesus Christ.

WHY SHOULD CHRISTIAN WORSHIP CENTER ON THE ORDO? Having clarified what is meant by this word “ordo,” we need to go on and reflect on why it is important. Why should Christians center worship on the ordo? We have already begun to answer this second question. Christians need to center our worship (and our lives) on the ordo because in doing so, we center our worship and our lives on Jesus Christ, who taught and washed and fed. Indeed, Christians have come to believe that Jesus is God’s Word, God’s Water, and God’s Bread of Life for us. This is the fundamental reason we center worship on the ordo: because in Word and sacraments, we encounter Jesus Christ. This is a bold claim. Yet it is a claim that has been made for centuries. In the writings of the NT and in Christian communities through the ages, people have encountered the living Christ in the Word, in the waters of baptism, and in the breaking of bread and the sharing of the cup at the Lord’s Table. Christian worship, therefore, should center on the ordo because this pattern is faithful to Scripture; it is faithful to the broad Christian historical tradition; it is faithful to contemporary ecumenical consensus; it is faithful to the heritage of my particular Christian family, Reformed Protestantism; and it is faithful to core Christian theological convictions. 1. It is faithful to Scripture. Proclamation, baptism, and breaking bread together were central acts of the Christian community from the beginning, as attested throughout the NT writings.9 Baptism, as far as we can discern, seems to have been the usual way people entered the Chris-

9

For a fuller discussion of the following points, see Lathrop, “Knowing Something a Little,” 41–43.

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tian community even in the apostolic era (e.g., Acts 2:38–41; 8:12–13; 1 Cor 12:13). Jesus himself may or may not have practiced baptism, but he was himself baptized, and he presumed the practice of baptism when he compared baptism with martyrdom (Mark 10:38–39) and when, as the Gospel of Matthew presents it, he commanded his disciples to teach and baptize (Matt 28:19). Paul also presumed a community that practiced baptism when he compared baptism to the “baptism” of Israel “in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor 10:2). All of these passages point to water baptism as a central practice of the Christian community from its inception. Likewise, reading Scripture and preaching the Word have been central acts, both in Jesus’ ministry according to the gospel writers and in the early church. Luke presents Jesus reading the scroll of Isaiah at the beginning of his ministry (Luke 4), suggesting that Christian communities received and continued this practice from the Jewish synagogue. Paul’s letters are clearly intended to be read in gathered Sunday meetings, and the letters in the book of Revelation also suggest this practice of reading of scripture as a core liturgical practice. Preaching, too, is clearly central to Jesus’ ministry, as it is to the apostles in Acts and to Paul. Breaking bread together is also a central act in Scripture, both in Jesus’ own ministry, as attested in the Gospels and in the Epistles. The gospels are full of accounts of Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, multiplying loaves and fishes to feed hungry multitudes, and identifying himself as the Bread of Life (John 6). After his resurrection, he broke bread with the disciples who had met him on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24), and he prepared a meal of bread and roasted fish on the beach beside the sea of Tiberias (John 21). The testimony of the earliest churches suggests that sharing a meal was a regular practice of the gathered communities (Acts 2:42; 20:7–12), and as with baptism, Paul presumed that the meal was a central practice of the community when he compared the meal to the food on the exodus journey (1 Cor 10:3–4; 12:13). To center our worship on the historic ordo, then, is to focus on the central acts of worship as they have come to us in Christian scripture. 2. It is faithful to the practice of Christian communities throughout history. Not only in the NT, but also in Christian churches ever since, these symbols of the bath, the preaching, and the meal have been central worship practices. From Justin’s First Apology in the second century and Hippolytus in the third, to the medieval Latin mass, to the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, to the sixteenth century liturgies of Luther and Calvin, to twentieth century liturgies around the world, Word, table, and baptism (either practiced or remembered) have been at the center of things. Certainly these central symbols were obscured sometimes, sidelined sometimes, even forgotten sometimes; yet over and over the fundamental pattern of the ordo has reemerged as the

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basic shape of Christian worship. So, when we center our worship on the ordo, we join our own worship to the communion of saints who have taught, washed, and fed in the name of Christ for two thousand years. 3. It is attentive to ecumenical liturgical consensus. Ecumenical liturgical scholarship since the nineteenth century has drawn attention to these central events of baptism, proclamation, and Lord’s Supper as stemming from the church’s earliest practice, and this discovery led to ecumenical consensus in the twentieth century around the shape of the liturgy. The WCC document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, as well as the Lima liturgy that accompanied its introduction in 1982, provides one illustration of this remarkable agreement on the shape of liturgy that emerged from generations of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox liturgical scholars who came to similar conclusions concerning the origins of Christian worship. To be sure, there are Christian communities around the world who do not participate in this ecumenical consensus, and we must be particularly careful not to ignore the worship patterns of Pentecostal churches, for instance, which lift up gifts of the Spirit as central to worship in addition to the Word proclaimed and the sacraments celebrated. Yet neither can we ignore or downplay the significance of the agreement among Christians East and West, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, on the basic shape of Christian liturgy that unites us in worship of the triune God. 4. It is faithful to Reformed Protestant heritage in particular. In the sixteenth century, when John Calvin sought to reform worship in Strasburg and Geneva, he focused on Word and sacraments as the marks of the church. In his famous statement on how to discern the visible church, he says, “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”10 Here we have an affirmation of the historic ordo as not only the appropriate structure of Christian worship, but the defining characteristics of a “church of God.” This theme of Word and sacraments as marks of the church is echoed in the sixteenth century Reformed confessions, which are foundational theological documents for our tradition.11 Finally, a recurring theme of Reformed thought since the sixteenth century has been that all of life is an expression of worship. The Westminster Shorter Catechism makes this particularly clear when it describes the chief end of humanity: “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”12 When we affirm that the entire shape of Christian living flows into and out of the font, the word proclaimed, and the meal shared, we are surely being faithful to our forebears who emphasized the way that worship of God characterizes every aspect of our daily lives. 5. It witnesses to fundamental Christian theological affirmations. Finally, affirming the historic

10

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), IV.1.9. See, for instance, the Scots Confession 3.18, Second Helvetic Confession 5.134-135, cf. Westminster Confession of Faith 6.143, and Belgic Confession Article 29. 12 Westminster Shorter Catechism 7.001. 11

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ordo is not only faithful to Scripture and Christian history, and not only attentive to ecumenical and Reformed heritage. It also testifies to fundamental Christian theological affirmations of incarnation and Trinity. To begin with, we affirm that Christ was God and human. Therefore, he is both the Holy One come among us and the human pattern for worshiping God. As Holy One incarnate, he bears the presence of God to us, and particularly through words and meals. As we have seen in scripture, Jesus in his ministry preached good news to the poor and oppressed, and he broke bread with Pharisees as well as “sinners and tax collectors.” After his resurrection, he again preached and taught, and he broke bread and fixed breakfast. When we come into contact with Word and table in worship, we too encounter the living Christ as God among us. As a pattern for human worship, Jesus Christ in his life demonstrated the movement from baptism to proclamation to table fellowship. These events were central acts in a life that was characterized by love for all the marginalized “others” of the time, whether woman or child or leper or Samaritan. And more: these acts were vitally connected to Jesus’ love for the marginalized ones of the world. In his baptism, he united himself to all those in need of cleansing and forgiveness. In his preaching, he blessed the poor and the meek. In his table fellowship, he filled the hungry with good things. If we affirm that Jesus’ human life was a model of full human faithfulness to God, then surely we need to attend to the central acts that marked his life as well as the total shape of that life itself when we consider what constitutes faithful worship in our time. Second, the God whom Christians worship is triune—so we affirm that God is a mystery beyond all our imagining at the same time that we affirm God has come among us incarnate and continues to dwell in and with us as the Holy Spirit. The ordo, centering on the events of proclamation, baptizing, and breaking bread, amply communicates our Trinitarian faith. The Holy One of Israel, the mystery at the heart of the universe, the one we know as Creator of heaven and earth as well as faithful covenant maker—this One has provided the words we speak, the water in which we wash, and the food and drink we share. This One made covenant with the people of Israel, washing them in the waters of the Red Sea, feeding them with manna in the wilderness, speaking to them through the law and the prophets. Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Holy One, also spoke and fed, was washed in the Jordan and commanded his disciples to do the same to others. This Jesus Christ continued to meet his followers even after his death in word, meal, and life-transforming waters. And this Jesus Christ sent to those followers—past and present—his Spirit, who empowers our preaching and joins us with the living Christ at table and font. These central symbols are too primal, too powerful to be replaced as the structure of Christian worship and life.

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HOW SHOULD OUR WORSHIP CENTER ON THE ORDO? The ordo of Christian worship, the basic shape of liturgy, consists of baptism, proclamation, and Lord’s Supper, together with the processes leading to and from these three central symbols. I affirm this structure not arbitrarily, but because of deep commitment to scripture, historic tradition, ecumenical consensus, and my own Reformed heritage. I affirm this structure because it witnesses to the Incarnate Christ and to the Trinity. All of these answer the question of why we ought to center our worship on the ordo. It yet remains to reflect on how we are to do this. In particular, I want to reflect briefly on two dimensions of the “how?”: how does commitment to the ordo cohere with freedom in worship; and how does this cohere with sensitivity to cultural context? First, how does commitment to the ordo cohere with freedom in worship? One section of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Directory for Worship provides helpful guidance on this question. In the opening chapter on “Dynamics of Christian Worship,” it affirms a balance of “liberty” and order: In worship, the church is to remember both its liberty in Christ and the biblical command to do all things in an orderly way. While Christian worship need not follow prescribed forms, careless or disorderly worship is both an offense to God and a stumbling block to the people. Those responsible for worship are to be guided by the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture, the historic experience of the Church universal, the Reformed tradition, The Book of Confessions, the needs and particular circumstances of the worshiping community, as well as the provisions of the Form of Government and this Directory.13

This paragraph makes it clear that commitment to a basic structure of worship, the ordo, is appropriate, because it reflects the call of the church to be guided by scripture, the experience of the Church universal, and the Reformed tradition. It also helpfully reminds us that we need to hold together our attention to forms with our liberty in Christ.14 Yet, the ordo does not constrain freedom. There are many ways to read scripture and many ways to preach; affirmation of the ordo does not presume a formal style, though it permits this. But it does presume a joyful seriousness about reading and communicating the Word that ought to show itself in any given instance of proclamation. Likewise, there are many particular ways to celebrate the sacrament of baptism: in a creek, in a pool, in a marble font, with a plastic dish. Commitment to the ordo does not mean that we sneer at simple baptismal practices or chuckle when someone stumbles over unfamiliar words. But it does mean that we come to the font (of whatever shape) in grateful wonder for God’s abundant grace, and with hopes that our

13 Directory for Worship, in Book of Order: The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Part II. 2002/2003 (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 2002), 1.4001. 14 See also W-3.1002 on the tension between form and freedom in worship.

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lives will be transformed to walk more closely with the One who was himself baptized in the waters of Jordan. Finally, there is enormous variety in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and such variety has characterized Christian communities from the earliest centuries. Affirmation of the ordo does not mean subscription to a single set form of words and gestures. But it does mean taking the words and gestures seriously, attending to the long tradition of eucharistic prayer that has lifted up before God thanksgiving and praise for all of salvation history, remembering before God the life of Jesus Christ, and remembering before God the body of Christ in the world, calling on the Spirit of God to bless and inhabit this event so that we might ourselves become a blessing for the world. The ordo is more like an endoskeleton than an exoskeleton. It does not restrict growth, but rather provides the bones beneath the flesh and the blood of particular local practice. Second, how does affirmation of the ordo cohere with “sensitivity to cultural context”? As I have already suggested, if we understand the ordo to be centered on the table, font, and pulpit, as primary expressions of who Christ is and what Christ does among us, this allows for a multitude of particular cultural expressions of these basic things. The ordo as embodied in a European cathedral will not and should not be identical to the ordo as embodied in a clapboard church on a hill or in a holler in Appalachia. The bread broken in an African village likely will not look or taste the same as the bread broken in Malaysia. The vessel used to pour water in Budapest will not be the same as the vessel used in Bangalore. The Word is incarnate anew in each place, and so it should be if it is to be received in faith. Those who prepare worship in each local community, by embracing the ordo, do not eschew their cultural context. Rather, they affirm it, since it is precisely in the swaddling cloths of our context that Jesus Christ comes to us again.

CONCLUSION What are the distinctive ways in which Christians encounter God through their worship? The ordo gives us a way of answering that very question. What is the ordo? The lifegiving water, Word, and meal given to us as the basis for our lives in Jesus Christ. Why affirm it? Because these things shape us in the way of Christ, the One who came among us to give his life for the world. How do we affirm it? By returning to these central things so regularly that in our daily living, every bath becomes a remembrance of baptism, every conversation a proclamation of the Word, and every meal a encounter with the stranger on the road to Emmaus. Thus we pray, using the words of a hymn from the early twentieth century:

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All our meals and all our living Make as sacraments of You, That by caring, helping, giving, We may be disciples true. Alleluia! Alleluia! We will serve with faith anew.15

15 Percy Dearmer, “Draw Us in the Spirit’s Tether,” #504 in The Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), v.3.

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Religious Identity in the Public Square1 PAUL D. HANSON Professor of Divinity Harvard Divinity School This article grows out of and hopes to remain a part of a conversation in which Jews and Christians ponder over the manner in which they can contribute to the public good from the richness of their Scriptures and traditions. It suggests a thoughtful hermeneutic that is simultaneously faithful to ancestral traditions and open to the contributions of all thoughtful individuals and groups within a diverse society.

THE CHALLENGE Jews and Christians who believe in the relevancy of their religious identities in public debate over the moral facets of domestic and international issues hold in common a serious problem. Though religious faith is growing, in some cases rapidly, in many parts of the world, the tendency among intellectuals in Europe and North America has been towards disparagement of those who turn to Scripture and other ancestral religious traditions for guidance in dealing with the complex political, social, and economic problems of the modern world. In many university departments, atheism is assumed as the worldview shared by anyone desiring to be taken seriously in the scientific community. Religious faith is consigned to a shelf it is obliged to share with superstition, magic, and ignorance. And beyond the academy, the pervasive environment in many professional circles is one that treats the religiously committed person with wariness. Sadly, modern cynics can collect abundant evidence to defend their case against public expressions of religious conviction: 9/11, the Hebron massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing. That religion is an enormously complex phenomenon and that humans find many different ways to obey or to manipulate God is not taken into consideration by minds that feel most comfortable in a universe categorically excluding the possibility of anything transcending the physical realm. When challenged by an academic colleague (as I recently was) to have God confirm his existence by writing on the wall in which our lively discussion was occurring, it is tempting to capitulate in frustration and to avoid public exposure by reserving expressions of religious experience for one’s own community. And that move would comport with a widespread contemporary attitude, namely, that religious belief and practice is the private right of

1

This article is adapted from “Particularity and the Public Square,” CrossCurrents 59 (2009): 229–40.

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any individual, and that it remains politically harmless so long at it is confined to sacred spaces like mosques, temples, and churches. The alternative to “checking one’s religion at the door,” that of giving public expression to religiously informed convictions relating to domestic and international issues, often exposes the person of faith to public rebuke or, more painful still, to dismissal as pre-modern, ignorant, and unscientific. The temptation to flow with the secularizing current becomes strong. Adopting the alternative of risking the “scandal” often attached to religious particularity violates our desire for social acceptance and respect. Therefore the question becomes urgent: Can a credible case be made in defense of the expression of religious identity in the public square? Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with an old friend about his reengagement with a community of faith. I noted how for years I deeply respected his commitment to issues such as world hunger, the Middle East conflict, and HIV/AIDS. It is when I ventured to ask whether his activities included worship and parish life that I was blessed with a powerful answer to my question regarding the public expression of religion. Jon found himself increasingly involved in his church not as an activity alongside his political activism, but as the compass that guided him and motivated him and gave him courage to sacrifice wealth and time for humanitarian causes. And then he made another observation, namely, that he derived a deep sense of joy in the knowledge that he was carrying on a tradition of caring for the forgotten of the world that he had inherited from his parents and grandparents. Though membership in a community of faith goes beyond personal experience to participation in a moral network that reaches out to places that the individual alone cannot reach, it is impossible to open the issue of religious identity in the public square without considering the personal faith of the individual. Accordingly, I now shall share something of my own religious selfunderstanding. I understand my faith in terms of a specific historical ontology. My identity, my very being, arises out of a relationship with God chronicled in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, amplified through a long history of interpretation by rabbis and theologians, and transmitted to me in a most personal and intimate way by Christian parents within the context of a Lutheran parish that they cherished and supported. Wakefield, the tiny town on the south shore of Lake Superior in which I spent my first seventeen years, was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of religious and cultural diversity as it is experienced in most regions of the country today. The Italian and Polish miners attended St. Joseph’s, the Swedish and Finnish foresters attended First Lutheran. There was a solitary Jewish family, but no residents of dark skin. Prejudice against minorities was not

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blatant, but to deny its latency in our Sunday school materials and the jokes people shared around the dinner table would be tantamount with resigning oneself to a life of unexamined bigotry. Fortunately, my life has been a journey of border crossings, on which the ignorance that matures into prejudice has been dismantled, one personal encounter at a time: Isaiah Mbang during my college years, Tim Lin during seminary, Buzzy Fishbane in graduate school, and on and on. The challenges were not only cultural, they were religious. But unlike the repudiation of a faith tradition that was so common among my academic peers, such encounters led me not to a renunciation of my ancestral faith, but to a deepened understanding of my spiritual roots. That background lies at the heart of my present work on religion and politics. The theo-political hermeneutic with which I work is simply an extension of an ongoing life-journey, a stage in the development of my historical ontology. Such language, however, is too abstract to capture the deepest meaning residing in my sense of ancestral roots. Perhaps a picture will get to the heart of the matter. My grandfather’s portrait hangs above the desk in my study. Hans Hanson was a sea captain. In 1900, he brought his wife, my dad, and his two siblings from Sweden to the forests of northern Michigan. Their earthly belongings were such that they could be carried across the gangplank of the windjammer. Among the half dozen books were the Bible and Luther’s Small Catechism. The rest, including a simple version of Christian pietism, was carried in the heart, and that is what forged the link in the ancestral heritage that connected me and my identity to Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther. That link was polished by the equally authentic Finnish Lutheranism of my mother. Thus it was that my parents placed in the possession of their four children a chart for navigating life’s waters. It was a chart rooted in Scripture and infused with powerful moral qualities, qualities embodied in dad’s teaching Sunday school and mom’s running the informal equivalent of a hostel for migrants and the elderly. The unspeakable blessing of family has continued on into the next two generations. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the annual arrival of our three children, their spouses, and our six grandchildren to our island farm in Maine. Ah, God’s promises to Abraham continue to be fulfilled! That fulfillment, however, has taken a modern twist. The Hanson clan is as close to a cross-section of modern America as one can get with such a small sampling, and it includes our daughter and her husband, the son of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, who practice neither Judaism nor Christianity, our son and his Armenian Christian wife who are raising their

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children within a vibrant and socially active Presbyterian congregation, and our youngest who shares with his wife a scientific worldview excluding any theistic dimension. It is a source of immense joy to witness six young adults deeply committed to serving community and world in their professions and simultaneously unstintingly given to providing the security and warmth of a loving family to their children. So whence the tinge of sadness as I watch my offspring and their offspring skipping and laughing and playing along the sands and stones deposited on our shoreline over geological ages? Why these nagging questions resisting banishment from my thought, “What will be the effects of two of my three children severing the thread that had been preserved over the generations of Cynthia’s and my ancestors that enables us to inherit such moral direction and glimmering joy with life? Did we fail to tutor them in the teachings of our faith, in spite of our life-long involvement in our Lutheran community? Were we defective in manifesting the relevance of that faith for our daily lives, especially in relation to the underserved and the oppressed?” During our years of childrearing, we never considered any religious pedagogy other than trusting our three children’s sacred right to decide for themselves what their personal relation to our ancestral religion would be, and we uphold that view to the present day. Yet, since I embrace not only the beauty but also the teachings and ethical principles of my biblical tradition, I feel something is in jeopardy that has implications for the enormous moral challenges facing our world in generations to come. Please do not misunderstand me. Amy and Gary and Casey, serving the sick and outcast as medical doctors, and Nathaniel, bracketing his own professional career to nurture Lilly and Winslow, are completely on board with Mark and Christina in upholding human values that make parents proud, but . . . , but . . ., is something eroding in an ontological foundation that will have long-ranging effects far beyond our lifespans? Are there certain values and virtues that are best transmitted within the communitarian context of a lived religion? As I have asked these questions, I have come to appreciate my solidarity in joy and sadness with many friends, Jews and Christians, and, increasingly over the recent past, Muslims as well.

A FA S H I O N A B L E S O L U T I O N There is no need to sketch a taxonomy of alternatives available in our society for those facing the challenge of relating their religious tradition to modernity. But I shall refer to one fashionable solution as a means of introducing my own thoughts on the issue of religious identity as it relates to the public square.

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We all know Jewish/Christian couples who have found as the fair-minded solution to their religious differences the middle ground offered by the Unitarian Universalist Association. The UUA is perhaps the religious paragon of American pragmatism. Faced with the scandal of religious particularity, individuals locate middle ground in an association whose “dogma” is the eschewal of explicit confessions and beliefs. As one of their bumper stickers declares, “UUA, Where the Question is the Answer.” Would the prospects for civil harmony and international peace be enhanced if all religions adopted this lowest common denominator policy, leading to a liberal-democratic “overlapping consensus”? That has been the rationale of the Civil Religion phenomenon in America. But its long-term adequacy for preserving the foundational values of a society is questionable. Unitarians represent a very constructive intellectual and moral force in our society, advocating for justice and equality and respecting the rights of others to believe as they choose. Not so with the atheistic philosopher Richard Dawkins, who declares categorically that belief in God is a delusion that detracts from the shared human task of maintaining a decent world on the basis of science and reason.2 Though finding in the contemporary world an intelligent, sharp-tongued spokesperson whose book has sold close to two million copies, the theory that religion has exercised a deleterious effect on human civilization is nothing new, and the evidence elicited has included everything from the wars of Joshua to the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries to the medieval Christian crusades aimed at reconquest of the Holy Land. Within our own time, those who support this theory draw attention to the aggressive position of some fundamentalists towards minorities at home and religious communities abroad that they see abetting what Samuel Huntington has called “a clash of civilizations.”3

THE CASE FOR THE POSITIVE ROLE OF RELIGIOUS PARTICULARITY IN A RELIGIOUSLY AND CULTURALLY DIVERSE SOCIETY The case for a positive role for religious communities that do not deny but publicly affirm and enact their particular beliefs and practices in society must begin with acknowledgment of the fact that religious particularity often has been abused as an instrument of repression of minorities and hatred towards adherents of different worldviews. This starting point places several obligations on the community claiming that faithfulness to its beliefs and practices and public testimony to its principles represent a valuable moral resource for the maintenance of a just and humane society, a resource that is not replicated by, but is fully capable of cooperating with other moral agencies.

2

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997). 3

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The first obligation is to foster a communal identity as a people created by a loving God, called into a covenant relationship with God, and committed to obey God as the only ultimate Reality and Authority in the universe.4 This obligation entails faithfulness to a centuries-long practice of reverent attentiveness to sacred texts and disciplined community interpretation of and reflection on those texts. Stated philosophically, it involves deriving from the foundation of the community’s religious classics an ontological understanding of who the Jew and Christian are and what she and he are called to do to contribute to the healing of God’s creation (tikkun (olam). As for its political impact, it is important to recognize that acknowledgement of the sole ultimate authority of God relativizes all human regimes, institutions, and powers, limiting their claims on their citizens to a penultimate status, and that only to the extent that they conform to the standards of righteousness that are inherent in God’s universal rule. In the Lutheran tradition to which I belong, the place where that essential identity is formed is in the presence of God in worship through the Word and the Sacraments. Accordingly, I maintain that worship constitutes the first step in a theo-political hermeneutic capable of guiding a faith community committed to living in the world as agents of God’s compassionate justice. Perhaps we can best guard against the common American tendency to privatize religion while at the same time emphasizing the importance of securing the foundation before building the superstructure with this audacious assertion: Worship is the most political act in which a person of faith can engage! Specification of the responsibility members of a community of faith have to the society and world understood as parts of God’s domain occurs in an ensuing act of performance, one that constitutes the second step in a viable theo-political hermeneutic. What is involved in this step is study, study in the church basement, in the seminary, in the retreat center and in the home, where moral issues—personal, social, and international—are discussed in relation to the foundational classics of the community, with the goal of clarifying specific policies and strategies that can be inferred from our sacred texts and from our identity as citizens of God’s universal reign. Such study shares with worship a communitarian character, occurring as it does within the covenantal bond of one’s spiritual family where, what can become the scandal of particularity in the public square, is simply the shared language of one large family. Precisely because the participants are devoted to a purpose transcending their own political agendas and ideological predilections, debate can be frank and unthwarted by disagreement over specific positions and strategies.5 While familial in nature, and thus inevitably parochial, such study constitutes the authentic basis for a faith community’s engagement with the larger society and world, inasmuch as the specificity of its contribution is derived from the depths of its religious heritage, separated from which its

4

See Paul D. Hanson, Political Engagement as Biblical Mandate (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2010). My own denomination, the Evangelical Church of America, was tested in its recent Bi-Annual Meeting by deep-seated disagreement over the issue of ordination of individuals living in relationships of trust with members of their same gender. The outcome in terms of denominational unity is unknown, and the crisis, shared by other mainstream faith communities as well, illustrated the fragile and genuinely human nature of religious bodies. 5

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particularity becomes blurred and its engagement in public discourse becomes anemic and indistinguishable from secular agencies within the larger society.6 As we engage our fellow communicants within the context of our particular religious communities in ethical and political discourse, we are thus performing the second most political act of which the person of faith is capable, and this before we even have entered the public square! A new challenge confronts us as we move to step three, which involves the movement from the performance of faith as an inner-community exercise to the practice of faith in the public realm. Within the context of the First Amendment tradition that is central to the discussion of religion and politics in the United States, arguments range from the categorical inappropriateness of bringing religiously based arguments into public debate to the assertion that a faith community must boldly give testimony to its beliefs and convictions without attempts to make that testimony compatible, or even comprehensible, to other ears. Here, I will limit the discussion to clarification of the distinction between the theo-political hermeneutic we adopt and two alternatives, inasmuch as we find in those alternatives a mixture of useful and unsuitable features. I consider first the communitarianism of Stanley Hauerwas, who draws on the philosophy of Alistair Macintyre and the theology of John Yoder. The affinities of my thought with that developed by Hauerwas relate to his emphasis on the indispensability of a religious community’s fidelity to its religious heritage, without which it severs its tie to the source of its contribution to the larger society and world and divests its testimony of passion and urgency. I am in agreement with Hauerwas that both the intellectual substance and deep compassion that are requisite to the faith community’s contribution to the wider world depend on its faithfulness to its biblical and confessional foundation. But a distinction must also be made: It is not sufficient for the faith community to live in obedience and give testimony to its moral principles in the untranslated categories of its heritage. As agents of a God who cares for his entire creation, it must also address a society that speaks in the tongues of myriad religions and moral philosophies in comprehensible terms suitable for inclusive, civil discourse. This brings us to the programmatic work of John Rawls and his claim that the key to civil discourse within a religiously and philosophically diverse society is agreement on a neutral starting point, one stripped of the scandal of particularity represented by the comprehensive doctrines of specific religious and ideological communities.7 That starting point is a theory of justice that intentionally refrains from providing a society with a universal worldview or privileging one such view over others, accepting instead the more modest goal of providing a context for civil dialogue

6 My understanding of the vital importance of rootedness in the specific stories and performances of one's faith community is indebted to the unflinching prophetic witness of Stanley Hauerwas, though as shall be seen immediately below, I believe that communitarianism, while essential to the preservation of authentic religious testimonies in a pluralistic society, is inadequate as a vehicle for translating the significance of those testimonies into public discourse. See Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004). 7 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) and idem, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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through the guarantee of the liberty and equal rights of all participants. We do not need to enter into the hair-splitting exercise of differentiating the early Rawls from the later, since in both, religiously grounded arguments have no autonomous status in public debate, where rational discourse alone carries weight. Though Rawls at first blush seems to provide the key for moving from the particularity of individual belief systems to the inclusiveness of public discourse, his system both strips religious communities of their freedom of giving public expression to their faith-based moral principals and privileges its own particular ideology, that of rationalism. Though purporting to uphold the First Amendment tradition, Rawls instead undermines that tradition’s stringent twin safeguards. In seeking to conceptualize the third step of a theo-political hermeneutic that will benefit from valid insights from both Hauerwas and Rawls while avoiding the pitfalls in each, I find myself attracted to the political philosophy of Jeffrey Stout8 and in agreement with the theological reflections of David Novak.9 Inherent in biblical tradition, in both its Jewish and Christian iterations, is an intricate understanding of reality that is predicated on faithfulness to the ultimate beliefs and loyalties of one’s particular community that at the same time includes affirmation of the integrity and equal rights of all the families in God’s vast creation. Though Scripture contains strands that can be elicited as warrants for theological exclusivism and its attendant disparagement of all who differ, the Judaism of Novak and the Christianity with which I identify provide the foundation for a political theory well suited for a democratic society. Since any and every human government belongs not to the category of God’s ultimate, universal rule but to the penultimate realm of human society, all communities—whether religious, agnostic, or atheist—are welcomed participants. Especially in relation to other religious communities, what the Christian and Jew desire is participation benefiting from the same in-depth connection with foundational sources that is viewed as essential to their own identity and hence potential contribution to the commonweal. What we are describing is a cultural maturity transcending tolerance and respect for human rights based on social contract. We speak of inalienable human rights derived not merely from human good will but from the infinite wisdom of the Ruler of all peoples. The model of government that ensues is one based not on principles determined by human savants, but on principles that have been in place from the creation of the universe. Human governments are not extrapolations from the ideal categories of a particular school of philosophy, but are temporal constructions negotiated by all of the participating individuals and groups who are engaged in the civil process of reaching agreed-upon goals via the most effective and fair policies and strategies imaginable, which constructions remain open to critique and revision.

8

Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 9

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Inclusive, civil discourse in which all participants are encouraged to draw upon the particularities of their own religious and moral traditions is what I designate as stage four of my theo-political hermeneutic. It stands in dialectical relation to stage two, because from the give and take of public discourse Jews and Christians return to the intimacy of their own communities having been chastened, edified, and challenged by encounter with citizens whose political positions have been shaped by traditions differing from their own, citizens viewed not as opponents but as provocateurs, and, in the case of Jews and Christians, cousins charged with distinct but ultimately collaborative roles in God’s redemptive plan for creation. Here, I offer one example of how the explicit beliefs and moral principles of Jews and Christians can enter into public debate in such a manner as neither to compromise the particularity of their belief systems nor transgress the limits imposed on religion and state by the First Amendment. A subject of intense debate in the public realm is the question of whether it is the responsibility of democratic societies to guarantee the rights of their citizens and to advocate for international human rights on the basis of a negative or a positive definition of rights. Classically in social contract theory, rights are defined in negative terms; that is, the individual is entitled to exercise his or her freedom up to the point where the rights of another are violated. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights produced by the United Nations Human Rights Commission formulated a much more comprehensive definition of human rights, namely, the rights of all people to the benefits of nutrition, security, healthcare, etc., that optimize the realization of their full potential as human beings. Within Judaism and Christianity, moral principles have developed over the centuries that emphatically support the positive definition, principles stemming from a particular understanding of God’s nature and God’s relation to humans as manifested in paradigmatic events like the Exodus and revealed in the Torah of Moses and the Beatitudes of Jesus. In entering into the public debate regarding human rights with substantive arguments and moral convictions rooted in their sacred traditions, Jews and Christians remain loyal to religious beliefs and moral principles derived from their particular historical ontologies, but at the same time, they abide by the rules for debate appropriate for a multi-cultural, religiously diverse society. Finally, I come to stage five, which stands as a bookend complementing the act of worship of stage one. If worship is the most political thing the person of faith can do, inasmuch as it is the lifeline securing her historical-ontological identity as a child of God in the world for the sake of the world, then stage five, the blessed vision of the fulfillment of God’s creative purpose in the messianic redemption (ge)ulah), is the most sublime thing the person of faith can possess, enabling her to hear the whispers of angels and glimpse the very Glory of the Most High. The blessed vision of the eschaton is a special gift of God to his children that the secular world, with its reduction of

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reality to a material universe, tries its utmost to obliterate.10 What is more, the political significance of that vision of eschatological fulfillment should not be overlooked, for in it is contained assurance that when participation in programs of justice and reform is obstructed by opposing forces, when the ridicule of cultural despisers of religion reaches its highest pitch, when the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, even then hope in final redemption is not lost. In that vision is also contained a safeguard against the temptation on the reverse side of despair, namely, the flush of human pride over accomplishments and perceptions of social progress that lead to a secularization of teleology and an impoverishment of theological imagination.11 In times of defeat as in times of victory, the one whose vision remains focused on God’s ineffable goal of universal shalom will neither despair nor exult, but will give God alone the glory and be satisfied to enter night’s rest with a prayer of thanks for being able to be a faithful servant of the King of the Universe.12

WHERE JEWS AND CHRISTIANS DIFFER Though the theo-political hermeneutic I have been describing provides a context within which all religious groups and ethical associations can join in building the good society, there is no denying the fact that a special relationship exists between Jews and Christians. Setting aside the obvious facts that broad diversity exists within these two religions and that certain affinities are felt more strongly across the two groups than within, we would be avoiding an essential part of our topic were we not to acknowledge the different interpretations of Scripture that distinguish Judaism and Christianity as two distinct religions. At the center of this distinction are topoi such as Eretz Yisrael, ritual law, and the figure of Jesus Christ, variously understood among students of the Bible as errant teacher, Cynic philosopher, apocalyptic seer, or Messiah. Substantive discussions between believing Jews and Christians are essential on several levels. No starker reminder of this fact could be imagined than the Shoah. Repentance motivating ongoing study of the roots of Christian anti-Judaism, self-examination of persisting sources of misrepresentation and prejudice within the church, and a genuine hunger to continue an exercise that remains in its infancy stage, namely, the exercise of learning from the vast knowledge and wisdom of Judaism, all of these are contributions that Judaism continues to make to Christianity. And of course the widespread secularizing tendencies within the developed countries of the world underscores the need that we have for each other’s insights into the attrition being experienced within our communities and the challenges we face as we seek to relate the treasures of our tradition to a society and world in need.

10 How sad it is to witness the large number of children raised in Jewish and Christian families who under the influence of a secular/materialist worldview reduce their vision of reality to Freud's construal of life as circumscribed by sex and death! 11 As has often been observed, this temptation derailed the Social Gospel movement of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth, leading to Karl Barth’s scathing critique and the emergence of neo-orthodoxy as well as Reinhard Neibuhr’s “Christian Realism.” 12 Useful as primers in the patience of an eschatological faith are Jeremiah’s word to Baruch in Jer 45 and Jesus’ saying about the slave returned from his day’s labor in Luke 17:7–10.

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One of the unfinished tasks in Jewish-Christian relations is conversation aimed at more adequate understandings of the historical Jewish figure, Jesus of Nazareth, including his relation to the tradition of biblical prophecy, his eschatology, his approach to interpreting Mosaic Torah, and his strategy for dealing with contemporary Jewish parties as well as the temple hierarchy, the Herodians, and the Roman occupation.13 Having acknowledged dimensions of the distinctiveness of our two religions, it is even more important to be conscious of the shared beliefs and longings that transcend differences and reaffirm the enduring importance of a scripturally rooted covenantal bond. I look to one passage from Isaiah and another from the Apostle Paul that enrich my vision of the eschaton as the sublime culmination of the religious and political vocations of all who love and fear the Creator of the Universe, among whom Jews and Christians are included by God’s boundless grace. In Isa 2:2–4, the prophet invites us to rejoice in God’s restoration of Zion, to which the nations are drawn by the irresistible lure of Torah, the study of which leads them to recast their weapons of destruction into implements of peace and shared prosperity. In Rom 8, the Apostle looks with hope beyond suffering and futility to the day of the Lord when “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (v. 21). In sharing such glimpses of God’s completion of the plan for which the universe and all its creatures were called into being, Jews and Christians find the solid foundation for working together. As sojourners who have not reached their final destination, we live without timetables and astronomical signs, but what we do possess is a hope predicated on our faith that the God who has brought us this far is the one in whose hands the future—including the final future—lies, and on our confidence that the path into that future is one that will bring ever closer together those who have been drawn into covenant relationship with God. Paul of Tarsus may have complicated things in many ways for circles of Jews and Christians seeking to understand what unites and what divides them, but it is he who may have taught Christians their most important theological lesson. I believe that lesson can provide a fitting conclusion for my reflections: “When all things are subjected to God, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

13 On the issues raised by research on the historical Jesus, see Paul D. Hanson, “We Once Knew Him from a Human Point of View” in Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today?: Pathways to Contemporary Christology (ed. Andreas Schuele and Guenter Thomas; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 203–218.

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Judaism, Multiculturalism, and the Power of Politics: Reconsidering Judaism’s Role in the Public Square RANDI RASHKOVER Assistant Professor of Religious Studies George Mason University It is the central argument of this essay that the profile of persons as ordered and affirmed by the difference between the divine and the human presents a different conception of power than that presupposed by multiculturalism. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW How do Jews see themselves as members of the American public sector? How should they see themselves within this arena? The history of Jewish involvement and self-perception within American cultural and political life is quite complex and has taken several sharp turns since the first Jews arrived in what was then New Amsterdam in 1654. It is not difficult to defend the claim that for at least the first two hundred and fifty years of Jewish life in America, American Jews sought full legal protection and admission into American culture. In 1790, Jews from the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island wrote a letter of welcome to George Washington, overflowing with gratitude for and commitment to Washington’s mission and the United States’ government: “Deprived as we have hitherto been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now, with a deep sense of gratitude . . . behold a government . . . which to bigotry gives no sanction . . . generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”1 Washington’s reply, which reminded the Jews that granted such rights and protections, they, like others, “should demean themselves as good citizens . . . and continue to merit and enjoy the good will of other inhabitants,”2 reflected a precariousness surrounding these assurances that would preoccupy Jews throughout the next two centuries and incline them to demonstrate continually their value as good citizens. Such efforts often translated into bold proclamations regarding the essential compatibility and even identity between Jewish and American ideals. Consider the language used by one of the most influential nineteenth-century Jewish Reform leaders, Isaac M. Wise, described by Michael A. Meyer as a “persistent enthusiast of America.”3 In his History of the Israelitish Nation, Wise writes

1 The Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, “Message of Welcome to George Washington (August 17, 1790),” in The Jew in the Modern World (ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 457. 2 George Washington, “A Reply to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport (c. August 17, 1790),” in The Jew in the Modern World, 459. Also available in Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006), 260–61. 3 Michael A. Meyer, “The Reform Movement’s Land of Promise,” in The American Jewish Experience (ed. Jonathan D. Sarna; 2d ed; New York: Holmes & Meier, 1997), 66.

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that Moses had already “promulgated the sophisticated principles of democratic liberty and of stern justice . . . [such that] Moses formed one pole and the American revolution the other, of an axis around which revolved the history of thirty-three centuries.”4 In 1915, Louis Brandeis, a leader of American Zionism and the first Jew to be appointed a Supreme Court Justice, argued similarly in an address delivered at the conference of the Eastern Council of Reform Rabbis: “The Jewish spirit, the product of our religion and experiences, is essentially modern and essentially American. Not since the destruction of the Temple have the Jews in spirit and in ideals been so fully in harmony with the noblest aspirations of the country in which they lived.”5 Clearly, these proclamations of Jewish and American identity did not derive from a Jewish perception of security, as the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth-century presented new waves of anti-Semitism in America. According to historian Naomi Cohen, the Civil War and post-Civil War periods were marked by a fresh “wave of Judaeophobia [that] swept both the North and the South. . . . An upsurge in religious passion accompanying the national crisis reinforced the age-old negative stereotypes of the Jews—Christ killers, accursed and stiff necked people . . . aliens, and traitors.”6 General Grant’s notorious Order No. 11 (December, 1862), which expelled “Jews as a class” from the military department of Tennessee, exemplifies the extent to which these cultural hostilities translated into political and legal restraints. Not long afterward, a group referred to as the “National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment for the Constitution” petitioned for the preamble to the Constitution to be altered to include reference to the supremacy of Jesus Christ.7 Fortunately, Lincoln, under whose administration the petition was presented, withheld support for the amendment,8 but the aggressive Christian agenda and the rise in anti-Semitism during and immediately after the Civil War reminded Jews of the instability of their minority status within the fabric of American society. This late eighteenth-century wave of anti-Semitism was followed by another, arguably more virulent, as the end of nineteenth and start of twentieth century saw massive immigration by Eastern European Jews to the shores of America. In a 1920 report presented to the House of Representatives by the “Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,” Jewish immigrants are described in the most pejorative terms. They are, the report suggests, “of the usual ghetto type. Most of them are more or less directly and frankly getting out of Poland to avoid war conditions. They are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.”9 As Hasia Diner documents,

4 Isaac M. Wise, The History of the Israelitish Nation, cited in Michael M. Meyer, “The Reform Movement’s Land of Promise,” 66. 5 Louis D. Brandeis, “Zionism Is Consistent with American Patriotism,” in The Jew in the Modern World (ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 496. 6 Naomi W. Cohen, “The Christian Agenda,” in The American Jewish Experience (ed. Jonathan D. Sarna; 2d ed; New York: Holmes & Meier, 1997), 84. 7 The sponsors sought to change the preamble of the Constitution to the following: “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government . . .” in Naomi W. Cohen, “The Christian Agenda,” 85. 8 See Meacham, American Gospel, 129–31. 9 “Congressional Committee on Immigration: Temporary Suspension of Immigration, 1920,” in The Jew in the Modern World, 511.

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the anti-Semitism spawned by the mass immigration of Eastern European Jews reached a climax in the period between World War I and World War II, resulting in university quotas, a resurgent anti-Jewish campaign by the Ku Klux Klan, and widespread accusations of Jewish responsibility for the depression. If, however, earlier concerns for security and acceptance inspired Jews to bold assertions of the cultural marriage between Judaism and America, early twentieth century antiSemitism inclined Jews to seek more discreet reactions. According to Diner, by and large, Jewish organizations shied away from airing their fears publicly, loathe to express their anger or to point out the ‘Jewish’ angle of their political vision. Noisy demonstrations and impassioned public proclamations drawing attention to Jewish concerns did not suit their desire to be viewed as sober, respectable citizens.10

Consequently, even though the post-WWII period brought an end to the most potent strains of American anti-Semitism, in 1973, the Reform Jewish theologian Eugene Borowitz could still write, Years back, Jews sought out Ethical Culture, Christian Science or Unitarianism as an escape from the stigma of Jewishness. . . . The forms varied, but the motive power was the same. The general society denigrated Jews, so they, in integrating in that society, sought to flee from their Jewishness. . . . There is something [of this] in each of us. . . . This is one reason why we wear Marrano masks with such fixity—they enable us to escape from our stigmatized inner selves; they proclaim us to be just like everyone else.11

J U D A I S M A N D M U LT I C U LT U R A L I S M With this brief review of American Jewish history, it is readily apparent that Jews’ self-perception and their actual status in America have differed dramatically from the public profile presented by Christians as a majority tradition (excluding Catholics who by and large, like the Jews, have occupied a minority status). Stanley Hauerwas’ work offers perhaps the most vivid profile of the character and self-perception of certain strands of the Christian majority. Hauerwas identifies the link between Christian majority status and the tendency by some to identify Christianity and the American project. According to Hauerwas, the very idea “that Christians can be at home, indeed can create a home in this world, is a mistake.”11 That having been said, he suggests that many Christians identify America as their cultural, political, and religious home, not, it is important to note, at the expense of, but in tandem with, their Christianity. Still, the marriage between Christianity and the American project, Hauerwas has long asserted, is fundamentally idolatrous. “It is unclear who started looking like whom first, whether Southern Baptist pastors started looking like Texas politicians, or Texas politicians started looking like Southern Baptists pastors.”13 But in either event, the Christian identification with American power negates the fundamental mission of the

10

Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 215. Eugene Borowitz, The Mask Jews Wear: The Self-Deceptions of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). 12 Stanley Hauerwas, “Why Resident Aliens Struck a Chord,” in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 53. 13 Ibid., 56. 11

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church as discipleship to the Christian message and its fundamental “struggle against the world.”14 By this, Hauerwas does not mean to dismiss the political character of Christianity. On the contrary, it is only through disengagement with this majority identity and its alliance with the American project that the church can pursue authentically its own distinct political program, a program emergent out of the texts and practices of the living church community. It would appear that Jews and Christians maintain dramatically different self-perceptions and images within the American public sphere. While history does attest to such a difference, the above account does not tell the whole story. In the post-civil rights era of American history, Jews have often perceived themselves and been perceived as enthusiastic supporters of the particular brand of American liberalism, broadly construed. If the Jewish experience of European political liberalism often left Jewish communities marginalized or pressured to disguise their traditional commitments in the name of their allegiance to the liberal state, in America, Jews often identify themselves with the ideology of the liberal state and have, at least since the civil rights era, been perceived as allied with the political and economic establishment. In Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, David Biale, Michael Galchinksy, and Susannah Heschel attribute part of the difference between the impact of European and American liberalism upon Jews to a difference between European and American attitudes regarding immigrant populations. They assert that American culture reflects its immigrant populations, whereas European culture insists upon a more homogeneous notion of national identity. Added to this, the authors argue, is the identification of the “other” in America with “blacks, native Americans and other ‘peoples of color.’”15 From this vantage point, Jews do not occupy the status of outsider but are grouped together as “white” along with the “dominant” culture. If, in other words, we recognize “multiculturalism” as the contemporary version of the drive towards cultural diversity characteristic of early twentieth-century immigrant cultures, then we must admit that today’s Jews often assume a different position in the debate over cultural diversity than they had some one hundred years back. Biale, Galchinksy, and Heschel make this point when they say that “it is no secret that Jews confront contemporary multiculturalism with great ambivalence, trepidation and even hostility.”16 Of course, the authors rightly go on to nuance this suggestion by reminding readers that any overt and committed Jewish alliance with the liberal national agenda still derives from a Jewish anxiety about fitting in to American culture. The Jewish “insider” was always an “outsider” first. Nonetheless, what often appears as (liberal) Jewish support for America, its politics and its economic establishment places Jews on the side of what Talal Asad and others portray as the ideology of the liberal nation,17 an ideology that ironically or not, often stands in conflict with the self-perception not only of

14

Ibid., 61. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, “Introduction” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heschel; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 2. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 For Talal Asad’s argument on the ideological force of secular liberalism,see Talal Asad, “Secularism, NationState and Religion” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 15

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religious believers but also members of all kinds of cultures within the fabric of American society. There are a number of problems with this perpetual dialectic between insider and outsider status characteristic of Jewish self-perception and image within the American public sphere. In the remainder of the essay, I would like to address one problem in particular and suggest a new approach for Jewish self-perception and public life. In her essay entitled “Jewish Studies as Counterhistory,” Susannah Heschel tackles the particular impact of American Jewish liberalism upon Jewish Studies as it has developed in America. According to Heschel, the Jewish commitment to American liberalism often translates into a tendency towards conservativism and a resistance to unveiling hegemonic tendencies within Jewish studies. Although the United States has always been a multiethnic country, built on the federalism of multiple groups, it is here that Jewish studies became transformed into a conservative field whose goal was the incorporation of Jewish history into the larger framework of Western civilization. The study of Judaism was presented as an effort not to undermine Christianity but to contribute to its understanding and reinforce its hegemony.18

In response, Heschel advocates the restoration of what the late Jewish scholar of mysticism, Gershom Scholem, referred to as the method of “counterhistory”—an examination of the power interests that underlie the histories and ideologies of the West. The question, according to Heschel, is “whether Jewish studies as a field can revitalize the radicalism that inspired its early development . . . such that [through multiculturalism], Jewish studies might be restored to its more interesting position as a challenger of the established definitions of the Western canon.”19 Heschel openly acknowledges the political nature of this embrace of multiculturalism, since its primary interest is in “destabilizing the hegemonic claims of the academy.”20 Jewish Studies, she suggests, should not only recover its minority voice within the academy but also do so in order to challenge the power structures underpinning the academic establishment, and the establishment generally speaking, to which it is connected and indebted. If we apply Heschel’s prescription for Jewish Studies to the question of the role of Jews within the public sphere, then we might ask whether or not an assertion of Jewish minority identity over and against the hegemony of the national ideology offers the best path to re-routing Jewish self-perception and position in the public square. Obviously, multiculturalism is premised upon the concern of many cultural and religious communities that, just as the European Enlightenment extended rights to all only to call into question the particular identities of varying com-

18

Susannah Heschel, “Jewish Studies as Counterhistory,” in Insider/Outsider, 103. Ibid., 104. 20 Ibid., 106. 19

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munities, a similar phenomenon rears its head within the American version of liberalism, even if the portrait of the dominant ideology differs from its European analogue. A Jewish embrace of multiculturalism therefore would work to secure Jewish identity amidst tendencies to dilute it both by persons and institutions outside of Judaism and by persons dedicated to the “secular” liberal project within Judaism as well. Moreover, a Jewish multiculturalism would, at least in the version described by Heschel, also take up the claims of other minorities neglected by the ideology of the powerful and support these claimants over against dominant ideologies both outside of and within Judaism, e.g., women, gays and lesbians, etc. Is this the most advantageous approach to reigniting the unique, particular face of Judaism within the public square? Theoretically, the goal of a Jewish multiculturalism is to enable Jews to re-claim power they have lost as a minority group. But I would ask, what is the nature of this reclaimed and fervently sought out power, and what are the consequences of acquiring it? I want to call attention to what I consider to be the difference between control and power, identifying multiculturalism as a quest for the former and not the latter. To make this point, I will use an example presented by Talal Asad’s commentary upon Clifford Geertz’s definitional approach to the study of religion. In an essay entitled, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” Asad examines Geertz’s effort to define religion as an example of the exercise of intellectual control in compensation for a perceived lack of power. According to Asad, Geertz’s definition of religion is a reaction to his assessment of the power of secularism.21 Geertz’s definition is not an expression of power, since it is a response to the loss of power by religion within secular society. Once acquired, the “control” Geertz claims to have acquired through defining a “safe” articulation of what constitutes religion over and against secularity implicates his account as a dialectic of control and fear. On the one hand, his definition stands polemically against a whole range of alternative definitions or expressions of religion and is therefore “threatened” by the interests of others. On the other hand, his definition excludes these alternative accounts and consequently, his so-called recovery of “religion” repeats the hegemonic move he identifies with secularism by declaring the essentialist character of religion in the terms established by his theory. Whatever “control” it acquires is sought after by those excluded by it, and is, therefore, constantly defined by the prospect of its own erasure. A good multiculturalist might retort that even though (at least in Asad’s interpretation) Geertz remains blind to the hegemonic or polemical implications of his own account of religion, a selfaware multiculturalist could identify these tendencies within her own program and apply the nec-

21 Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27–54.

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essary critique to her own set of claims. But I am suggesting that such self-critique would only perpetuate the dialectic between control and loss of control. Applied to her own claims, the multiculturalist would inevitably demonize these claims as potentially exclusionary of the claims of others leaving her with no apparent basis for the retention of her original assertions. Multiculturalism presupposes that power is always related to the jockeying for control—a control precariously held and always in need of protection against others who seek to call it into question. When describing the classically multiculturalist exercise of re-telling exclusionary narratives through the lens of the excluded, Susannah Heschel inadvertently illustrates the identity between the control illicitly maintained by the excluder and the control acquired by the excluded. Speaking specifically about Abraham Geiger’s “second look” at anti-Jewish Christian myths, she says, like women characters in the English novel, the Jewish victim of Christian persecutions—slain, dismembered, powerless—is revived, made whole and empowered through a Jewish retelling of the Christian story . . . [such a ] Jewish retelling . . . is not merely a matter of Jews wishing to “set the record straight.” Rather, it demonstrates a Jewish desire to enter the Christian myth, become its hero, and claim the power inherent in it (emphasis mine).22

In his essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor offers a similar analysis of the logic of multiculturalism oriented towards the critique of the hegemonic tendencies of dominant ideologies. Multiculturalists he points out, who charge ideologues with subjectivist agendas, fall prey to their own critique so far as they cannot and/or refuse to establish “objective” or reliable bases for non-subjective modes of the evaluation of cultures. While Taylor suggests, multiculturalists can advocate a position of “solidarity” with certain communities, as I have argued, such solidarity only reinforces the polemical positioning of communities within the multicultural context instead of orienting themselves towards a free, non-interest-oriented appreciation of all cultures.23 A multiculturalist approach does little to offer Jews a positive presence within American public life but positions them polemically in relation to others and focuses their attention upon the acquisition and loss of cultural control. Still, I would like to argue, it is not only an identitarian-driven, multiculturalist approach to the role of Jews within the public square that fosters this polemical arrangement of competition

22

Heschel, “Jewish Studies as Counterhistory,” 110. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (ed. and intro. by Amy Gutmann; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–74. The antidote that Taylor presents in this essay relies upon the capacity for a Gadamerian-type “fusion of horizons,” which by dialectically challenging the background and often prejudicial presuppositions of a given world-view, permits the emergence of “objective” standards of evaluation by persons analyzing foreign cultures. According to Taylor, “we only need a sense of our own limited part in the whole human story to accept the presumption [of the possibility of the value of another’s claims]. It is only arrogance . . . that can deprive us of this. But what the presumption requires of us is not peremptory and inauthentic judgments of equal value, but a willingness to be open to comparative culture study of the kind that must displace our horizons in the resulting fusions” (Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 73). While I appreciate Taylor’s recognition of the fallacy of subjectively-based multiculturalist exercise of cultural alliance, I do not think that Taylor’s effort to support standards of cultural evaluation can produce the sort of open-mindedness or cultural pluralism he seeks. It may be the case that a Gadamerian fusion of horizons arrives at some sort of conversationally established assertion of claims, but it does so only by retaining the polemical and ultimately negative appraisal of cultures that sit together at the table. Cultural education should not, I will assert throughout the essay, come at the expense of the verifiability of a tradition’s claims but should be coterminous with the full recognition of a given tradition, background beliefs included. A Gadamerian-styled model of cultural reasoning presupposes the negation of traditions carried over from the mechanics of the Hegelian dialectic which inevitably posits the merits of a cumulative reason over and against those of an internal cultural or religious tradition. 23

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over interests. Many theoretical models for American pluralism are premised upon the same logic of interests and scarcity. For example, in an essay entitled “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest,”24 Michael Walzer distinguishes between what he sees as multiculturalism’s plea for the social acknowledgment of neglected groups and the practical pursuit of what he refers to as the “meat and potato” resources required to bolster the independent strength of these groups. At first it may seem that Walzer’s “meat and potatoes multiculturalism” offers an antidote to the perpetual disempowerment sustained by these groups’ quest for social acknowledgment. Walzer’s approach seems to advocate a turning within of variant constituencies and an effort to focus less on external recognition and more on the development of resources that will permit groups, and Jews, in this case, to express themselves freely according to their own self-understanding. But Walzer’s approach, less pleading and more industrious as it is, nonetheless presupposes the same interest-driven account of the public square presupposed by less materialist accounts. In Walzer’s scheme, Jews, for example, could and have in many ways, done much to bolster their own institutional, economic, and political resources, but this sort of fattening does little to overcome the essentially polemical position they retain in relation to others at the table. Walzer’s essay does not address the context of the pursuit of these material goods and therefore does not mark the distinction between a polemical pursuit of material well-being and a non-polemical assertion of the same needs. Consequently, Walzer’s proposal remains blind to the power dynamics that can ensue from the active assertion of material interests by the Jewish (or any) community. If liberal theories of human rights are indicted by multiculturalists on charges of hegemony and exclusion,25 then multiculturalists may be charged with a failure to present alternative, non-hegemonic and lawfully regulated accounts of legitimate rights or power. It is important to note that an interest-driven public square is not in the service of JewishChristian relations in particular. Elsewhere, I discuss the problems associated with an interest-driven basis for Jewish-Christian relations, since such a context inevitably leads to two possible results: either it presents one or two of these groups as more powerful than the other (in the U.S., this has commonly played out as we have seen in cases of Christian control over and against the Jewish minority) or, and this is frequently considered the case today, Christians and Jews join forces together as two minority groups working against what they consider the hegemonic forces of secular liberalism.26 While a number of leading theologians, Jewish and Christian, have supported this second approach to a Jewish-Christian presence within the public square,27 it is ulti-

24 Michael Walzer, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heschel; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 88–99. 25 Perhaps the most famous of these is Michael Sandel’s so-called communitarian critique of John Rawls’ theory of liberal proceduralism. See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (2d ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 26 See my manuscript in progress, Randi Rashkover, Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics. 27 Despite his commitment to natural law as the philosophical basis of multiculturalism, David Novak's account of Jewish-Christian relations often defends this idea of a Jewish-Christian alliance over and against the forces of secularism. In an essay “Jews, Christians and Civil Society.” Novak argues, “Many of us Jews and Christians want the public square to be pluralistic. . . . Theoretically at least, this has led to the discovery of some important new political commonalities between Christians and Jews. These commonalities should not only be noted, but encouraged. . . . We have reached a point in history, at least in North America, when Jews and Christians can recognize each other as each other’s closet neighbors rather than our most threatening enemy. The power of contemporary secularism, with its enmity against religion, has forced this recognition upon both of us. . . .” See David Novak, Talking With Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 205.

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mately short-sighted in character. While certain occasions may bring Jewish and Christian interests together against a common antagonist, these circumstantial connections should not be confused with a free and candid acknowledgment of the other tradition. Such arrangements are as precarious as are the changing circumstances that give rise to them. Moreover, Judeo-Christian alliances premised upon shared interests perform hegemonically in relation to other cultures not included in the alliance.

POWER, FREEDOM, AND THE POLITICS OF PRAISE In what follows, I would like to contrast the above portrayal of control with a theologicallyrooted conception of power and freedom that orients Jews to the non-Jewish world and to the American public square without promoting cultural antagonism. In my book, Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise,28 I describe, using the theologies of divine freedom and witness in the work of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, what I refer to as a politics of praise. By this, I mean to describe the close link between the exercise of doxological witness and a Jew’s or a Christian’s relation to the political, that is to the state on the one hand and to one’s commitment to society on the other hand. Central to the politics of praise is the primacy of one’s commitment to testify to divine sovereignty. Rooted in a theology of revelation and the practical and obedient response of persons claimed or called by a radically other, loving God, a politics of praise attends first and foremost to the response of obedience. Given the primacy of obedient acknowledgment, a politics of praise identifies one’s commitment to testimony over and above one’s commitment to the state. At the same time, however, the performance of praise does not quarantine itself away from the needs of persons, the demands of economics, or the practical concerns of the material world within which we live. Doxological practice occupies persons wholly and overrides false separations between the so-called private and public spheres, infusing all aspects of their behavior. By virtue of the primacy of witness, a politics of praise certainly presents Judaism with an active political and/or public agenda, but it may seem that a politics of praise de-limits the extent to which a doxological tradition might engage openly and freely with other cultural and religious elements of society. At worst, a politics of praise could be charged with imperialism by virtue of its single-minded insistence upon the divine claim. It has often been said that covenantal life renders persons incapable of acknowledging and thereby intolerant of the claims of persons outside of the covenantal structure. Recently, I have taken up this challenge to the politics of praise as the impetus for my forthcoming book, Freedom and Law: a Jewish-Christian Apologetics. Here, I expand my

28 Randi Rashkover, Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise (New York: T & T Clark, 2005).

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analysis of the concept of divine freedom as developed in Revelation and Theopolitics. More specifically, I argue that the freedom of the covenantal God manifests itself in three unique expressions: 1) sovereignty; revelation presupposes a God who is radically other and thereby sovereign over those to whom God reveals Godself; 2) nearness: revelation presupposes a God who freely draws nears (loves) that which is other than Godself without sacrificing transcendence or alterity; and 3) lawfulness: the God of revelation establishes a free order or lawfulness within which each of these two prior expressions of freedom operate or, that we might say, they presuppose. If an examination of divine command shows that the divine is free or sovereign over that which is other than God, then we can say that divine freedom (as command) operates by positing a law of difference between the divine and all else. However, divine freedom (as I have suggested) also means the capacity to care freely for that which is not God. Consequently, the law of difference between God and all else is a law that affirms the irreducibility of that which God distinguishes from Godself. Divine law (that is, the lawful difference between the divine and the human) performs divine love. Divine law is not teleological or driven by God’s desire for a self-serving end. Divine law is free and “for the sake of” all that is not divine. As such, divine law does not act against the nature or desire of those it orders but secures the being or reality of what is offered definition and organization by this free law. To appreciate how recognition of the freedom of divine lawfulness challenges the charges of monotheistic intolerance, we must look at the twofold impact of the freedom of divine lawfulness upon the covenantal participants. First, divine lawfulness de-limits and/or lawfully distinguishes persons from the divine by virtue of the “difference” between the one who commands and the one who is commanded. Second, divine freedom as extension towards or affirmation of another affirms participants in their humanity. For us, and not for God, divine law therefore de-limits without excising. It is not the vehicle through which the divine seeks to orient persons towards his self-interested purpose but rather provides the conditions for determining the independent significance of that which is other than God, in this case, persons. This is not to say that divine law funds a human anarchy, since persons are affirmed only within the context of the divine order. Their freedom is not a product of their own generation but rather occasioned by a divine dispensation and conditioned by this limit of its possibility. In this way, divine law “judges,”“discerns,” or “elucidates” the character of persons in their freedom providing them with an understanding of the temporality, historicity, relationality, and lawful nature of their freedom. It is the central argument of this essay that this profile of persons as ordered and affirmed by the difference between the divine and the human presents a different conception of power than that presupposed by multiculturalism. Seen from the perspective of what I refer to as this “logic

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of law,” Jewish life consists in the active testimony to the commanding God when this testimony includes a full affirmation of human need and desire or what is a freedom or power to acknowledge one’s humanity within one’s obedient praise. The nexus between praise and communal need expresses itself in a variety of forms, including prayer (petition, the freedom for petitionary prayer), political discernment (the freedom to discern the communal needs of the people), and economic reflection (the freedom to evaluate the material resources required by this people). Within the freedom of divine law, the politics of praise funds a basis for the community’s empowerment before God and licenses actions performed on behalf of the community’s rightful needs. Beyond this, theologically grounded communal power impacts positively upon the community’s relationship to other communities within the public square. Logically speaking, if the conception of power as control presupposes a scarcity that breeds polemic between interest-groups, then the conception of power within the logic of the law permits a free and positive acknowledgment of other communities on the grounds of the lawful de-limitation of the Jewish community’s own self-assertion. Recall, power rooted in divine law is conditioned by divine law. While divine law does not require the sacrifice of the community’s needs for the sake of adherence to the divine will, it does identify the community’s power as affirmed only within this lawful context. Any tendency by the community, consciously or otherwise, to assert its freedom over and against others (that is, polemically) constitutes a breach in the conditions of its own power. Philosophically speaking, the reason why is rather simple. If according to the theo-logic of divine law, the community’s freedom is predicated upon its having been acted upon by an event of divine freedom, it stands to reason that this condition of communal freedom is available (at least potentially so) for other communities/persons as well. Any one community or individual’s encounter with divine grace cannot exhaust the resources of divine grace. Within an order of divine law, the condition of the possibility of one community’s freedom and empowerment is therefore synonymous with the possibility of another community’s lawful empowerment as well. The denial of that possibility is tantamount to a denial of the divine freedom. Consequently, communal power rooted in the lawful affirmation of divine freedom renders the Jewish community both powerful and de-limited and thereby well-situated for a meaningful and religiously authentic position within a multicultural public environment. While de-limited, a Jewish community empowered within the logic of law can relate “freely” to other religious/cultural groups, that is to say without concern for the extent to which the rights of its own community competes with the rights of other communities. It is, as discussed above, this “freedom” or “right” to power and action, which ironically enough, multiculturalism does not provide. More specifically, participation within the covenantal order frees the Jewish community from the burden of

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competing for identitarian acknowledgment or social recognition and permits it to actively pursue its own material interests upon the condition of the rights of others to do similarly. I will look at both of these in turn. First, affirmed covenantally, Jews need not premise their relations with others in the public square upon their need for social acknowledgment. Jewish identity is, from this perspective, theologically rooted and lawfully regulated and not socially determined. By extension, Jewish interactions with other religious traditions and/or cultures need not be overtly or covertly premised upon the drive for identitarian acknowledgment but may be premised upon the free inquiry into the contents and practices of other cultures/traditions. What about the problem of anti-Semitism? Does my call for an end to Jewish identity politics undermine the community’s right to act against anti-Semitism? No, it does not. Within the logic of the law and as part and parcel of a politics of praise, Jews retain a theologically-rooted right to act against anti-Semitism and protect their own well-being. The argument here is that the key to responding to anti-Semitism has less to do with the acquisition of social placement and more to do with the power of the community to act on its own theologically-rooted behalf. Jewish power, in other words, does not derive from either of two extremes within a polemical (“us vs. them”) social environment: assimilation (collaboration and identification with the dominant culture) or separatism (antagonism towards all others) but from the freedom offered by the covenantal God to develop a community of doxological praise and self-affirmation. Second, lawful affirmation within the logic of the law provides a powerful foundation for Walzer’s “meat and potatoes” approach to pluralism without sustaining the polemical context of multicultural relations characteristic of non-theologically rooted accounts of communal rights. If the logic of the law does not go so far as to require Jews actively to engage in the acquisition of the needs/interests of other groups at the very least, it does require the Jewish community to advocate for the right of these other groups to the have their interests recognized. The Jewish community’s pursuit of its own interests does not compete with the same pursuit by others. This is not to say that the satisfaction of varying communal interests does not require negotiation and compromise. It does suggest, however, that the work of such negotiation and compromise can be exercised out of a spirit of freedom and affirmation rather than from a position of scarcity and insecurity. By way of conclusion, I would like to offer a rather unconventional example of what such a Jewish community might look like by referencing John Howard Yoder’s description of Christian political life. Surprising as it may be to consider a Jewish politics of praise and public participation by way of a Mennonite example, the parallel is possible in view of the shared assumptions

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regarding divine freedom within Yoder’s theology and the Jewish covenantal account described above. In a famous essay, “The Spirit of God and the Politics of Men,” Yoder describes his vision of Christian political life, earmarking the two sides of what I refer to as the politics of praise: doxology and the power of patience or free engagement. Is the ecclesia political, Yoder asks? Should it involve itself in public concerns or remove itself into a separatism of the private sector? A doxological tradition, the Mennonite community has little choice but to behave politically, Yoder argues. Praise of God is not limited to the church house or the private home and citing none other than Isa 42:1, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations . . .,” Yoder exhorts the Christian community to engage in public activity now. God has already commanded obedience in justice. God has already commanded a life of praise in and among “the nations.” Who are Christians to wait for an invitation from America to engage politically and on terms established by this nation? But what does this public posture look like? Neither liberal nor multicultural, the Christian political posture is liturgical, it is testimonial. It does not as Yoder discusses elsewhere, line up with the calculations of other ideologies. It is not concerned with the strategic forecasts of their successes and their failures; instead, a Christian public posture remains focused on its commitment to obedience to God in its perpetual discernment of the character and actions appropriate to this commitment. What about the community’s relations with other cultures or religions? Do not the community’s ecclesiastical and devotional commitments register as the quest for an alliance of powers—a new Christian America? Yoder passionately says “no.” Obedience to God translates into a repentance and humility that tempers self-certainty and ideological insistence. Beyond this, and more importantly for the analysis here, the just God who commands obedience is also the loving God who fulfills and affirms those whom God commands. Obedience towards God translates into patience with and freedom for others. Affirmed in the humanity of God, the church is patient with that which it does not agree and with that which does not apparently work in its favor. In the Spirit of God . . . the righteous judge of the Old Testament . . . is marked by his mercy, [not] his intransigence . . . the Spirit of the crucified one can be redemptively patient with impatience and with enmity, can be nonresistantly patient with situations it does not control and cannot change yet without mitigating at all the proclamation of God’s demands or one’s own obedience.29

Its power funded by the God whom it praises, the community may proceed with the important work it must do, devoid of the fear or sense of scarcity that drives most political exercises and

29 John Howard Yoder, “The Spirit of God and the Politics of Men” in For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 229.

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missions, it can engage freely and on behalf of others whose needs and interests must be recognized and served. Likewise, a Jewish community rooted in the obedience and freedom affirmed by the covenantal God can and should engage publicly and freely legitimize the needs of those outside of its community. When unaware of its covenantal orientation, the community permits itself to be ensnarled in the dialectics of power that deplete the tradition by focusing its efforts on an alliance with the powers that be or solidarity with those excluded by it. Only a theological basis of public life sustains and legitimizes an active Jewish communal presence in the public square and offers a foundation for a free and positive engagement with other cultures and traditions.

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Between Text & Sermon Isaiah 11:1–11

CHRISTOPHER LEIGHTON AND ADAM GREGERMAN Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies Baltimore, Maryland

THIS PASSAGE FROM ISAIAH IS BRIMMING WITH IMAGERY that has shaped the imaginations of Jews and Christians for centuries. Although the eschatological visions of Jews and Christians are dramatically different, both of our communities continue to turn to Isaiah to map a glorious future when the harsh realities of the present are overcome. In this brief essay, we will profile some of the enduring tensions that have emerged from competing, at times conflicting, understandings of this text’s messianic significance. We will then conclude our reflection by offering critical and hopefully constructive responses to the other community’s appropriations of this text. An examination of the ways in which text and tradition are entangled will help us appreciate how our scriptural legacies continue to shape our perceptions of the other as well as ourselves. We hope to demonstrate that Christians and Jews can challenge one another to think through the complexities of proclaiming God’s word in a religiously plural world. The messianic portrait that Isaiah provides in the opening sentences of ch. 11 highlights a sociopolitical king in the line of David (from “the stock of Jesse”), whose reign will anchor God’s will in Jerusalem and extend outward to the rest of the creation. He is blessed with three pairs of divine gifts: “wisdom and understanding,” “the spirit of counsel and might,” and “the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (v. 2). The first pair refers to the practical acumen required to arbitrate political and judicial affairs. The second pair designates the qualities for advancing diplomatic negotiations and consolidating military authority. The third pair validates the piety of the ideal king and confirms his status as God’s instrument. Isaiah’s description of this ruler reflects messianic expectations that were emerging in the First Temple period, during which he wrote, and which were more fully developed in the Second Temple period. In the messianic era, the Lord will bring Jews who have been scattered in distant lands back to the land of Israel (11:11–12). The humiliation that befell Egypt during the exodus will be visited on Israel’s enemies (11:14–16). The ideal king will enact a sociopolitical transformation in which “the poor” will become the recipients of justice, “the meek” will be restored, and “the wicked” will receive the punishment they so richly deserve (11:4). This radical realignment constitutes the core of Isaiah’s vision. The establishment of this new age is anchored in a particular place of revived security and peace, making possible the realization of God’s intentions for the creation. As God’s agent, the ideal king will inaugurate a peaceable kingdom: “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid” (11:6). This radical reconfiguration of the political landscape raises some troubling questions. When “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord” (11:9), what will become of those who do not

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live within the camp of Israel? There is an expectation that other peoples will acknowledge and submit to the divine rule firmly established on God’s “holy mountain.” Yet what does this universal affirmation really entail for Gentiles? Does this passage generate an expectation that Gentiles will undergo a religious, social, and political transformation? Indeed, does the acknowledgement of the God of Israel and the divine legitimacy of his appointed king imply the conversion of the nations? Rather than investigate this murky question in Isa 11 itself, we would like to focus on the reception of this passage in later Christian and Jewish thought. (For a discussion of Second Temple literature, see Matthew V. Novenson, “The Jewish Messiahs, the Pauline Christ, and the Gentile Question,” JBL 126.2 [2009]: 362–64. The inclusion of Gentiles is expressed in terms of their willing subjection to the Jewish king, not the disappearance of their ethnic and cultic identity.) Paul’s views are an obvious choice, for he uses Isa 11 in a key passage in Romans. There, he fastens onto Isaiah’s vision of Gentile inclusion, although the contours of his eschatological hopes are laden with ambiguities that have potent implications for Christian-Jewish relations. In Rom 15:12, Paul invokes Isa 11:10 (LXX) to express the dream of universal salvation: “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.” Obviously, Paul maintains that the ideal ruler anticipated by Isaiah is none other than Jesus Christ. Paul picks up the universal dimension of Isaiah’s prophecy to elaborate on the realization of biblical promises to the patriarchs, most especially the hope that the Gentiles will abandon their idols and come to glorify the God of Israel through faith in Christ. Of particular importance is the fact that the recognition of Jesus’ lordship does not require Gentiles to become Jews. Rather, they can share in the salvific transformation of the world by means of participation in the life of Christ. Paul’s universalism is not exclusive in the sense that unbelieving Jews will have no place in the kingdom of God. God’s call is irrevocable, even when the rejection of Jesus registers as an inscrutable mystery (11:25–29). Yet this eschatological hope was not the prevailing trajectory in later Christian thought. Rather, most Christians held that Jews, who became “the others” or outsiders to this vision, must acknowledge Jesus Christ as God’s chosen instrument for the establishment of the peaceable kingdom. Only in this way do they benefit from the universal transformation found in Isaiah and adapted by Paul. According to this scenario, universal salvation entails the collapse of ethnic and religious divisions and the attainment of theological unanimity among Jews and Gentiles. In other words, Jews will be absorbed into the body of Christ and therefore cease to have any enduring significance as a people set apart. This conception of salvation underwrites the evangelical quest to convince Jews to relinquish their ancestral practices or to detect the underlying christological significance within their rituals and customs. Isaiah’s dream comes to fruition, according to the prevailing Christian paradigm, when Jews recognize that their true covenantal destiny entails a theological merger with the church and a shared commitment of faith in Jesus Christ. (Modern Christians, committed to reconceptualizing in more positive terms their relationship with Jews and Judaism, might reclaim some of Paul’s original interpretation: that Isaiah aims at Gentile inclusion without Jewish disappearance or exclusion.) When turning to Jewish interpretations of Isa 11 and their implications for “the others” as Jews understood them (i.e., Gentiles), we notice that many Jews highlight the nationalist, even political aspects of the messianic promise. (See John Sawyer, “Isaiah and Zionism,” in Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll , Sheffield Academic, 2002,

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246–60.) There is a prominent focus on what the Messiah accomplishes for this one people and this one land, even if there is also the recognition of some peripheral transformative effects of his coming for the entire world. Modern translations immediately make this Jewish-Christian split clear. In v. 4, the New Revised Standard Version, overseen by an interdenominational group of Christian scholars, renders the Hebrew )eres9 as “earth” in order to expand the realm of the Messiah to the entire world’s regions and peoples. The Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh, however, uses “land,” implying the land of Israel and thereby imposing a geographical limitation to the Messiah’s actions (e.g., judging the poor [11:4]) and effects (e.g., spreading knowledge of God [11:9]). One could debate which of these most fairly represents Isaiah’s original views, but there is no doubt the difference in translations points to a real difference in religious traditions. In some Jewish interpretations, universalist, even world-utopian elements of Isaiah’s message, such as transformations of the natural order, are submerged or denied in order to keep the focus of the prophecy on Israel and the Jews’ travails in the world. Isaian themes of reversal and deliverance are cast in terms of the people’s historical experiences and reveal the pain of exile and powerlessness. These are not foreign to the original prophecy, especially if written at a time of intense fear over an Assyrian invasion. However, in later centuries Jews dwelled on those political aspects of the prophecy that offered hope after centuries of dispersion. Two examples of interpretations of Isa 11, centuries apart, demonstrate this. The first, from the twelfth-century eminent philosopher and theologian Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, famously describes the nature of the messianic age (Laws of Kings 12). His views draw on extant Talmudic traditions about the changes that will occur (e.g., Sanhedrin 91b: “The sole difference between the present and the messianic days is delivery from servitude to foreign powers”). He strictly limits the Messiah’s role to what could be called the political realm. Maimonides mentions possible earthshaking changes—“there will be neither famine nor war”—though these are largely incidental to the main reason why God will send the Messiah. Above all, the aim is for Israel finally to be able to study the Torah and to observe its commandments in peace and in their own land: “Israel will be free to devote itself to the law and its wisdom.” The end to the Jews’ dispersion, along with security and sovereignty, are prerequisites, of course, and this necessarily affects all humanity. The messianic warrior will subdue Israel’s enemies. But there is no cosmic or utopian transformation. Maimonides therefore insists that the prophecies of Isaiah do not foretell a disruption to the so-called “laws of nature.” No wolf will live with the lamb; no leopard will lie with the kid (11:6). These are only figurative expressions for Israel’s dwelling securely among the nations. The world, he says, “will follow its normal course.” Though others (including some Jews) have seen Isaiah’s prophecy as a sort of return to Eden that completely ruptures the present order, Maimonides is probably more faithful to Isaiah’s originally metaphorical claims. Isaiah’s main focus on a strong, divinely appointed leader who inaugurates practical changes in Israel’s life, despite his florid imagery of a transformation of the entire natural order, is here echoed by Maimonides. Likewise, he gives the promise that the “the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw” (11:7, NJPS) a practical application: “Israel [shall] earn a comfortable living in a legitimate way.” While this may appear to be lowering the bar for messianic change, for a weakened people in the eighth century B.C.E. or twelfth century C.E., this political reversal has undeniable appeal.

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Maimonides has comparatively little interest in the Messiah’s own attributes. While Isaiah emphasizes his remarkable qualities of wisdom, leadership, and piety, Maimonides largely emphasizes his accomplishments. He is in a sense a temporary servant to the people. He is not superhuman, and does no miracles. When Israel’s present condition improves, his task will be complete. The people, not the Messiah, are the focus. Furthermore, the destiny of the Gentiles is touched on only briefly. They see the great deeds that the Messiah does for Israel, and they humbly admit that Israel’s god is the one true God. But in keeping with the absence of any natural or cosmic transformation, they are a sort of witness-people, in this case, witnesses to the transformation of Israel’s current circumstances. The second interpretation of Isa 11 comes from modern Israel, where this text is read in synagogues on Israel’s Independence Day (Yom Ha’atsmaut). There have been intense discussions about the religious significance of the creation of the modern State of Israel and the proper commemoration of it. There is no uniform liturgy for the day, though the widespread practice of using traditional liturgical elements (e.g., Bible readings, Hallel psalms of praise) clearly shows that many Jews comfortably cast recent historical—specifically political and military— events in highly theological, even messianic terms. Isaiah is therefore a revealing choice. The messianic themes of restoration and rebuilding are deemed appropriate by many, if not by all, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike to describe the events of 1948. The practice of reading Isa 11 on a day marked by military parades, the celebration of national independence, and the recitation of new texts modeled on centuries-old Hanukkah and Purim prayers of thanksgiving for “triumphant victories” gives the prophecy a political and nationalist context. That the fulfillment is not yet complete is undeniable. Conservative Rabbi Jules Harlow endorses the inclusion of Isaian prophecies “to reflect a Jerusalem partially restored to greatness” (“Revising the Liturgy for Conservative Jews,” in The Changing Face of Jewish and Christian Worship in North America, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, 132; italics added). Nonetheless, it is a dramatic decision to apply a futuristic prophecy to present events, even if the fit is imperfect. Likewise, the universal aspects of Isaiah’s original prophecy are almost entirely overlooked in many Independence Day liturgies. As one might expect, the focus is on national victory. As in Maimonides, the Gentile nations appear largely as witnesses. For example, a quote from the Conservative Jewish liturgy praises God for “revealing your glory and your holiness to all the world” in the victories Israel has won (Siddur Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals, Rabbinical Assembly, New York,1998, 149). There is an important precedent in traditional Jewish liturgy for the reading of Isa 11 on Independence Day. This text is also read in synagogues on the eighth day of Passover, setting up parallel examples of divine redemption and assigning miraculous significance to the events of 1948. A striking claim is made by this linkage. Like the exodus commemorated on Passover, the prophet’s hope for the future return of “the other part of His [God’s] people” (11:15–16, NJPS) and the creation of the modern state and subsequent ingathering of exiles are all attributed to God. Needless to say, Israel’s contemporary victories can also be explained in purely secular military terms, which makes the parallel all the more significant and bold. The hand of God was present, the messianic promises were trustworthy, even if the victories were won by soldiers. Inter-

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estingly, one might also note the similarities between the original exodus/entry into the land and the events of 1948 in contrast to Isaiah’s vision. While Isaiah arguably foresees not just political but cosmic or supernatural changes, the exodus and the creation of the state both involved no such transformation. Again, the focus is on land (exodus) and state (liturgy for Independence Day), despite the profoundly different circumstances between the thirteenth century B.C.E. and the twentieth century C.E. Encounters with the history of Jewish and Christian interpretations of Isaiah are a powerful reminder that a sacred text can live many lives in different communities. The multiple meanings that reside within our own as well as the other’s tradition challenge those who want to take possession of the text and reduce it to a singular truth. Of course, not all interpretations are equal on exegetical, historical, or theological grounds. So in these concluding critical comments, we steer a path between a hermeneutical relativism that authorizes people to make the text say anything they want and an absolutism that enshrines triumphalist dispositions that blind them to the wisdom of their neighbors. CONCLUSION: LEIGHTON As a Presbyterian in the United States, I find that the linkage of Isa 11 with Israeli Independence Day gives rise to an eerie familiarity. We know all too well the habits of seeing biblical texts through the prism of nationalist agendas. Our emphasis on God’s sovereignty has all too often worked in tandem with a sense of Manifest Destiny, as the national saga of the United States makes painfully evident. It is one thing to read the Scriptures in order to contest injustice and expose hypocrisies. It is quite another to rely on Scriptures to elevate one’s own national agenda over and against the rest of the world. The deployment of Isa 11 within the context of Israel’s celebrations may reinforce the ideological excesses of nationalism unless coupled with the sharp ethical critiques that permeate other segments of prophetic literature. In a world where religious and ethnic conflicts polarize and fragment populations, perhaps our appropriations of biblical texts should be weighted on the basis of ethical criteria: How does our reading of a sacred text enable us to recognize and respond to the needs and sufferings of those who stand outside our community? Does the incorporation of Isaiah in the context of Israel’s Independence Day celebrations bring to light the unfinished business of the nation? Does the text reinforce a monarchical model of authority in which submission and obedience is expected, or does it heighten the awareness of the legitimate claims of the stranger and leave room for democratic dissent? The prophets may not always advance the spiritual dispositions that lead to theological humility, but the interplay of divergent religious communities might help us to curb our appetites so that we do not attempt to swallow up those with whom we disagree.

CONCLUSION: GREGERMAN This comparative study reveals a prominent feature in both communities’ interpretations— the tendency to place the focus of the prophecy on one’s own group and to overlook others to whom Isaiah’s powerful message is also relevant. This is understandable, and not inherently

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objectionable. Recognition of our shared claims to the biblical text need not preclude a commitment to the relevance of the text for our own communities. However, troubling aspects of the Christian interpretations cannot be neglected, especially in light of the history of Jewish-Christian relations. From a Jewish perspective, the widespread Christian trend of reading passages such as Isa 11 with little attention to implications for the Jews is questionable on exegetical, moral, and theological grounds. It is problematic to overlook Isaiah’s positive hopes for the people of Israel and only emphasize those for the nations, for Isaiah’s vision is a bold one, both Israel-focused and world-transformative. In the first few centuries of the common era, Christians increasingly rejected the notion that the Jewish people will have any positive role to play in the fulfillment of this prophecy. To give one example, Tertullian, probably early in the third century, denies that the Jews will benefit from Isaiah’s prophecy after Jesus’ advent: “for after this time the ‘spirit of the Creator’ [cf. Isa 11:2] never breathed among them” (Against Marcion, 5:8:4). That is, Isaiah’s promises to the people of Israel are now void. Paul’s interpretation in Romans (noted above), by contrast, is less objectionable than such later Christian interpretations. His refusal to cut Israel off entirely from the prophetic promises, even though few Jews believed in Jesus as the Messiah, reflects an admirable affirmation of the covenant between God and Israel. Nonetheless, his exclusive focus on the implications of Isa 11 for believing Gentiles in Rom 15 is imbalanced and misrepresents the spirit of the text. While the Jewish interpretations highlighted above largely ignore the implications of Isa 11 for non-Jews, Paul elevates one aspect of the vision that is suitable to his mission without also recalling the general context of Isaiah’s vision. The return of the Jewish exiles, the imagery of a new exodus, the centrality of Jerusalem—all of these are essential aspects of the prophet’s message. Paul’s decision to minimize them surely laid the groundwork for later Christians’ views, such as Tertullian’s, that they were canceled entirely. From a Jewish perspective, this trajectory, from the implied irrelevance of the Jews in Paul’s views to the intentional elimination of Jews from the biblical promises in Tertullian’s, is profoundly problematic. FINAL COMMENTS Our critiques get to a core tension of such a comparative study: By expressing a willingness to hear each other’s perspectives, we inevitably learn of those that are troubling and even offensive. This is all the more reason for continuing our study, for we learn not just about other communities’ interpretations, but also their ongoing processes of critical re-evaluation. As in any true dialogue, we do not simply hand over our communities’ traditions to each other. Rather, we faithfully and honestly grapple with them together, hopefully seeing things we would otherwise fail to notice or actively avoid. Rev. Dr. Christopher Leighton is the Executive Director of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Adam Gregerman is the Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies.

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CAROL STEELE Columbia Theological Seminary Decatur, Georgia

Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

THE SERMON THAT IS THE BOOK OF HEBREWS begins with God, and with God’s speech to God’s people. More specifically, the sermon begins with a one-sentence history of how God has spoken in various ways to various peoples in various times and circumstances. And so, with ear-catching alliteration and an obvious flair for rhetoric, the preacher/writer of Hebrews immediately sets before us the enormous sweep of God’s interaction with the people, and places his listeners toward the end of this line, “in these last days,” when God’s speech has been sharpened, adjusted, nuanced yet again in the life, atoning work, and exaltation of a Son. As in the first verse, the rest of the sermon will go about the work of placing that Son in the context of those prophets, broadly defined, who have gone before: Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Rahab. And at the same time, as evidenced by the “but” that separates the clauses of the opening sentence, the preacher sets this final word, spoken through Jesus Christ, apart from and above the words that have been spoken before. Here lies the contradition that runs throughout the book of Hebrews: while the preacher takes such pains to embed Christ in the history of God’s actions with our ancestors, he sets the Christ-word above the prophet-words in terms of its completeness, superiority, and finality. As Frances Taylor Gench notes, continuity and discontinuity walk hand-in-hand through the sermon of Hebrews (Hebrews and James, Westminster John Knox, 16). So steeped is this sermon in the history of the ancestors and the prophets—calling not only on the patriarchs and matriarchs but also on the Wisdom tradition and the Levitical priesthood for context—that one can nearly hear the “but” as an “and”: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, [and] in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he created the worlds.” I will confess that I prefer to hear an “and” here instead of a “but.” I would rather hear God’s history of interaction with God’s people as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, certainly, but without the wrinkle that God’s former speech was somehow incomplete, inadequate, or insufficient. The implication this has for our brothers and sisters who find in those words that God spoke “by the prophets” a full and sufficient revelation of God’s desires for God’s people troubles me. Most commentators spend little time discussing the claims of superiority being made in

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Hebrews and the troubling implications they raise for those who might want to explain this text to a Jewish colleague. Perhaps this is because biblical scholars are well aware that, for the writers of the NT, the question of how Christians and Jews would treat one another in the coming two millenia (and how their own writings would influence that treatment) was utterly meaningless. Who would be around in 2010, anyway? Their days were the final days. It does not do much good for us to wonder what they would have thought about the future development of the relationship between Jews and Christians as two distinct bodies of faith. It might do us some good, however, as preachers in 2010, to consider that a straightforward reading of Hebrews today makes some serious claims of superiority for Christ, signaled by the initial “but” in v.1, that could be used carelessly to draw conclusions about those who find the word that God spoke “by the prophets” to be sufficient and complete in itself. So, while an “and” is implicit in v. 1—God’s speech did not begin with the incarnation— there is a “but” here also, and the one who is writing this sermon for these early Christians has placed it there intentionally. The one who would preach on this passage to a later group of Christians must understand why. First, the preacher seeks to set the Son of God apart as a different kind of God-speech. The Son is God’s heir of all things and, drawing on the teaching of Wisdom literature, the one through whom all things were created (Frances Taylor Gench, Hebrews and James, Westminster John Knox, 1996, 17). Christ the Son has a different relationship with God than any who have come before; he is pre-existent and shares the dominion over all things with God; whereas Moses was a servant in God’s household, Christ is Son in God’s household (3:5, 6). His closeness to God is so immediate that he is the “exact imprint of God’s very being”; in him, one can see God most fully and completely. In these sentences our writer has made clear that Christ is no prophet or leader or king who is called out from a life’s work of farming or herding or laboring for a specific task. No, Christ is the very imprint of God, through whom the worlds were made, sent by God as a means of revelation and atonement. Finally, the passage turns to an allusion to Christ’s atoning work of purification, a point to be expounded in ch. 10 where Christ’s sacrifice is described as having happened “once for all” (10: 2), in contrast to the regular and repeated sacrifices administered by the priests (10: 11), and describes Christ seated in glory, exalted above even the angels. Thus, in this passage we are presented with a message from God that, while it stands on a foundation of older messages, is of a new and different, in fact, pre-eminent kind. In Christ is a person, in contrast to those who have come before, who is the very imprint of God, present at the creation of the world and instrumental in it, who is God become the final sacrifice in his own self and life, and who sits, above the angels, in glory at God’s right hand, a place no other may occupy. Building on the first point, the Son of God as God’s pre-eminent speech will go on in subsequent chapters to describe how this new speech we find in Christ operates differently in the lives of the people: the purification of sins accomplished in Christ, for example, is a once-and-for-all action rather than a rite that needs to be practiced continually (10:10–12). As a result, the people can approach God “with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (10:22). Again we see our theme:

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Jesus’ sacrifice for sin is like and yet different from the sacrifices that came before it; our assurance is both like and unlike what came before. These points about the particularity of God’s message in Christ are made in the service of the exhortation to remain faithful. One gets the feeling that the preacher of Hebrews may have received some hint that his audience was flagging a bit in its commitment, perhaps questioning the purpose of life lived in response to this Jesus, with whom they almost surely had no direct contact. And so the writer reminds them of God’s long history of speaking to God’s people in ways that are appropriate to the time and circumstances, culminating, he sees, in the gift of Christ. His argument closes in the final chapters with reference to the cloud of witnesses that surrounds them in the life of faith, not only Christ but also Abel, Noah, Enoch, and others (11:4–40). The community is further reminded that it bears the marks of a life changed by faith: mutual love, hospitality to strangers, remembering those in prison and those being tortured, honoring marriage, and being content with what one has (13:1–5). These days, we know all too well that passages like Hebrews have been used to form a supercessionist theology that considers the gospel of Christ as a replacement for, rather than a complement to, the covenant God initiated with the Jewish people. Certainly, as noted above, this was an outcome inconceivable to the writer of Hebrews; nonetheless, it is a reality we must confront in our preaching today. Hebrews 1:1–4 falls in the lectionary at Christmas, perhaps a difficult time to delve into this type of modern theological problem with so much to celebrate in the birth narratives themselves. And yet, perhaps Christmas is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that God’s revelation to us in Christ was unique, to be sure—as well as unprecedented, astounding, newsworthy, and faith-forming—but that it also stands on the shoulders of a longer history of God’s speaking to God’s people in times of need, in ways they could hear, using people ordinary and humble. We can no more cut ourselves off from this long tradition of God’s revelation than we can escape our identity as children of God. The writer of Hebrews affirms this again and again as the news of Christ is told, both standing as the pre-eminent expression of and lying deeply embedded in God’s Word to God’s people throughout history, and before all time, and when time is no more.

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Reviews Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology by Michael Fishbane University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008. 231 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-226-25171-4.

“IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING,” wrote T. S. Eliot, in his theologically engaged major poem, “Four Quartets,” which explores the relation between poetry and the history of Christian theology. In many ways, the acknowledgments that conclude Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology mark the volume’s real beginning. Here, Michael Fishbane describes how the book came into being, and does so in frank and personal terms. He describes how he had long delayed giving tangible form to the process of endless brooding on matters of theology until things reached a point of urgency, when he felt compelled to give his ideas shape, not only for his own sake but also primarily “to provide my family with a spiritual testament of my values and worldview.” He describes the volume as “a father’s gift of tradition and truthfulness” to his two sons, one that arises from “a lifetime of shared study and conversation” with them (p. 211). The book opens out from that initial audience in his mind’s eye to the broader world. In this way, the volume represents, at least in part, something like the medieval genre of the ethical will, and belongs in the tradition of a bequest in which the father passes to the children a summary of what he has learned in life, the larger set of values separate from a material estate. This is already a biblical genre, as we think of the final testaments of Jacob and of the instruction motif found in the Pentateuch around the Passover narrative, as fathers are urged to teach the next generation. This birth story of the volume helps readers know what it is and how to read it, because it is a project that, quite explicitly, goes beyond the intellectual realm to become a larger statement of value and significance. If it is a bequest to the sons, it is equally a scholar’s bequest to his readership, as he passes on not only the material estate of historical knowledge, but also a larger sense of why scholarship matters. In this way, it is a Summa Theologica, not as a summary of the major theological teachings of the time, as with Aquinas, but as a summary of the significance of Fishbane’s academic work for broader work in theology. Throughout, Fishbane consistently reflects on this project, its methodology and goals, and thus invites the reader to join in that dialogue. It is important to stress that the volume is not a standard biblical theology with a descriptive and historical focus that seeks to draw out the theological significance of the HB or the theologies of its writers. Nor is it a standard systematic theology in the conventional sense, providing neatly compartmentalized reflections on dogmatics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. It does not map past meanings, because Fishbane’s goal is constructive. He aims to provide a coherent description of what it means to live as a Jew in the mod-

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ern world, in such a way that one’s existence is informed thoroughly by the riches of Jewish tradition, but not confined within the worldview of conventional orthodox Judaism. This theological project takes a broader conceptual view of the breakdown of tradition and of the certainties of the past on the one hand, and of human language, culture, and embodiment on the other. It includes thoughtful discussions of the aesthetic dimension of life, which is to say the ways in which the fine arts, such as music and poetry, function as means to seek transcendence. I was struck, for example, by Fishbane’s discussion of a poem by Wallace Stevens and his implicit recognition of the religious dimensions of poetry as a “prefiguration of theology” (p. 32). What is distinctive about this volume is that it is so self-consciously a hermeneutical theology. Scripture is the primary textual resource for the construction of this theology. The studied interpretation of Scripture, engaging classical techniques of rabbinic interpretation, provides the primary methodology that animates the theology, even as the volume reaches beyond the original compass both of Scripture and of the rabbinic world in which those exegetical techniques originally operated. Fishbane asks, “What is hermeneutical theology? How may we understand it in the context of Jewish theology?” (p. 62). His answer illustrates his focus upon the constructive rather than historical nature of his engagement with the HB: “The cultural archive must become a living voice, and the written formulations must become direct address; one’s life and the lifeworld presented in the text must coincide in a dynamic way” (p. 63). At the surface level, the point here is very clear: In drawing upon Scripture, Fishbane is concerned to provide not an archaeology of past meanings, but a new cultural resource, indeed, a resource for the generation of new culture. He does not interrogate Scripture but allows Scripture to speak anew. Below the surface, the shift from historical to constructive seems to me also selfreferential in terms of how this volume relates to Fishbane’s earlier work, as the historian of Jewish textuality moves forward to become a constructive theologian also. At a more profound level, I would argue that this new project is simply unthinkable without his previous work. More importantly, the previous work was already implicitly theological from the very beginning. Before turning to this present volume, let me develop this point, and then I will look at some of the readings of Scripture in Sacred Attunement, including Fishbane’s techniques for allowing Scripture to become direct address. Finally, I will pose some questions. In Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985; with addenda, 1988), Fishbane built on the insights of a number of other scholars to provide a new model for analyzing the composition and growth of biblical literature. He demonstrated the extent to which Israelite scribes and authors were constrained to comment upon, explicate, annotate, revise, refer to, and embellish earlier texts that occupied a privileged place in their culture. Fishbane also showed how the dynamic of tradition and interpretation is an inner-biblical as well as a post-biblical one. The continuities of literary form and exegetical technique reach from cuneiform literature through biblical texts into the Dead Sea Scrolls. These continuities imply that rabbinic literature presupposes an immanent tradition of textual study and does not belatedly derive from the Greco-Roman culture of late antiquity. The book also established continuities of form and scribal technique that span the various literary genres of the Bible. At another level, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel did much more. It represented an act

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of cultural recovery, reclaiming the HB as a fertile site of Jewish scholarship and a foundation for Jewish intellectual history. In some ways, Fishbane did for biblical studies what Larry Schiffman did a decade ago for Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, in that both directed attention to the creative nature of law and legal interpretation. Fishbane conceptualized the Bible, in effect, as a hermeneutical text, a dialogical text, where different voices interact with one another, and where one can see the tradition in the process of its formation. Looking back upon this work a decade later, Fishbane wrote: [T]he Bible is only tradition, in form and content. . . . As we now have them, we have tradition producing tradition through the mediation of a silent redaction. This silent hand of culture-formation and its anthological product is of the essence of biblical and post-biblical tradition. ( “The Hebrew Bible and Exegetical Tradition,” in Intertextuality in Ugarit and Israel [ed. Johannes C. de Moor; Oudtestamentische Studiën 40; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998], 18).

The larger goal of this scholarly analysis is a project of cultural recovery: “the Hebrew Bible is the product of tradition in diverse stages of unfolding, and . . . to catch the content in diverse contexts would be to penetrate beneath the textual surface to the living reality of Israel” (ibid.). Fishbane’s Biblical Myth and Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) addressed a problem in the history of religion. Scholars as well as laity tend to make a sharp distinction between mythological religions and monotheism, as if the former were more primitive and irrational, and the monotheistic religions replaced and moved beyond them in order to achieve their distinctive identity. Fishbane made a strong argument that myth is integral to both monotheism and Judaism. The book is a demanding, often technical, read that covers two millennia of literary history. Its three major sections focus upon ancient Israel, the midrashic literature of rabbinic Judaism, and medieval Judaism. In each case, Fishbane investigated two different modes of conceptualizing God: the cosmological acts of God (God as creator) and the magnalia dei, the great acts of God in history as he defends or redeems Israel (YHWH as Divine Warrior). Through all of this, Fishbane sought to realign some of the standard intellectual categories. Myth becomes a form of exegesis, and Jewish history becomes a series of ever intensifying rereadings of the past. Ancient Israelite authors rework Near Eastern material in order to conceptualize creation or redemption; rabbinic authorities reread the biblical canon to turn it into a kind of lexicon for new mythmaking (to depict the Shekinah as going into slavery in Egypt along with Israel, so that God is then redeemed along with his people in the exodus); and in the Zoharic rereading, the canon of Scripture itself becomes finally only a coded textual metaphor for God, depicted as embodied, as having an erotic life, and as being impacted directly by human action and historical events such as the destruction of the temple. In this ambitious study, exegesis is no longer a specific textual interpretation. It becomes a form of cultural transformation and religious imagination central to monotheism. The principle that was demonstrated in historical terms in Biblical Myth and Mythmaking, that cultural renewal and transformation take place by means of hermeneutics, by rereading the classical texts of the past, becomes an agent for constructive theology in Sacred Attunement. In ch. 2, “A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology,” the longest chapter in the book, Fishbane offers a series of readings of three key texts in the Bible: 1) the beautiful story of Jacob’s dream at Beth El in Gen 28:10–22, with the vision of the stairway to heaven; 2) the account of the call of Moses in

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Exod 3; and 3)the account of the Sinai covenant, with a particular focus upon Exod 19 as the foundation of Jewish theology. These three passages become a resource for the construction of new meanings through the use of the fourfold method of medieval Jewish exegesis, known by the acronym PARDES, the term for “paradise.” The four consonants each refer to a different hermeneutics of Scripture: 1. Peshat: the literal or historical reading 2. Derash: midrashic interpretation, where the focus is the plurality of meanings and the ability to contemporize the text to address new needs 3. Remez: the process of aligning the text to a non-textual and non-empirical truth that is external to the text, on the assumption that truth lies beyond appearances 4. Sod: the technique of mystical or esoteric interpretation In a tour de force demonstration of exegetical dexterity, Fishbane offers four extended readings of the account of Jacob’s dream, according to each of the four methods. The goal of the project is to transform Scripture from a repository of past meanings into, in effect, a contemporary revelation. Without retracing his steps, I would like to offer some thoughts and responses, mainly in the form of open-ended questions that arose from my own reading. Let me begin, as Fishbane does in the textual core of the volume, with the revelation at Mount Sinai. I will quote rather liberally from ch. 2 to give a sense of his approach as he moves from the biblical text to the construction of a Jewish theology out of that text: For scripture, Sinai is primary and its words are primary. It is foundational in every sense. At this place, the entire people stood before God and received their central theological principles. (p. 46) Different teachers emphasized different topics and values; and various seekers sought the core of Sinai in different intellectual or spiritual principles. But Sinai always remained primary. One might even say that there is no authentic Jewish theology outside this covenant core, however diversely it might be conceived or elaborated. For it is the Sinai covenant that has shaped Jewish life and thought over the ages. (p. 49) Sinai is thus not a one-time event, but for all times; it is not only grounded in the historical past, but hovers in the living present. Sinai stands at the mythic core of Jewish memory, and the explication of its teachings is a sacred ritual for Judaism. (p. 49)

And then there is a transition from the historically descriptive to the constructive, and, with it, to an elegantly posed question: But since we are only now turning toward Jewish theology, it is first necessary to ask: What is the theological center of the Sinai event? If Sinai is the beginning of Jewish theology, what is the beginning of Sinai, and what is its core? This last query is less a historical question than a hermeneutical one, and it addresses anyone who would still hope to stand at Sinai in new times and circumstances. I would begin an answer this way: Jewish theology begins with Sinai, but God was before this event. (pp. 49–50)

This is where I begin my series of questions and responses. The first question is: “Does placing

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God prior to Sinai mean, in effect, that God is prior to and independent of hermeneutics?” From the rest of Fishbane’s work, one would not think so, but at this point in the volume, with its stress on the importance of receptivity, of turning toward the divine, I almost get the feeling that the concept of God is being essentialized, placed beyond language, as if God were not also a theological construction. Let me take this a step further, once again looking back at Fishbane’s larger oeuvre, especially Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel through Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. How does the earlier historical-descriptive work on inner biblical exegesis connect with the theologicalprescriptive emphasized in Sacred Attunement? The strength that I have always found in Fishbane’s work is his demonstration of the ways in which the received tradition was always already itself a product of the reworking of tradition. The academic and historical analysis, in other words, was never merely descriptive or archival, but showed the nuts and bolts of tradition in formation, and was therefore implicitly constructive. Exegesis is not only what is done to Scripture, but what gives rise to Scripture. From this perspective, what does it mean to say, “Sinai is the beginning of the Jewish tradition”? Is it not equally the case that Sinai, far from representing an ancient beginning, is rather a mature and belated exegetical, redactional, and theological construction, one that represents the studied work of scribes? This is a point where the methodology and theoretical model of inner biblical exegesis squares completely with German literary and redaction critical arguments that the Sinai pericope, along with the concept of covenant in Exod 19 and 24, represent mature developments that presuppose Deuteronomistic theology, and are not early ideas. Thus, how do we read the statements here, and how do they function as points of departure for belief? How does Fishbane negotiate these issues in his own work as engaged scholar and as a committed theologian? To return to Sacred Attunement, let me raise another question evoked by Fishbane’s reflection upon the singular importance of Moses as a paradigm for the life attuned to the divine call, for the irruption of the transcendent that can transform one’s normal commitments and force new ones. He reflects on the significance of the Moses call narrative in Exod 3 as follows: This call is a call of destiny and demand. Out of the silence, Moses hears the appeal of commitment. It was similar to the call addressed to the ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in generations past, which instructed them to guide the people to their land of promise; and now Moses understands that he too has been summoned to step out of his everyday routine and see his life as part of a larger destiny. . . . Now all is mission, consumed by the consciousness of being sent. (p. 53)

As attractive as this formulation is, I read Exod 3–4 somewhat differently. I see Moses ducking and weaving and feinting, almost like Muhammed Ali in the ring, doing whatever he can to parry God’s call, asking for names, asking for signs, protesting his inability to speak, to the point that he ultimately infuriates God (Exod 4:14). In my view, the theological profundity of the story is its affirmation of the humanity and fallibility of the founder of the tradition, even at the moment of being called. Let me put this more conceptually, and pose my second main question: What is the place of doubt and of theological challenge within any theology, let alone a Jewish theology? Can doubt have

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theological integrity? Doubting and questioning is an extensive theme throughout the Bible, evident in the repeated challenges and questions of Moses at the burning bush and in the spirit of Ecclesiastes, so threatening to piety that it had to be contained by a pious colophon at odds with everything that precedes. It is also majestically evident, of course, in the book of Job, and its rejection of Deuteronomic doctrine about the proper reward for the righteous. For all Job’s impious challenges to God, it is uniquely of him that God says in the book’s epilogue, addressing Eliphaz the Temanite: “I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job” (Job 42:7b; JPSV). Despite Job’s pious repentance in dust and ashes (42:6), cowed by the theophany, the final redaction of the book affirms Job’s challenges, perhaps we can say his faithful and principled impiety, as ne5ko
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logically inclined secular Jew? In part, my question arises from Fishbane’s extended use of the first person plural “we” throughout the volume, as a vehicle for making normative statements about the nature of human existence and the shape of being in the world. There is an attempt here to describe, in a universal way, the human condition, and to be as inclusive as possible in doing so. I believe that the intent is to move away from the standard academic, objective voice to one that is more embodied and inclusive (p. 202). Ironically, while welcoming the intent, I did not always know how to connect to these statements. In some ways, and here I return to the end of Sacred Attunement, I wanted to see more of those “I” statements. I was interested in learning how Fishbane personally found it possible to hold together the scholarly and the religious; how he maintained theological convictions in face of personal tragedy; how someone with a distinctive ability to track the entire trajectory of Israelite and Jewish literary and religious thought could also hear the divine speaking; and how he could ascend that ladder, reconciling the )ars[a< (earthward) of scholarship with the has\s\a3ma3ye5ma< (heavenward) of theology. Bernard M. Levinson UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

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Beginning from Jerusalem: Christianity in the Making, Vol. 2 by James D. G. Dunn Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 1,363 pp. $80.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8028-3932-9. JAMES DUNN HAS BEEN ONE OF the most prolific and influential NT scholars of the last forty years. An architect of the “new perspective” on Paul, he is known for his command of the primary and secondary sources, plus meticulous attention to detail combined with a clear vision of the big picture. His work has not only reshaped the study of Paul, but also reoriented the study of the historical Jesus and his reception in the early church. Dunn writes as a Christian, always (at least implicitly) with an eye on the contemporary church. He writes for “seekers of truth”—and for those who teach them (p. xv). Beginning from Jerusalem is the second volume in Dunn’s trilogy on the birth of Christianity, the first volume being Jesus Remembered (2003). This huge book is intimidating but—as always with Dunn—quite readable. It covers the years 30–70 C.E. in four major parts: “Writing a History of Christianity’s Beginnings,” on method and sources; “The First Phase,” on the earliest church in Jerusalem, the Hellenists, Paul’s emergence, Peter’s mission, and the Antioch crisis addressed at Jerusalem; “Apostle to the Gentiles,” on Paul’s apostleship, mission, and churches; and, finally, “The End of the Beginning,” on the end of Paul’s ministry, the “voiceless Peter,” the fate of the Jerusalem church, and the legacy of the apostles Paul, James, and Peter as reflected in Ephesians, James, and 1 Peter. More than half of the book is about Paul. Dunn’s agenda is “the quest for the historical church(es),” though not merely as an aspect of ancient history, but “from within,” as experienced by those who were part of it (pp. 5, 129–30). Still, the trilogy is driven by a standard historical question: How did an apocalyptic, charismatic, evangelistic, and messianic Jewish sect become a predominantly Gentile religion? This volume answers how the movement in that direction began: through the ministry of Jews who were convinced that the eschatological Spirit had been given to Gentiles as Gentiles, obviating the need for them to become Jews but also gradually distancing themselves from the most conservative members of the sect in Jerusalem, ironically, where it all began. Much of the book is an expert, in-depth guided tour of Acts—with all its puzzles, problems, and lacunae—and, for Paul, the letters. How can one summarize and evaluate such a project in a few paragraphs? Only by commenting on a few key topics. 1. The nature of Acts. One cannot reconstruct earliest Christian history without sources, but there has been a tendency in recent scholarship to question the historical value of Acts. Dunn sides with those who reject this “dominant theology-and-therefore-not-history school” (pp. 127–28).

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Making an argument similar to the one in Jesus Remembered, Dunn contends that Luke is both faithful to his sources (including the speeches) and an innovative interpreter of them. He rightly points out that Luke has an agenda—“to tell his story as the narrative of God’s working out his purpose” (p. 82) and to show the unity in the growing movement (p. 85)—but that this does not mean Luke creates a fantasy world. Rather, both the broad strokes and many of the details of Luke’s account are remarkably accurate, based, Dunn argues, on eyewitness accounts and on Luke’s own experience (the “we” passages, in which the “we” is often discounted as mere rhetoric). Luke, then, is a good ancient historian, writing history with rhetorical and artistic flair for a purpose, but still good history. Dunn’s perspective will seem conservative to some, but it is better characterized as moderate and balanced. Unfortunately, however, Dunn occasionally perpetuates the idea that Acts intends to reassure readers that the growth of the church “did not threaten Roman authority in any degree” (p. 82; cf. 553–54 and passim). While early Christianity was not politically revolutionary, according to Acts, it did fundamentally threaten everything Roman, as Kavin Rowe has persuasively argued (World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age [Oxford University Press, 2009]). This has more than historical consequences, affecting how we hear Acts today. At least Dunn acknowledges that Paul, like Jesus, advocated a life that was “deeply, but not openly, subversive” (p. 555). 2. The first phase. In his discussion of the earliest communities in and around Jerusalem, a topic often neglected because of the paucity of sources, Dunn leads his readers through the early chapters of Acts. He has a fascinating theological and historical analysis of the Pentecost narrative, not merely to introduce his approach to Acts, but to answer the question of how the first phase of the movement—and indeed Christianity itself—was launched. He argues that something like the narrative recounted in Acts 2 is historically quite plausible, and he rightly reminds us that this “first mass ecstasy” (p. 168), the “big bang” (p. 169) that jump-started the church, is part of the strong evidence that the first generation of Christianity “understood itself as quintessentially a movement of the Spirit of God” (p. 171). Throughout this section, Dunn skillfully weaves together the details of Acts, relevant texts and data from other sources within and outside the NT, and historical judgments to paint a picture of nascent Christianity that is, on the whole, accurately reflected in Acts. This is not circular reasoning; rather, Dunn painstakingly and convincingly shows the plausibility of much of Acts, in spite of Luke’s tendency to engage in some hyperbole and idealization. Of special note is Dunn’s welcome accent on the vitality of the living memory of Jesus for these earliest Christians. As the story unfolds, Dunn wisely highlights the diversity and even tension within earliest Christianity, a move with both historical and contemporary theological significance. The overall picture that emerges is of communities that are clearly Jewish and yet also distinctive: by virtue of their confession of and devotion to Jesus, act of initiation (baptism), experience of the Spirit, solidarity, scriptural interpretation, and missionary zeal—even toward Gentiles, without requiring their circumcision (thanks first to the Hellenists, or former diaspora Jews, then Paul and his colleagues, and even Peter and James). Some of these distinctives quickly enraged temple officials and other Jewish leaders, such as the pre-Christian Saul/Paul. 3. Paul. Dunn’s treatment of Paul (“the second founder of Christianity”) complements his

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Theology of Paul the Apostle, giving attention to what we learn from Acts and from each letter, and thus to the developing story of Paul’s mission and to the particularities of the various Pauline communities. Anyone familiar with Dunn’s work on Paul will not be surprised at his careful attention to Paul’s “theologizing” with each community and to his ongoing—though somewhat more nuanced—embrace of what he himself termed “the new perspective.” But Dunn is sometimes persuasive in unpredictable ways: Paul was likely a Roman citizen; the Damascus road experience was a conversion, not just a call (contra Krister Stendahl); the conversion was the most important source of Paul’s theology (following Seyoon Kim, a critic of the new perspective); justification is “vertical” as well as “horizontal” (a response to critics); Luke rightly has Paul beginning each urban mission at the local synagogue; and Paul almost certainly does not believe in two ways of salvation. Of only a handful of significant disagreements I have with Dunn on Paul, one cannot go unnoted. He claims that in 1 Thessalonians Paul unfortunately wants the Thessalonians to be an introverted, Qumran-like cult unconcerned for outsiders (pp. 711–12). This seems very unlikely in light of the Thessalonians’ widespread reputation for faithfulness in persecution (1:8) and Paul's admonition to “do good to one another and to all” (i.e., insiders and outsiders; 1 Thess 5:15). 4. Final matters. Dunn argues, surprisingly but plausibly, that both James and 1 Peter contain the teaching of the apostles whose names they bear. And he contends provocatively, but persuasively, that James actually comes to Paul’s defense (!), and that he and Paul fundamentally agree on justification and ethics. Finally, Ephesians may be for Dunn the pinnacle of the NT, with its vision of Jewish-Gentile unity in the church. Scholars will debate the details of Dunn’s reconstruction for many years. But what can preachers and teachers gain, and share, from this massive work? Four principal things, I think. First, a wealth of historical insights about the earliest churches reflected in Acts and the letters. Second, greater appreciation for the development and the distinctives of the early Christian church(es) and, consequently, for the church’s ongoing diversity. Third, gratitude to the Hellenists and Paul for opening up the movement to Gentiles. And fourth, a renewed appreciation for the role of the Spirit in the church and a corollary trust that, despite all our foibles, God’s purposes in Christ are being worked out. Michael J. Gorman ST. MARY’S SEMINARY & UNIVERSITY BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

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Revelation: A Commentary by Brian K. Blount New Testament Library. Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 462 pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-664-22121-8. THE CHALLENGE FOR ANYONE who writes a commentary on the book of Revelation is to produce a coherent, convincing reading of a text that is filled with strange symbolism, mixed genres, and a confusing structure. This commentary by Brian Blount in the New Testament Library series succeeds admirably, not only in helping readers understand the often bewildering landscape of Revelation, but also in challenging them to take seriously the powerful theological concerns of the book. In the relatively brief introduction to the commentary, Blount covers the usual issues of authorship, date, genre, social setting, outline, and structure of the book. His views are consistent with that of most recent scholars. The book was written around 95 C.E. during the reign of Domitian as Roman emperor by an otherwise unknown John, a prophet-leader among the churches of Asia Minor. The setting was western Asia Minor in a society dominated by the Roman Empire, whose social, economic, political, and religious control permeated all aspects of the culture. Persecution of Christians who defied Roman hegemony was a real threat, but so far only a minor reality. In fact, the lack of persecution could be seen as evidence that Christians had sold out to Rome and its enticements. For Blount, the interpretive key to Revelation is the book’s call to nonaccomodating, resistant witness to God and Christ. John believed that the churches in Asia Minor were under siege by a culture with which there could be no compromise. As the messages to the seven churches in chs. 2 and 3 make clear, some of the Christians in those churches had already resisted the idolatrous claims of Rome on their lives, demonstrating their faithfulness to God by bearing witness that God, not the emperor, was Lord. The message of Revelation to those faithful witnesses was one of encouragement to hold fast, to persist in their refusal to accept the societal and cultural enticements to acknowledge the sovereignty of Rome. On the other hand, some of the Christians of Asia Minor had failed to make clear their total allegiance to God and Christ. They had acquiesced to the claims of imperial Rome, compromising their faith and their witness by becoming too much a part of their world and culture. John’s message to these accommodating Christians was to take a stand for the lordship of God. They were called to stand up and stand out, rather than blend into the culture and not be noticed, even if such action resulted in their deaths. Adhering to the format of the New Testament Library series, Blount offers his own translation of the text of Revelation, followed by brief notes on the Greek text. His translations at times provide some fresh ways of hearing the text. For example, instead of the literal translation “son of man,” he uses the phrase “child of humanity” in order to be more inclusive. Sensitive trans-

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lators have frequently struggled with the best way to render that phrase, with no completely satisfactory solution. Translations like Blount’s avoid masculine wording, but at the cost of losing the richness of the “son of man” terminology and its connection to other biblical and nonbiblical texts. His suggested translation of the robes given to the faithful as “dazzling” robes instead of “white” robes evidences a concern for the way words can sometimes imply unintended ideas. As he points out, “Too often the color [white] has been connected uncritically with ethnicity and race. Biblical affirmation of the color has therefore often been taken incorrectly as a biblical affirmation of the white race” (p. 71). When he turns to commentary on the text itself, Blount brings a theological and ethical sensitivity to his reading of John’s message, such as sensitivity to the portrayal of women in the text and to the use of violence. He concedes that John’s language and imagery is unfortunately at times misogynistic, especially his portrayal of the great whore of Babylon. Not only is there glee over the violence done to the woman, but the imagery degrades women’s sexuality. As Blount writes, “Evil takes on a decidedly female shape. Sexuality is the problem, and clearly for John here, it has a female orientation” (p. 310). The task of the preacher or teacher of this text is to find ways to neutralize the damage these images could do to women, perhaps by finding better metaphors to convey John’s message for modern audiences. Also, John at times presents God as the source and authorization of extreme acts of violence, from the plagues and torments unleashed through the series of seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls to the scenes of eternal torment of the wicked. Again, Blount challenges the modern reader of the Apocalypse to search for a better way to express the truth John was trying to convey, that is, that God’s justice includes eternal separation from the presence of God for those who choose to reject God. The whole issue of violence, however, and especially the violence associated with God, is one area where Blount’s work seems to come up short, especially given the forceful way he introduces this topic at the beginning of his commentary. He writes that Revelation is a “mean book; it is not, however, mean-spirited” (p. 1). Furthermore, “John’s God, like Moses’ God, is a violent God” (p. 3). In dealing with this issue, he cites the views of Miroslav Volf and Allan Boesak that divine violence and divine anger are required by divine justice. In response, Blount correctly points out that Revelation never calls for violent resistance to the evil of the world. Rather, the challenge issued by John is for nonviolent witness for God and against evil. At the end of the commentary, Blount concedes that John’s depictions of violence, authorized and executed by God, are perhaps part of the inadequate and even inaccurate portions of the message of Revelation, similar to John’s erroneous belief that the end of the world would occur soon. But is that all that can be said? In light of the dangers of misreading and misusing the violent imagery of Revelation, a fuller excursus on the theological problems of John’s portrayal of God and violence would have been helpful, especially for those who must teach and preach this book. As is the case with any commentary, and certainly with one on a book as creative and imaginative as the Apocalypse, one can find places where one would disagree with an author’s views or explanations. Only on rare occasions did I find myself in disagreement with Blount, and usually even in those instances his views were an equally viable alternative. His approach to Revelation is well-argued, perceptive, and conversant with the best of recent scholarship on the

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book. One example, however, of a place where Blount’s exegesis seems to falter is in Rev 12. Surprisingly, in explaining the story of the woman who gives birth to a male child and is subsequently attacked by the great red dragon, he does not connect this story to the combat myths of the ancient world, especially the myth of Leto’s giving birth to Apollo, followed by the attack of Python. Adela Yarbro Collins and others have shown how John is likely adapting this ancient myth and Christianizing it to make it a vehicle for the gospel story. That insightful understanding of the background of ch. 12 provides a more powerful reading of the text and seems more likely than the view that John’s imagery here is drawn primarily from motifs in the HB and from pagan cults. Regardless of these minor criticisms or disagreements, Blount has produced a coherent, lively commentary on Revelation. His passion for John’s visionary work pulses through the pages. Anyone who accepts the challenge of teaching or preaching the Apocalypse will find this commentary to be a clear, understandable guide to the message of the book, imbued with thoughtful theological insight. Blount’s reading of Revelation is that it is a call for its readers/hearers to be faithful witnesses. By means of his compelling exegesis of John’s work, Blount has shown himself to be a faithful witness, echoing the demand of the ancient seer of Patmos that Christians are to declare by their words and their deeds that “true lordship belongs to God and Christ” (p. 417). Mitchell G. Reddish STETSON UNIVERSITY DELAND, FLORIDA

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God and Earthly Power: An Old Testament Political Theology by J. G. McConville Continuum Biblical Studies. New York, T & T Clark, 2008. 200 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978-0-567-04570-6. J. G. MCCONVILLE OBSERVES how theological scholarship generally has been guided by one of three approaches, the traditional historical-critical method (behind the text), “a method of reading in which texts are understood in light of each other” (p. 10, of/within the text), and a reader-centered approach (in front of the text). While he expresses his intention to utilize all three, and while instances are not lacking in which he attends to historical context, his portrayal of the political theology of the OT is mainly shaped by the meaning he discovers within the narrative of the received canon. The book’s subtitle, An Old Testament Political Theology, suggests a broader scope than a study of Genesis to 2 Kings. The consequence of this selectivity is serious, as alternative theo-political formulations found in Hebrew Scripture are scarcely mentioned, and when they are, as in the case of the royal theology, the interpretation is negative. The result is that the inclusivist/Deuteronomic political theology that McConville eloquently describes and commends to the reader does not benefit from a serious discourse with the other political views coming to expression in Scripture. At the center of McConville’s study is the biblical emphasis on the oneness of God. Although, as he notes, it has become fashionable to attribute intolerance, domination, and violence to monotheism and to extol (in a manner echoing modern pluralism) worship of a multiplicity of gods as a source of world harmony, he presents the thesis that rightly understood, the biblical confession in one God as creator and ruler of all peoples presents the modern world with the unique opportunity to develop political philosophies and strategies dedicated to inclusive justice and peace. The key to this opportunity is found in the attribution to God of s[edakah (righteousness/justice) and the confession that God created a universe based on that very quality. God calls all nations to live in harmony with righteousness/justice, with the promise that obedience will lead to universal peace, while rejection of God’s call will result in chaos. In support of his claim for the universal vision of Scripture, he points to the report that already in antediluvian times “people began to invoke the name of the Lord” (Gen 4:26b), that even before the Torah was revealed to Moses, righteousness was ascribed to Noah and Abraham, and that alongside Israel’s ancestors, Gentiles like Rahab played a part in the biblical drama. While not denying Israel’s particular calling to exemplify true worship and faithful obedience, McConville emphatically denies the charge that the Bible is exclusivist and oppressive of other peoples, for in the unity of God’s creation lies the promise of peace among nations and liberation of the oppressed from rulers who, like the Pharaoh defeated by YHWH, are agents of chaos.

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The book has a number of strengths. First, McConville is to be commended for the clarity with which he delineates the central importance of the biblical confession of one God for political theology. Without appreciation for what within the Bible is the first commandment, it is impossible to construct the foundation for a theo-political vision that is both faithful to biblical tradition and beneficial to the people God’s disciples are called to serve. Second, by identifying s[edakah (righteousness/justice) as lying at the heart of God’s nature, and by extension, being built into the very structure of all creation and all humans (“image of God”), McConville provides profound insight into that which enables the Bible to offer hope for a peaceable and just world order. Finally, McConville’s interpretation of the laws constituting the Torah as applications of Israel’s understanding of earthly institutions as responses to God’s creational purposes, rather than as timeless rules reflective of a timeless order (as in the Egypt of the Pharaohs), opens up the Bible’s legal traditions for contemporary moral reflection. Similarly, his explanation of the balancing of powers between judiciary, monarchy, priesthood, and prophecy in the Deuteronomistic polity (regarding which he acknowledges indebtedness to S. Dean McBride) directly relates to present-day political-philosophical debate. Weaknesses include McConville’s methodology, which can be characterized as narrative/ canonical with occasional references to historical matrix. It mutes the rich developmental dimension to biblical tradition and the lively interplay between different political perspectives that facilitates engagement of biblical tradition with the complex issues and challenges of the modern world. For example, dismissal of royal theology as the seizure of power belonging to God by a human tyrant (and thus by definition an agent of chaos) fails to appreciate monarchy as a response to a precarious situation in which the collapse of tribal institutions coincided with Philistine aggression. Analogous observations could be made regarding the sapiential, apocalyptic, and accommodationist theo-political strategies found in the Bible. The above criticism implies an approach that would incorporate a more rigorous study of the contexts within which various theo-political alternatives waxed and waned over time, an approach deploying the tools of historical critical methodology supplemented by social-anthropological analysis and greater attention to archaeological data. Such attention to the diachronic dimension, in turn, would expose the complexity of political institutions in Israel and enable honest grappling with elements of violence and domination attributed to divine commands, such as the slaughter of the indigenous peoples in the conquest. The result would be a thicker description of the creative, liberating dynamic of Israel’s central confession of God’s oneness and righteousness that McConville describes with force and clarity, a description underlining the “messiness” of the phenomenon in which a just and merciful God chooses humans as partners and their institutions as the mediating agencies of his earthly rule. Paul D. Hanson HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

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“They Shall Purify Themselves”: Essays on Purity in Early Judaism by Susan Haber Early Judaism and its Literature. Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, 2008. 240 pp. $32.95. ISBN 978-158983-355-5.

SUSAN HABER WAS A doctoral student at McMaster University when she died in 2006 after a brief illness. The quality and insightfulness of the work she left behind, collected here under the editorship of Adele Reinhartz, suggests the loss the academy suffered as a result of her untimely death. Haber examines conceptions of impurity and the application of the laws of cultic cleanness in antique Judaism. The issues are of central and growing interest and importance in contemporary study, and this book provides an excellent point of entry, both in Haber’s reviews of past scholarship (part 1) and in her own synthetic studies of the meaning of purity in ancient Judaism (parts 2–3). The three bibliographic studies that comprise the book’s first section cover “Ritual and Moral Purity and Impurity” in the HB, Second Temple Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The question Haber examines is whether sin was understood to lead to defilement in the same way as contact with physical sources of uncleanness. Study of this relationship between sin and uncleanness has recurred over the last decades, and interest has grown in the face of recent scholarly concern for the construction of the body in ancient cultures. Here, Haber largely reviews the approaches and conclusions of the many scholars who have addressed this question, offering an initial critique but not, in this setting, attempting her own synthesis of the diverse and often ambiguous evidence. Her work is a valuable point of entry into this current and ongoing debate. Section Two examines the role purity played in selected Second Temple and early Christian pericopae: the martyrdom of the mother and seven sons in 2 Maccabees, the language of

purity and temple in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the story of the hemorrhaging woman in Mark 5:24–34, and the rejection of Jewish purity law as a central aspect of Hebrews’ polemic against Judaism. The final section, “Historical Studies,” concerns the role of purity in first-century Jewish life, reflecting on whether the early synagogue was considered a place of sanctity that required ritual purification before entering, comparable to the Jerusalem temple, and considering Jesus’ possible participation in purity rituals upon his arrival in Jerusalem, and prior to his entry into the temple. In both of these instances, recognizing purity as a central concern of biblical and post-biblical Judaism, Haber finds good evidence to assume the application of the purity regimen. Throughout the essays in the second and third sections of the book, she heightens our awareness of the need to confront the centrality of purity in early Judaism if we are to understand either the context of Jesus’ early ministry or the self-definition of Christianity as Christians broke from Jewish theology and practice. In all of these essays, Haber offers close and critical analyses of texts that bring us directly to a central concern of classical Judaism. These studies are of value to anyone who wishes to grasp how within the temple and, especially after its destruction, Jews, and then early Christians, struggled with the meaning and purpose of the Levitical purity laws, which we see here in their central role within early Judaism.

ALAN J. AVERY-PECK COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS

God’s Tapestry: Reading the Bible in a World of Religious Diversity by W. Eugene March Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 113 pp. $16.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23360-0.

HOW TO ADAPT TO OUR religiously diverse and pluralistic world is the issue that Eugene March

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explores in God’s Tapestry: Reading the Bible in a World of Religious Diversity. He says that in order to do so, Christians must address two crucial issues. First, we must reexamine many long held assumptions about the Bible; and second, American Christians must become educated about our new historical context. March uses the metaphor of a tapestry to describe God’s work in the world, contending that the “rich tapestry of religious tradition . . . is God’s gift to us, intended to help us better understand God’s graciousness” (p. 93). March argues that instead of the exclusivist and condescending view toward other faiths that Christians have held for centuries, God wants us to become better informed about our own religion and to engage in honest, open dialogue with those of other faiths. March questions whether the view that Christian faith is the only way to have a relationship with God is what the Bible really teaches. He shows that the Bible records various instances in which our forbearers also confronted religious diversity and pluralism, often learning and adapting from others. March quotes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who says that every great faith has both abrasive, harsh texts that endorse particularism, suspicion of strangers, and intolerance of others, and generous texts that emphasize kinship, empathy, and the courage to extend a hand across boundaries of estrangement or hostility. March wants us to emphasize the latter. March also addresses ways that American congregations can understand and adapt to the new religious diversity. He emphasizes that the language we use and the approach we take to relating to other faiths should be respectful and inclusive. He makes many practical suggestions for congregations, such as inviting those of other faiths into mutual conversation, doing joint work projects, and establishing an interfaith council or forum in their local community. In a post–9/11 world, it is crucial that Christians find positive ways to relate to and engage those of other faiths. If we cannot, violent expressions of faith threaten to create more terrorism and xenophobia. Congregations would benefit greatly from reading March’s book, discussing the questions included at the end of every chapter, and implementing his

suggestions for reaching out to those of other faiths.

HAMPTON DECK FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH VALLEJO, CALIFORNIA

Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World by Lawrence M. Wills Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., 2008. 257 pp. $26.95. ISBN 978-0-7425-6250-9.

THIS BOOK EXAMINES THE vision of the “Other” as constructed by texts from the biblical world, including the HB, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Gospels of Matthew and John, the letters of Paul, and the Acts of the Apostles. While the main emphasis is on how and why biblical texts construct their visions of the Other, Not God’s People also reflects a concern with how these constructions affect the ideas, attitudes, and sensibilities of modern Christians and Jews. Drawing on theoretical approaches to identity and the Other, Lawrence Wills proposes nine theorems that apply not only to biblical texts, but also to a wide range of contexts. Theorem 1, for example, called “From Other to We,” posits that the construction of the Other can serve to construct the We. The theorems provide a useful matrix for the analysis of specific texts and help to unify a large and diverse body of material. Wills shows conclusively that biblical texts exhibit little if any continuity with regard to the vision and construction of the Other, even when they claim to do so. The close triangular relationship between constructions of the Other, prejudice, and violence suggests that the damage of violence and prejudice can be un done only by perceiving the construction of the Other in all cultures and recognizing its relationship to power. This important book can help us to understand the complex role that the construction of the Other can play in identity formation. Along the way, numerous difficult exegetical issues are dealt with in a responsible and nuanced manner. For example, Wills provides an excellent and succinct discussion of the thorny question of the Johannine use of “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaioi). He concludes, correctly in my view, that “the Jews”

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serve as a cipher for the Other within the narrative world of the text, and that this narrative role expresses the alienation that the Johannine community may have felt with regard to the Jews among whom they lived. This well-written and engaging book will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike. It is not only an excellent study in biblical exegesis and thought, but also has implications for the ongoing relationship between identity and the Other in our own times.

ADELE REINHARTZ UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA ONTARIO, CANADA

Christian Origins by Jonathan Knight T & T Clark, London, 2008. 455 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0567-03351-2.

JONATHAN KNIGHT OFFERS a historical introduction to early Christianity that explains the bedrock out of which Christianity developed and the diverse forms that Christianity first assumed. Christian Origins does many things well. It traces major theological and historical developments beginning with the Bronze Age “Settlement” of Israel in the Land of Canaan and concluding with the second century C.E. rise of Gnosticism, focusing especially on Jesus and Paul. It also quickly surveys the Jewish soil out of which Christianity grew, focusing on apocalyptic expectation, different parties in Judaism (Pharisees, Sadducees, etc.), the synagogue, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other important matters. In spite of covering so much ground, however, Knight emphasizes that this ground is not at all flat, and explores the contours and landmarks of numerous scholarly debates to show that “our understanding of biblical history is in continual process of reassessment” (p. 20). His conclusions are not always uncontestable, but they are not unreasonable. Furthermore, to offer an accessible introduction that also accounts for scholarly debates is a very difficult balance to achieve, and Knight is to be commended. The book could have given more attention, however, to the fact that Christianity developed

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in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire, and that it sprang from a Judaism that was itself hellenized to various degrees. We are told in three pages about diaspora Judaism, and quickly informed of a few others things, such as that Philo was a hellenized Jew, that the Gospels resemble ancient “Lives,” and that, if Paul was born in Tarsus, he would have learned the teachings of the Cynics and Stoics. Because Knight aspires, however, to explore the “social and religious context in which Christianity first emerged”(p. 1), it would seem necessary to give more attention to the various social, religious and philosophical realities that faced the early urban Christians. The relative influence of “Judaism” and “Hellenism” upon the first Christians is certainly a contested matter, and the scholarly debates have generated libraries worth of research. But, since this book gives nuanced answers to other questions, it would seem essential to address these issues as well. Christian Origins does provide, however, a good introduction to many matters for educated laypersons or for seminary students. It would ideally be paired, though, with a companion volume, such as J. Paul Sampley’s Paul in the Greco-Roman World.

GEORGE L. PARSENIOS PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Great Psalms of the Bible by J. Clinton McCann, Jr. Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 150 pp. $16.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23176-7.

THIS BOOK IS THE LATEST contribution to the interpretation of the Psalms by J. Clinton McCann, Jr. As much as any contemporary scholar, McCann has helped the church recover the Psalter by illuminating its literary and theological character and by showing how the book of Psalms itself provides a theological context for interpretation. Great Psalms of the Bible is in some ways a distillation of his previous work in a format amenable to individual or group Bible study. The book includes twelve chapters, each of which covers a single psalm (Pss 1, 8, 13, 23, 32, 51, 63, 73, 90, 103, 139, and 148). McCann

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begins the discussion of each psalm by introducing its content, theology, and when appropriate, the role the psalm plays in the structure and overall message of the Psalter. He then explains issues of interpretation under the heading of “Dimensions of Meaning.” In the final main section (“For Today”), McCann illustrates the meaning of the psalm with references to literature, systematic theology, and issues in popular culture. He ends each chapter with “Questions for Reflection and Discussion.” The book may be most useful as a resource for studying and teaching the Psalms in a church school or other devotional setting. McCann’s selection of psalms provides a rich cross-section, so that one gets in this book essentially an introduction to the whole Psalter. For example, he discusses a rich diversity of psalm types: Ps 8 is a hymn; Ps 23 is a psalm of trust; and Ps 32 is a penitential psalm. He also discusses psalms from various places in the book of Psalms and thus provides the reader with essential information on the theological significance of the shape of the book. McCann makes each psalm accessible by orienting readers to the psalm’s structure and subject matter. For example, on Ps 63 he says, “The key word in Psalm 63 is ‘soul’” (p. 82). Then he explains briefly how the term might be otherwise translated as “life” and how the psalm is really about what constitutes life. Extensive illustrations clarify each psalm’s relevance for theology, prayer, and ethics. Although the book is eminently readable for laypersons, it will also be helpful to pastors and scholars. McCann is up-to-date on scholarship, and he writes with a freshness that will be helpful to anyone who teaches or preaches the Psalms.

JEROME F. D. CREACH PITTSBURGH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Judges by Trent C. Butler Word Biblical Commentary. Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2009. 538 pp. $49.99 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8499-0207-9.

ONLY A DEDICATED SCHOLAR would describe the writing of a 538-page commentary on the book of Judges as “fun.” Despite the fact that Judges

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has a “drearisome message of failure and disobedience,” Trent Butler defends this word choice, arguing that the book “presents the theme through irony, satire, and humor”(p. ix). Following the familiar format of the Word Biblical Commentary series, Butler introduces each textual unit with an extensive bibliography followed by his own translation and accompanying textual notes. A discussion of critical interpretive issues follows in the “Form/Structure/ Setting” section. Under “Comment,” Butler presents a detailed verse-byverse analysis that concludes with a general interpretive discussion titled “Explanation.” The commentary is introduced with an extensive discussion of textual, compositional, literary, and historical issues as well as reflections on the purpose of the book of Judges. After thoroughly reviewing positions on each of the critical issues, Butler draws his own measured conclusions and develops his “working hypothesis.” For Butler, Judges is an artful narration . . . for an audience experiencing the opening years of the divided monarchy and having to decide which king to follow and which sanctuary to recognize as the true center of worship. . . . [The writer] places Judah first and condemns . . . the entire northern kingdom . . . because of their idolatrous worship. (p. lxxiv) Scholars might disagree with some of the exegetical decisions made by Butler, but they cannot fault him for the thorough evenness of his discussions. Scholar and student, professor and pastor alike will find this commentary a helpful resource. For those inclined toward academic issues, Butler presents an extensive discussion of the scholarly critical issues. For example, he includes a fifty-one-page appendix containing twenty-six tables on such topics as “Syntactical Breaks in Judg 1.” For those more interested in preaching and teaching, Butler’s expositions, theological and otherwise, will be helpful. An example is his discussion of Samson, leadership skills, and the divine use of leaders possessing or, more often, lacking these skills. Given this variety of scholarly and interpretive discussion, the commentary easily should become one of the defini-

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tive resources on the book of Judges. Readers, regardless of their perspectives or interests, should have fun along with Butler as they seek “to ferret out the instances of irony and humor and to solve the scholarly riddles the book so frequently presents” (p. ix).

RICHARD G. BOWMAN AUGUSTANA COLLEGE SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA

Twice Used Songs: Performance Criticism of the Songs of Ancient Israel by Terry Giles and William J. Doan Hendrickson, Peabody, Mass., 2009. 179 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978-1-59856-272-9.

TERRY GILES, A BIBLICAL scholar, and William J. Doan, a scholar of the theater, have combined their separate skills, expertise, and experience to investigate a puzzling feature of the biblical text: songs found in literary contexts rarely add to the narrative detail of the prose sections in which they are found and often contradict it. What, then, is the function of poetic pieces that fail to contribute to the plot of the narrative? Giles and Doan claim that these songs function as a kind of “bridge” connecting the story and the audience, drawing the audience into the narrative. Two definitions are required: 1) Twice used songs “are those songs, scattered throughout the HB, that have been inserted into the midst of prose narratives. So placed, the songs have assumed a use in addition to that for which they were first composed” (p. 1); and 2) For the authors, the somewhat nebulous term performance criticism is a critical methodology that investigates biblical passages assumed to be written variations of originally oral compositions read or recited before live audiences. Since these readings and recitations were essentially “performances,” scholarly analysis of their performative dynamics provides insight into their meaning. This is an ingenious approach to the biblical text. The authors are not at all opposed to the findings of historical critical exegesis, though they explore aspects of the biblical text that have not been adequately explained by that approach. In some ways, one is reminded of the early days of form criticism when the alleged historical

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setting of a passage was reconstructed after being separated from the “author’s” redactional, that is to say, editorial activity. Here, the songs are simply separated and judged to be earlier with little or no attempt to reconstruct their original context. While this detracts somewhat from the emphasis on these songs as performances, this omission is appropriate since the only context we actually have is literary and all interpretation is reader response. It must be admitted, however, that the contradictions often found between inserted songs and their narrative contexts suggests a “prior life” for the hymnic material. Giles and Doan have provided one possible explanation for this, and in so doing, have opened up a new way into the biblical text. This book provides a clear introduction to the method and, at least, an initial run at these puzzling texts.

MARK A. THRONTVEIT LUTHER SEMINARY SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA

The Indispensable Guide to the Old Testament by Angela Bauer-Levesque Pilgrim, Cleveland, 2009, 139 pp. $17.00. ISBN 978-08298-1780-5.

ANY BOOK WITH THE bravado to label itself “indispensable,” particularly with respect to something as heavily commented on as the OT, must draw special attention. Fortunately, Angela Bauer-Levesque, a professor of Bible at Episcopal Divinity School, explains in her first chapter that it is a guide that is indispensable—not necessarily hers! Bible readers should go beyond simple “reading at face value,” and The Indispensable Guide to the Old Testament is written to help them do exactly that: to incorporate “sociohistorical and literary contexts” into one’s reading, and also to consider how to live out “scriptural truths in one’s particular context/community” (p. 14). If the Bible offers its best value when read in these ways, then readers surely need a “guide” such as this. The book is designed to serve as a supplementary text for an eight-week OT certificate course, such as those which, according to BauerLevesque, have arisen around the country as

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alternatives to Master of Divinity programs. The volume’s brevity and simplicity are thus assets: many such students are best served by spending as much time as possible on the biblical text itself, rather than on commentary upon it. Since Bauer-Levesque has an eight-week course in mind, the Guide has eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces a few OT basics, and argues for the value of historical and literary criticism as tools for acquiring a well-informed understanding of the text. This is followed by two chapters on the Pentateuch, a chapter on the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings), three chapters on the Prophets, and a final chapter entitled “Responses to Exile,” which touches on Trito-Isaiah, the Psalms, Job, and, interestingly, the “priestly” creation story of Gen 1. Unfortunately, this leaves no room for the discussion of a number of books, including some (Proverbs, Daniel) that are significant to the Christian tradition. Bauer-Levesque’s work is nevertheless lively and informative, illuminating the text without getting in its way. The bibliographies at the end of each chapter concentrate on study Bibles and one-volume commentaries instead of the book-specific commentaries that would interest diligent students. But despite this minor flaw, I enthusiastically recommend this book for use by Bible certificate programs, church study groups, and individuals who wish to engage the OT on a deeper level.

JOHN W. HERBST UNION-PSCE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles by F. Scott Spencer Interpreting Biblical Texts. Abingdon, Nashville, 2008. 260 pp. $24.00. ISBN 978-0-687-00850-6.

SCOTT SPENCER HAS ALMOST achieved the impossible: a one-volume guide to Luke’s twovolume tour de force of the life of Jesus and his first witnesses. If pastors and students who benefited from Spencer’s earlier Journeying through Acts will keep that travel guide handy, this tour provides an excellent fly-over of how Luke’s two

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volumes work together, as well as a superb companion guide for Luke’s Gospel. Though aware of the attempt by Parsons and Pervo to remove the hyphen from Cadbury’s infelicitous label, “Luke-Acts,” Spencer cautiously reasserts the value of reading Luke’s two volumes as a “double work,” noting that although they are “not identical genetic twins, they bear more than a passing family resemblance” with numerous “intertextual links” and “unifying elements” (p. 23). Beyond the parallel actions of Jesus and his followers, the paired stories of male and female experiences of the kingdom, and the prophetic previews and reviews of fulfillment, Spencer shows that both Luke’s Gospel and Acts work in tandem, providing two rails of the same track to guide readers in the preparation, establishment, expansion, and defense of God’s mission. Spencer astutely describes Luke’s articulation of God’s mission as a competitive claim on Israel’s scriptural heritage with at least seven very practical, pastoral aims: 1) to demonstrate the ancient roots of the Jesus movement; 2) to explain how God’s mission could include a crucified Messiah; 3) to underscore the risen Lord’s spiritual presence despite his physical absence; 4) to demonstrate that his power is greater than threatening demonic forces; 5) to highlight the continuing spread of the Jesus movement despite the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 C.E.; 6) to urge an ethic of love and sharing of resources despite conflicts provoked by ethnic and social diversity of the movement; and 7) to offer examples of self-definition and interreligious dialogue that do not compromise the movement’s theological identity. Spencer’s treatment of Luke’s Gospel is extensive and a welcome addition to his previous work on Acts. While his one-chapter summary of Acts in this volume rightly focuses on reverberations of “the Pentecost experience” (p. 221), Spencer left me wanting more of his insightful commentary on God’s continuing mission.

GREGORY R. PERRY COVENANT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY ST LOUIS, MISSOURI

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Galatians through the Centuries by John Riches Blackwell Bible Commentary. Oxford, 2008. 336 pp. $100.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-631-23084-7.

THIS VOLUME IN THE Blackwell Bible Commentary series on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is a literary history. While a reference work, this book could be used in the classroom in various ways to increase awareness of the relation between interpretation and social setting, to compare interpretations, or to see that sometimes interpretation is not about Galatians at all. Martin Luther, for example loved Galatians more than any other biblical book and his interpretation had a tremendous influence in the tradition. But what he said about terms such as justification had more to do with the Roman Catholic church and the papacy than with what Jews like Paul thought in the first century. John Riches traces the letter’s reception through the commentary genre, a form that allows commentators to “wrestle with the precise meaning of Paul’s compressed and often ambiguous text and to engage in dialogue with other readers in the tradition” (p. 2). He considers the commentary essential: “how are we to resolve the ambiguities of Paul’s arguments, to half-guess the nature of the arguments to which Paul is replying, without attempting to piece out its meaning sentence by sentence?” (p. 2). What does the reception historian do? The task is “to give a coherent account of the reception of a particular text” (p. 5) and to take account of the work’s power to shape the “horizon of expectations” of its readers (p. 6). Riches treats nine commentators. In each chapter, he introduces a section of Galatians and then explores the reading of it, supplementing the nine with figures such as E. P. Sanders and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. J. Louis Martyn is cited with more approval than Sanders. Interpretation of Galatians, unfortunately, is a history of Christian theological anti-Semitism. Joseph Lightfoot, for example, writes that “Paul’s religious experience has brought back to him the ‘bleak desolation, which [the Law] created and was intended to create in the soul of man,’ and

this experience had transformed him from ‘the champion of a bigoted and narrow tradition into the large-hearted Apostle of the Gentiles’” (p. 133). A reception history requires a dialectical approach that recovers genuine insights from the tradition at the same time that it explicitly rejects the biases found there, in this case, the distortions of the Law, Jews, and Judaism. This is a fascinating book by a historian who knows well the text and the theological voices of the tradition.

TATHA WILEY UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA

Christology and Science by F. LeRon Shults Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2008. 171 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-6248-8.

THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN science and religion has become something of a cottage industry in the academy, with contributions from Barbour, Polkinghorne, Peacocke, Haught, and company on very large themes: the nature and scope of divine agency in a relativistic and quantum world, issues of theodicy in a Darwinian evolutionary context, debates about determinism and freedom reframed in the context of modern genetics, and so forth. These reflections are quite valuable as correctives to popular misconceptions about the supposedly necessary conflict between science and religion. At the same time, such discussion often remains at a level of generality that glosses over the specifics of particular traditions with their distinctive doctrinal formulations. It is to LeRon Shults’ credit that he takes up the latter task by analyzing how traditional formulations of Christology are challenged by recent research in both science and the philosophy of science. Shults proposes a two-fold agenda for “the task of reforming Christology”: traditional perspectives on the person and work of Christ should be reconstructed in light of recent philosophical and scientific perspectives; and such reconceptualization should have concrete implications for Christian life and communal practice. In the first of the book’s four chapters,

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Shults develops a useful matrix that schematizes the links between and among matters of Christology, basic philosophical categories (epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical), and certain themes that emerge from recent scientific research. Those links are then made more explicit in subsequent chapters. Thus, ch. 2 reconsiders the incarnation in light of findings from evolutionary biology; ch. 3 critiques traditional “penal” understandings of atonement in light of recent work in cultural anthropology; and ch. 4 explores the way that notions of the Parousia might be reformed in light of the findings of recent physical cosmology. In each instance, what could have easily devolved into a superficial mixture of theological jargon and scientific summary is instead subtly crafted by Shults into a wide-ranging yet insightful analysis of the concepts and themes he finds pivotal to his reconstructive task. The strengths of the book are many; I will mention two. First, Shults’ review of evolutionary biology provides a convincing case for the need to reform (indeed, replace) the traditional categories of substance metaphysics for a more holistic understanding of Christ’s personhood. As he says, “one’s understanding of the relation between human flesh and human knowing will affect one’s understanding of the embodied experience of Jesus” (p. 36). Second, Shults’ critique of classical atonement theories, with their emphasis on penal and judicial metaphors, is convincing. While he does not downplay the significance of the cross, Shults recommends that atonement theory should be articulated in a way that acknowledges its broader pneumatological and ecclesiological considerations” (p. 105). The book also has two shortcomings. First, as to style, while Shults is generally clear, his writing is sometimes labored, at times, even turgid. Second, as to substance, while Shults is excellent in analyzing and synthesizing the in sights of others, his own constructive proposals remain underdeveloped. Given his reformist agenda, I expected a bit more originality than I found here.

ANDREW LUSTIG DAVIDSON COLLEGE DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA

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Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today? Pathways to Contemporary Christology edited by Andreas Schuele and Günter Thomas Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 263 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23339-6.

THIS FESTSCHRIFT COMPRISES a loose sampling of what some current Protestant scholars who happen to be friends of Michael Welker are thinking about the contemporary significance of Christ. The resulting randomness of the topics treated contributes to the vague feel of the book as a whole (who is the intended audience?), but a number of the pieces will prove interesting to one reader or another. Some are worthwhile simply as informative applications of solid scholarship to particular interpretive problems: examples include Patrick Miller’s workmanlike study of the title “king of the Jews” in the Gospels, Peter Lampe’s brief but carefully argued note on the meaning of hypostasis in Hebrews, and Sarah Coakley’s typically nuanced and historicallyinformed exploration of the “mingling” of divine and human in Christ according to Gregory of Nyssa. Andreas Schuele’s wide-ranging reflection on forgiveness in Matthew is also satisfying. Other contributions are notable for taking up boldly constructive hypotheses, albeit none with complete success. William Schweiker offers a thoughtful and appealingly modest meditation on the meaning of Christ from the standpoint of a politically-engaged humanist rather than that of a churchperson, though the properly theological payoff is elusive. Catherine Keller’s chapter is a seductively written and imaginative rhapsody on what “incarnation” might mean within the constraints of process philosophy, but the sharply rejected “classical” approaches are tiresome caricatures, and far more energy is expended on poetic turns of phrase than on metaphysical rigor. John Hoffmeyer’s earnest attempt to specify the ethical import of the parable of the sheep and the goats never stops to consider whether the pericope is perhaps best not interpreted in a hortatory vein. Remarkably, only Christoph Schwöbel’s invigoratingly technical conceptualization of resurrection can be said to push beyond surveys and brief hints in order to contribute positively to the elaboration of systematic

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Christology as traditionally conceived. Indeed, his is the most substantive of perhaps two or three contributions where explicit reflection on the theological significance of Christ is able to rise above a somewhat tired moralism. After all, this is a book on Christology in which hardly any attempt is made to thematize the issues of Jesus’ divinity and divine agency. Even so, there are rewarding nuggets to be found. Thomas Gillespie’s delightfully intriguing argument for “pistis” as a christological title in Paul’s writings by itself almost justifies paying the full purchase price.

PAUL DEHART VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Christ in Evolution Ilia Delio Orbis, Maryknoll, N.Y., 2008. 228 pp. $18.00. ISBN 9781-57075-777-8.

WE ARE ENTERING A NEW era of human consciousness, Christ in Evolution argues, and we need a new Christology that does justice to the full meaning of Christ as the Logos of the creation as we now see it through the eyes of science. Ilia Delio, professor of spirituality studies at Washington Theological Union, draws equally on evolutionary themes and Franciscan spirituality to offer a view of Christ as “the integrating center of our lives and of a universe moving forward into God.” The full scope of cosmic and biological evolution, she believes, is unified and drawn patiently but inexorably toward its consummation in Christ. Inspired in particular by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Delio says that one of the tasks of Christology today is to understand Christ

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not only as fully divine and fully human, but also as fully cosmic. The incarnation is in human form, but through our bodiliness, Christ is connected not just with human flesh but with the stuff of the cosmos, with the same redemptive purpose in view, the divinization of the creation. The strengths of this book are its timeliness and its courage. At a time when too many Christians are confused about evolution and too many theologians silent, Delio is bold to proclaim a radically new Christology. The fact that her focus is on Christology is significant in itself; this book is more than the usual “theology and science,” which so often is limited to God the Creator and not much different from deism. In addition, Christ in Evolution shows the link between theology and spirituality. Delio’s goal for us is not merely that we understand Christ but that we live in Christ, with lives that balance contemplation and action, elevating our consciousness and transforming the world. Through detachment from what is unimportant and renunciation of broken selves, we give ourselves more completely to the Christ whose fullest meaning is literally unfolding in the world in which we live, if only we are aware. While she is not against academic theology, she warns that too often the living Christ is taken prisoner by conceptual debates. “In order for Christ to live, we must let go of possessing Christ—‘do not cling to me,’ Jesus said” (p. 153). Only through a theology that is at once mystical and scientific will faith be renewed. Christ in Evolution is far more than an attempt to make Christ relevant for today; it is a cry for followers of Christ to dare to open up to and become part of the transformational truth of Christ in every dimension of creation.

RONALD COLE-TURNER PITTSBURGH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

The Power of Images in Paul by Raymond F. Collins Liturgical, Collegeville, Minn., 2008. 307 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8146-5963-2.

METAPHOR WAS ONE OF the most powerful tools that Paul used in attempting to persuade

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his audiences of the truth of the gospel that he preached. Images drawn from a variety of sources served both to clarify and to increase the impact of Paul’s arguments. Raymond Collins’ book is a thorough exploration of the metaphors and other types of images found in Paul’s letters. Both Collins’ adeptness at exegesis and his respect for the rhetorical abilities of Paul come through in this book. Collins begins with a brief treatment of the views of three ancient authors on the use of metaphor (Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian) in order to clarify the ideas about metaphor and rhetoric that Paul would have absorbed from living within Hellenistic culture. Collins then dedicates one chapter to each of Paul’s undisputed epistles, walking through each letter and exploring the metaphors found along the way. In reading this work, one is struck by the great variety of images that Paul employed. Some are drawn directly from or are heavily influenced by the Hebrew Scriptures, while others are drawn from life in the Greco-Roman city. Some are cosmic in scope while others are quite personal. In creating and employing his metaphors, Paul draws from the worlds of religion, government, finance, athletics, family, agriculture, and the courtroom. In analyzing these metaphors, Collins explores both the Hellenistic and the Hebraic backgrounds necessary for understanding the meaning of each metaphor. In addition to exploring the relevant cultural and literary backgrounds for each image, Collins also analyzes the way each metaphor serves Paul’s rhetorical aims in that particular letter. Each image is studied in its context and as it relates to the letter as a whole. Whether it is a well-known and extended metaphor, such as the image of the body of Christ in 1 Cor 12, or a brief image confined to a word or two, such as Paul’s reference to himself and his companions as being orphaned in 1 Thess 2:17, the exegete cannot do justice to Paul’s argument without careful attention to his metaphors. Collins’ book will be a useful resource to the teacher, preacher, or student seeking to understand Paul’s use of metaphor in general as well as the background, meaning, and rhetorical impact of a particular image

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found in Paul’s letters.

JENNIFER HOUSTON MCNEEL UNION-PSCE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology by Monica Coleman Innovations: African American Religious Thought. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2009. 220 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-0-80066293-6.

MONICA COLEMAN INTERWEAVES an intriguing tapestry of lived reality, intellectual thought, and transformative hope in Making a Way Out of No Way, a postmodern womanist theology. Committed to engaging faith, social responsibility, and truth telling, Coleman incorporates autobiographical, contextual experiences with soteriological scholarship of selected womanist theologians and process thinkers, with a view toward creative transformation, in order to posit a communal, soteriological theology. Coleman uses philosophical metaphysics to show how the world operates, how God and world relate to account for reality, and to account for all nature (the constant sense of change in the world, human freedom, and dynamics of evil and suffering as loss). God’s activity and nature call us with intensity to a world vision of beauty and justice. This paradigm affords human becoming and the valuing of all creation. Empowering change emerges from creative transformation wherever people create teaching and healing communities of God; challenge the status quo; de-center Christ and Jesus; involve human agency toward justice, a holistic life, and survival; and where salvation is a process, change itself. This salvific tapestry incorporates re-memory and honors ancestors. Dialogical engagement with varieties of belief and being is an ethical imperative fostering world salvific transformation. Coleman incorporates stories from science fiction and from Atlanta, Georgia’s faith community, GSN (God, Self, Neighbor) Ministries, as case studies of salvific womanist postmodern theology that embody communal and theological change. In her project, Coleman is intentional about

shaping her theory to create a diverse womanist theology that can address Black women’s lives. Making a Way Out of No Way is a provocative, engaging, dialogical work—a systematic, philosophical reading and expansion of womanist theology. Coleman’s salvation-based tapestry is impressive both in terms of the voices she engages and her critique of their weaknesses. For readers new to process theology, her thought may be jarring; others will find it refreshing. De-centering of Jesus is critical for religious pluralism among womanist thinkers at large. Summaries and conclusions help one digest her postmodern philosophical metaphysics. The womanist scholars engaged here need to be qualified as selected, for they are not representative of all womanist thinking. That GSN Ministries no longer exists demonstrates the challenge of building communal theology. Classical theology’s understanding of God who is unchanging is antithetical to Coleman’s postmodern God of change. This volume is essential reading for those interested in religious pluralism, womanist thought, salvation, and transformation and for those who want to “think outside of the box” of classic theism.

CHERYL A. KIRK-DUGGAN SHAW UNIVERSITY DIVINITY SCHOOL RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

Faithful Disagreement: Wrestling with Scripture in the Midst of Church Conflict by Frances Taylor Gench Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 135 pp. $16.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23338-9.

FEW SCHOLARS OF THE stature of Frances Taylor Gench have spent as much time as she has in engaging the church in high-charged and heartfelt conversations. Faithful Disagreement: Wrestling with Scripture in the Midst of Church Conflict is a text within context—the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its ongoing controversies over ordination standards. The book represents her passion for the highest levels of biblical scholarship and her honest discourse with countless congregations, groups, and individuals whose own passions energize her work. It is at

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once a reflection on her experience as a member of the PCUSA’s Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the church, and her commitment to rich, honest biblical study. Gench holds before the reader the tension between two principles. On the one hand, there are some things worth arguing about. Quoting John Burgess’ exposition of Karl Barth, she encourages us not to shy away from “relative conflict” because “only as we grapple with each other’s readings of Scripture will we discern what form Christ is taking among us here and now” (p. 11). On the other hand, most points of worthy conflict are not worth dividing the church over. She studies Rom 14 to hear Paul calling us to reframe our conflicts in view of the big picture, “the larger biblical narrative of God’s cosmic project of reconciliation” (p. 44). Thriving in this tension, we journey to discern the form of Christ and live faithfully into the fulfillment of God’s future. This book is an invitation to enter together into the conversation we find in the midst of these two tensions. To do so faithfully is to “wrestle with Scripture.” In conflict, she says, we must stop talking about Scripture in order to actually read it together. Each chapter is built around a Bible study, bringing her unique blend of keen intellect, common sense, and clarity of language. What other scholar could so naturally interject in an exegetical lesson, “In short, you put the grease where the squeak is”? The book is a gift to study groups who want to listen to Scripture as they listen to each other. It is a tool for those stuck in the tension and ready to focus on the ways forward. It is easily accessible for someone trained or someone untrained in biblical scholarship. Discussion questions conclude every chapter. This volume is a real gift back to the church she has engaged in her journey of discernment.

THOMAS D. HAY OFFICE OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (U.S.A.) LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

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Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent by Richard R. Gaillardetz Orbis, Maryknoll, N.Y., 2008. 312 pp. $30.00. ISBN 9781-57075-769-3.

THIS BOOK PROVIDES A rich overview of Roman Catholic ecclesiology in relation to the significance of church in an increasingly diverse and globalized world. Richard Gaillardetz starts out by reviewing biblical visions of community from which various versions of Christian ecclesiology emerged, covering key elements such as covenant, law, identity, and the inevitable role of power and conflict. From the communities of Israel and the Jesus movement, to Pauline and other early visions of church, he highlights judgments that still shape ecclesiology, such as Jesus’ welcoming of the stranger—but also the differences that shaped the early church and continue to characterize contemporary ecclesiology, such as varying forms of egalitarianism and the treatment of women. Based upon this rich introduction of biblical visions of community, Gaillardetz asserts a theme reiterated throughout the book: no one ecclesiology can be counted as singularly normative. The remaining chapters review the classic marks of the church, i.e., catholicity, unity, holiness, and apostolicity in light of globalization. This is not to say that Gaillardetz rejects tradition. Rather, he weaves his way through church history alternately critiquing the absolutizing of traditions in Roman Catholic history and agreeing that the ongoing vibrancy and life of the church requires tradition. His account of what differentiated emerging Protestant ecclesiology from Roman Catholic helpfully reveals more blurred lines in that history than are typically acknowledged. Attentive to the role of the global South and the voices of feminist, black, mujerista, latino/a, and womanist theologians, Gaillardetz offers creative implications of these marks. Apostolicity, for example, includes the need to recognize the bodied, performative character of memory. Mission in a globalized world must be dialogical and receive from the other. His consistent challenge to narrow preferences for controlled orthodoxy is not just rooted in a scholarly recognition of the diversity of faith

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communities, but also comes out of his own experiences in South Africa, the Philippines, and Chiapos, Mexico, where, for example, he identifies the need for altered clerical structures. This book is particularly useful for Protestants who are not familiar with the history of Roman Catholicism. Rightly acknowledging that the full implications of globalization are yet to be discerned, Ecclesiology for a Global Church truly is about a people who are called and sent. It does an extremely good job of honoring a diverse people.

MARY MCCLINTOCK FULKERSON DUKE DIVINITY SCHOOL DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith by Mark A. Noll InterVarsity, Downers Grove, Ill., 2009. 212 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-8308-2847-0.

MARK NOLL HAS ENTERED A well-established conversation about global Christianity and has made a unique contribution. His thesis is that Christianity as it is coming to be expressed in many regions in the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, is developing in a social atmosphere that is similar to that of early American Christianity. This atmosphere is one of rapid social, economic, intellectual, political, and cultural change associated today with the process of globalization. The entrepreneurial and voluntaristic forms of Christianity that were successful in similar circumstances in early America were extremely portable and flexible and characterized the United States’ missionary force in the nineteenth century. The result, according to Noll, is that these authentically American evangelical forms of Christianity have provided a useful model that has been readily appropriated worldwide by indigenous believers to provide ecclesial order out of chaos. Noll makes at least three important contributions to the discussion about American influence on the shape of global faith. First, Noll is able to offer a measured evaluation of the impact of American influence on world Christianity by

emphasizing a common historical experience between early America and the Global South, by highlighting the agency of the receiving cultures that adopt the American model as a suitable way to address anomie, and by mitigating the direct influence of the American missionaries. Second, Noll provides a handy synthesis of recent thought about the world Christian movement and the relationship between Christianity in its local expressions and its ecumenical diversity. In this regard, he has offered an evangelical appropriation of the groundbreaking work of Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, and Philip Jenkins and made them accessible to the congregant and lay scholar. Finally, he has demonstrated an approach to appreciating the American evangelical influence on world Christianity that avoids harsh postcolonial accusations of imperialism or uncritical missionary hagiography. He has addressed the many social factors that are responsible for the expansion and impact of a particular expression of Christianity while affirming the fact that the gospel has a momentum intrinsic to itself that also accounts for its spread and acceptance. I heartily recommend The New Shape of World Christianity, especially to those who are not conversant with contemporary missiology. In what could be considered a missiological sequel to his The Old Religion in a New World (Eerdmans, 2001), Noll opens for readers a door into an important discussion about mission practices and theology that could be of great consequence in an academic or congregational setting.

BENJAMIN T. CONNER UNION-PSCE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Ethics in the Global Village: Moral Insights for the Post 9-11 U.S.A. by Jack A. Hill Polebridge, Santa Rosa, Ca., 2008. 174 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-59815-008-7.

IN THIS WIDE-RANGING AND accessible book, Jack Hill constructs an ethics of “re-connection” that confronts three problematic trends in the contemporary North American context: speciesism, which is “an ideology of human exceptionalism

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that sees humans as exceptions within . . . the earth’s biosphere” (p. 66); economism, in which “economics becomes . . . our ultimate concern or primary means of transformation” (p. x) and we overvalue economic success (pp. 83, 90); and militarism, which is “a predisposition toward vigorous support for a strong military organization” (p. x) and often involves the demonization of the “enemy” in the interest of security (p. 100). The best counterweight to these tendencies is an ethics of reconnection informed by hearing and gaining insight from “the moral experience from the margins” (particularly embodied in stories from the Pacific Islands, Jamaican Rastafarianism, and South African freedom fighters) as well as from a contextualized reading of Jesus’ sayings (p. xii). Readers will find Ethics in a Global Village immensely compelling. Hill’s framework helps the reader to recognize a deep shared foundation for the seemingly divergent elements of this “unholy trinity” (p. 125): a disconnected and alienated way in which we relate to the “Other.” The transformation of our relationships with the ecological, economic, and political “Other” then offers a means for middle-class North American Christians to think (self-)critically about how we relate to voices from other parts of the world. Along the way, Hill argues, “we expect reversals and stand ready to abandon outmoded understandings, institutions, and relationships” (p. 134). In short, our insular and arrogant ideologies and practices will be challenged, and this is a good thing. The book does leave the reader with a few lingering questions about how Hill relates his argument to the larger field of Christian social ethics. Two features make the third chapter’s retracing of four dominant streams of moral thought in the United States (and the concluding chapter’s return to these themes) a bit awkward. First, the reader is left with a sense that Hill’s descriptions of these narratives are a bit sweeping and perhaps too neatly drawn. Second, this aspect of the argument feels a bit removed from the disconnection/reconnection aspects of the argument, and the implications drawn in the final chapter a bit strained. Some readers may also find Hill’s reliance on the scholarship of the Jesus Seminar to be limiting.

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This book would be an excellent choice for an adult (or even youth) religious education class, because Hill invites readers into a “non-specialist” public conversation about the major moral questions confronting North American Christians living in a global context. Each chapter concludes with well-conceived and personally applicable questions for reflection.

JENNIFER R. AYRES MCCORMICK THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry by G. K. Beale InterVarsity, Downers Grove, Il., 2008. 304 pp. $26.00. ISBN 978-0-8308-2877-7.

THIS VOLUME IS AN EXPLORATION of idolatry and its ruinous consequences for those who engage in it. G. K. Beale’s central thesis is “What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration” (p. 16; italics in the original). To illustrate his thesis, Beale gives special attention to Israel’s golden calf episode in Exod 32. He argues that the Hebrew prophets and later NT writers portray as a just judgment the fact that, like this idol, the transgressors (and their successors through the ages) become stiff-necked, unseeing, and unhearing. Beale’s work—a masterful exercise in biblical theology—is compelling. His work with key texts such as Exod 32, Ps 115, Isa 6, and 1 Cor 10 is rich and penetrating. The breadth of Beale’s work is likewise impressive. He offers substantive expositions of a great many texts from both Old and New Testaments, and interacts with a wide spectrum of other appropriate ancient sources, including rabbinic interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures. The book is weighty, but accessible, and Beale’s tone is irenic throughout. Although the book is clearly cast as an investigation of idolatry and its ruinous consequences, I had hoped for more concerning the corresponding positive aspect that those who worship the true God are transformed into that wondrous likeness. This is limited to a single, brief chapter. The biblical themes of either reflecting or falling short of the glory of God—

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Coming up next in Interpretation October 2010

God With Us: Perspectives from the Gospel of Matthew

January 2011

Liturgy and Easter third in the church year series

April 2011

Usury

July 2011

Bicultural Perspectives on Reading the Bible

October 2011

Creation Groaning: A Moral and Ethical Issue

January 2012

Liturgy and Pentecost/ Trinity Sunday fourth in the church year series

April 2012

The Book of Joshua

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examined so thoroughly in the negative—is introduced in the positive, and the doctrine of glorification is broached. But the discussion is short, and critical texts are left largely untouched. Second Peter 1:3–11, for example, in which we read that believers have a vital participation in the divine nature and thus have all that is needed to grow in godliness, is barely mentioned. Nor is there discussion of the orthodox notion of theosis, a doctrine often linked to this text, and one which seems pertinent to Beale’s broad concerns. Those looking for practical implications from the study may be disappointed. Although it seems that much could be said regarding the shape and substance of preaching, teaching, and worship, Beale’s suggestions in the book’s final chapter are few and rather general. In keeping with one of the key themes of the book, however, those with eyes to see and ears to hear as they journey with Beale in this deeply engaging study may well discern all sorts of implications for their own ministries.

GARY A. PARRETT GORDON-CONWELL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY SOUTH HAMILTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Great is the Lord: Theology for the Praise of God by Ron Highfield Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2008. 467 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-3300-6.

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. Ron Highfield, Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University, is a member of the Churches of Christ, a group that anchors one end of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement of the nineteenth century. Barton W. Stone was Arian in theology. Alexander Campbell declared that, “We are neither Unitarian nor Trinitarian,” since the Council of Nicaea occurred after the closing of the canon and creeds were anathema to him; and called for “Bible names for Bible things,” thus excluding both the words “theology” and “sacrament.” John Locke was a major philosophical influence on Campbell’s thought. Given this context, it is astonishing to read Highfield’s systematic theology, which reads like

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an apologia aimed at his homebase. It is openly Trinitarian, cites the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds without embarrassment, has a good word for Tradition, criticizes Biblicism, speaks positively of sacraments, and is critical of Locke. This book is classically orthodox in both the Catholic and Reformed senses. Highfield’s frequently cited conversation partners are Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, the Orthodox John Zizioulas, and Karl Rahner, as well as Aquinas and Calvin. However, Richard Muller’s four-volume book, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2003) serves to bring scholastic Reformed voices to the table more often than any other source, and Highfield clearly feels most at home in that milieu. While the first part of the book lays theological foundations in a classically Reformed way, the greater part is devoted to the divine attributes: e.g., God is omnipresent, eternal, omnipotent, immutable, impassible, etc. Highfield acknowledges that to speak in these terms risks depersonalizing God, but believes such a discussion is necessary if we are to say anything about the character of God rather than nothing. Highfield occupies the traditional ground in discussion of each, artfully turning back objections articulated by process theologians and advocates of open theism. The book’s subtitle would seem to indicate that this is a liturgical theology, but that is not the case. Highfield declares that if people knew what the word “God” meant, “every street corner would echo with thanksgiving and every courtyard would ring with praise” (p. xv). The sentiment is not far from the traditional Lex credendi, lex orandi. To paraphrase, what is believed must be capable of being prayed.

RONALD P. BYARS, Professor Emeritus UNION-PSCE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church and the Bible by M. Daniel Carroll R. Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2008. 174 pp. $15.00. ISBN 978-0-8010-3566-1.

THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCH towards the millions of undocumented immigrants in the

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United States poses social, political, ethical, and theological challenges. For many, the proper response is to lend support to fellow human beings who are in search of improved living conditions and opportunities. For others, undocumented immigrants have committed a crime by failing to go through proper channels to enter the country legally and therefore should be deported. Daniel Carroll accomplishes, extraordinarily, the purpose of his book, which is to offer a thorough, yet not exhaustive, examination of the history of Hispanic immigration, biblical-theological insights, social-political dynamics, and praxis-oriented pastoral approaches to the issues raised within the church by the many undocumented Hispanic members of our congregations and communities. The history of immigration in our country is a complex one that has always stirred deep passionate debates which at times have seemed sincere and at other times blatantly racist and xenophobic in nature. As is the case with many difficult issues in our society, many stakeholders, including pastors and laypeople, do not have the time or opportunity to scrutinize material available to experts in the field. For those who want to become well informed, Carroll provides a well-documented, well-researched book on immigration, without reverting to scholarly minutiae. Christians at the Border would serve beautifully as a primer for pastors and lay people who seek to understand the challenges of immigration and to provide adequate ministries to the increasing number of immigrants in churches, communities, and society at large. The book provides excellent material for entry level courses in urban ministry and missions for college and seminary students. It is also suitable for church study groups and adult education classes. However, if you are in search of a book that will provide help in legislative matters, exhaustive exegetical analysis of both the Old and New Testaments, and/or a detailed historical analysis of immigration history and law in the United States, then this is not the book for you. But, if Carroll’s book whets your appetite and you want to deepen your knowledge of the intricacies of immigration in this country, he

provides an appendix of selected resources that offer further guidance.

SAMUEL CRUZ UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William T. Cavanaugh Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2008. 115 pp. $12.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-4561-0.

ACCORDING TO WILLIAM T. Cavanaugh, “Many Christians . . . intuit that what we do with our money and our stuff should be directly informed by how we relate to God.” At the same time, however, “Christians of [this] kind tend to remain in a reactive posture. That is, we tend to take current economic realities as givens and then wonder what our stance should be when confronted by these givens” (p. vii). Drawing on “Christian resources to try to change the terms of the debate,” Cavanaugh’s wonderfully thought-provoking book aims to recapture the theological and behavioral high ground he believes too many believers have ceded to the wider culture. The book does so by focusing on four “basic matters of economic life: the free market, consumerism, globalization, and scarcity” (p. vii). For Cavanaugh, to engage adequately “the subject of economics from a theological point of view” requires that we “discuss the ends of human life, specifically the end of life in God” (p. viii). Too often, such teleological questions are preempted by debates about “whether the market performs best with or without state intervention” (p. viii). Cavanaugh helpfully structures his argument around “a set of binaries: negative freedom and positive freedom, detachment and attachment, the global and the local, scarcity and abundance” (p. x)—binaries that highlight the ways in which the “end” of human “flourishing” (p. viii) has been excluded from contemporary economic thought and practice. For example, Cavanaugh reminds readers of Augustine’s notion of “disordered loves” (p. 14): true human “freedom” is not about individualistic autonomy but requires “being wrapped up in the will of God” (p. 8). By contrast, the ways in which

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our desires “freely” manifest themselves in what we call free market economics actually leads to a lack of freedom. Cavanaugh also argues, counterintuitively but persuasively, that the theological problem with our “consumer culture” is not materialism as such: “What really characterizes consumer culture is not attachment to things but detachment” (p. 34). We don’t want to possess things so much as we want to pursue other things. For Cavanaugh, “that’s why it is not simply buying but shopping that is the heart of consumerism” (p. 35). He contrasts consumerism with the Eucharist, in which, “The act of consumption is . . . turned inside out: instead of simply consuming the body of Christ, we are consumed by it” (p. 54). This is a highly readable and incisive book. Cavanaugh boldly engages contemporary economic assumptions—and some of their theological shortcomings—with wit and vigor, and he proves to be a knowledgeable and thoughtful guide. Being Consumed could be studied profitably in both classrooms and congregations, and it deserves a wide readership in North American churches.

MICHAEL BARRAM SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA MORAGA, CALIFORNIA

Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All by Richard A. Horsley Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 193 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23395-2.

THIS BOOK, AS THE TITLE aptly captures, asserts that the rubric of the biblical covenant relationship necessarily includes economic matters, primarily with an eye toward socio-economic justice for all members of society. Drawing on the relational nature of the covenant, first between God and Israel, and then expanded to include the Gentiles through the ministry of Jesus, Richard Horsley highlights the socio-economic dimensions of the texts. Generous background is provided on the nature of ancient societies, including information about kinship, agriculture, land ownership, debt-slavery, imperial economies, and early Christian assemblies. As Horsley marches

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through the biblical canon, he points to texts that support the increasingly unjust economic state of the peasant, whether ancient Israelite or first-century Gentile, as a result of economic exploitation by the monarchy, be it native Judean or Roman. The book covers the key biblical texts related to covenant: escape from Egypt, the Ten Commandments, pentateuchal economic laws, monarchal exploitation, prophetic accusation, the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospel of Mark, and the Letters of Paul. Horsley is well-known from his other publications for keen insights into the social realities that undergird biblical texts, and he brings that knowledge to bear on key economic texts in both the Old and New Testaments. This book is helpful as a broad overview of the topic of biblical economics. Lay readers especially will find his descriptions of ancient societies and economic realities enlightening and will begin to hear familiar biblical texts in new ways. One particular strength of the book is that the themes developed in the first half dealing with the OT are explicitly carried forward into the second half dealing with the NT. Thus, Jesus is presented as the next in a long line of those calling for covenant renewal, rather than as a radically new voice with little or no connection to the rich religious heritage of ancient Israel. As his modern analogy to ancient covenant economics, Horsley suggests the United States Constitution and its attendant guarantee of economic rights, an analogy I found more distracting than helpful. The book provides a sufficiently compelling interpretation of biblical texts in their own right that such an analogy is not really necessary. In summary, the book will be on my list of required textbooks for my next course on biblical economics.

MARTY STEVENS LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AT GETTYSBURG GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

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Strategic Leadership for a Change: Facing Our Losses, Finding Our Future by Kenneth J. McFayden Alban Institute, Herndon, Va., 2009. 111 pp. $17.00. ISBN 978-7-56699-392-0.

KENNETH MCFAYDEN’S contribution to the growing body of literature on leadership, and congregational leadership in particular, is a helpful one. McFayden is Professor of Ministry and Leadership and Dean of the Center for Ministry and Leadership Development at Union-PSCE in Richmond. He brings to bear not only that background of teaching and working with congregations and their leaders, but also his work in the field of pastoral care. This shapes an approach to congregational leadership that is in some ways unique. McFayden takes grief and loss very seriously. Pastoral leaders are well advised to join McFayden in addressing grief and loss and to learn from him. Today, many long-established congregations and many historically prominent congregations are experiencing a good bit of conflict. Not infrequently, the pastor/congregation relationship is a challenging one. Behind these difficulties lies, in many cases, grief and loss. “The church isn’t the same.” “The church isn’t like it used to be.” “I don’t feel like it’s ‘my church’ any more.” These are common laments of those dealing with grief and loss. McFayden approaches this through the “attachment theory” framework of John Bowlby. What he has to say will give the pastoral leader who may be over-eager for change, or frustrated with the slow pace of it, a way to step back and look at things with different eyes. This is not say that McFayden grinds to a halt here or wants us to. He sees clearly the need for change and for what he terms, “Finding Our Future.” But in order to find our future, there are losses to be faced and acknowledged, and there is grief work to be done and encouraged. Another helpful emphasis in McFayden’s approach is how he cues leaders to locate and develop vision. He urges leaders to find vision for the future by paying attention to existing values and stories, as well as values and stories that are emerging. This strikes me as wise. If leaders can locate sources and inspiration for the future in a congregation’s past and story, as well as in its present, it avoids communicating a sense that every-

thing we’ve done or been is irrelevant or worse. On the contrary, there are resources in our past and present to be valued and lifted up as we discern what God is calling us to do and be today and in the future.

ANTHONY B. ROBINSON CONGREGATIONAL LEADERSHIP NORTHWEST SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

Setting Words on Fire: Putting God at the Center of the Sermon by Paul Scott Wilson Abingdon, Nashville, 2008. 293 pp. $27.00. ISBN 9780-687-64718-7.

PAUL SCOTT WILSON laments the state of current preaching. He maintains that the teaching dimension of the art is alive and well. What is getting lost is proclamation. The result is that congregations have become accustomed to hearing about God, but not to hearing God. He portrays proclamation as passionate, intimate, urgent, even musical speech that results in confidence and faith. After opening chapters that describe and illustrate the art of homiletical teaching, Wilson finds his stride in setting out nine genres of proclamation. These are condemnation, lament, stern exhortation, testimony, prayer, nurturing exhortation, proclamatory statements, doxology, and celebration. The book largely consists of large numbers of illustrative quotations of each of these genres from historic and contemporary luminaries of the preaching art. Wilson cites an array of typologies, some of which he returns to, and some he does not. The most significant is Augustine’s threefold distinction between teaching, which requires the plain style, delighting, which requires the moderate style, and persuading, which requires the grand style. The range of sources quoted is impressive. The understanding of African American genres of preaching is particularly nuanced. Some of the historic texts are gems, notably a second-century sermon by Melito of Sardis, where the speaker expounds Christ’s presence in the OT narrative. Wilson is courageous in assessing some neglected and unfashionable themes in preaching. I did find it curious that he does not seem to mention the role of humor.

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Despite the frequent lists and commentaries on quoted passages, the overall effect is one of wave upon wave of illustration, tidily organized, yet in search of a compelling thesis. I attribute this to two related assumptions that permeate the book. One is that it is possible to analyze preaching through the study of published sermons. The book seems not to be about preaching in general, but about the character of the published sermon in particular. The written sermon is invariably less, rather than more, than the sermon heard, received, and responded to; and the published sermon is less again, since it is largely devoid of context. And that discloses the second troubling assumption: that it is possible to assess preaching without regard to context. The heart of preaching surely lies not in set-piece rhetoric from celebrity pulpits, but in profound and regular pastoral interaction between a preacher and a congregation who know and love one another. There is no acknowledgement here that such contexts are where most sermons arise. For these two reasons this thorough and balanced treatment of the most practical of pastoral skills seems tied to some of the less helpful assumptions of the academy and seldom seems to encompass the reality of the local congregation.

SAM WELLS DUKE UNIVERSITY DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life by M. Craig Barnes Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 146 pp. $18.00. ISBN

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relentless Sundays”; rather, he suggests, it is “confusion about what it means to be a pastor” (p. 4). He then moves to the heart of the book by suggesting a new metaphor for the faithful parish minister: the “minor poet.” The first of the book’s two parts unpacks this metaphor. By poet, Barnes means one who sees deep into things—Scripture and the lives of his congregation especially—and then honestly and eloquently witnesses to what he or she sees. By “minor,” he intends T. S. Eliot’s distinction (see On Poetry and Poets, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009) between those (rare) major poets who provide “enduring expressions of the deep truth of life,” Scripture for example, and the needful minor poets who inculcate “truth to particular people in particular places,” parish ministers for instance (p. 24). The second half of the book examines what it means to preach as a minor poet, one who looks beneath the surfaces and bears witness to the deeper truth lying there. Barnes examines what he names the “subtext of Scripture,” “the subtext of human life,” and the “subtext of the poet.” He digs into several specific NT texts in search of their subtexts, offers theological affirmations about the “subtext” of being human, and considers what he names (again following Eliot) the “three voices” of the poet. The most limber of the book’s many strengths is the metaphor of “minor poet.” After three decades of pastoral ministry, I found myself drawn into this startlingly fresh image to consider my work— especially preaching—in this light. Near the end of the book, Barnes notes, “poets don’t make arguments; they reveal mysteries” (p. 131). Like the entire book, that is a word to comfort and jolt the pastor and preacher.

978-0-8028-2962-7.

CRAIG BARNES, PASTOR AND professor, pens a stealth book in The Pastor as Minor Poet. It is finally a book about preaching, but that is not where it begins, and fittingly so. Barnes begins with an analysis of the ennui he witnesses among many of the pastors he encounters when teaching the Doctor of Ministry program at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. It is not just “the long hours, the demanding congregations, the eclectic responsibilities, the fishbowl existence, or the

MICHAEL L. LINDVALL THE BRICK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH NEW YORK, NEW YORK

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Book

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Vines Intertwined: A History of Jews and Christians from the Babylonian Exile to the Advent of Islam

but also the philosophical, historical, sociological, and political dimensions of Jewish–Christian relations.

by Leo Duprée Sandgren Hendrickson, Peabody, Mass., 2010. 838 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-59856-083-1.

The study of Jewish/Christian history in antiquity is experiencing a renaissance. Textual witnesses and archaeological sites are being reevaluated and revisited. As a result, Sandgren asserts, the relationship between Jews and Christians has shifted from a “mother/daughter” paradigm to one better described as “siblings.” He recognizes that Judaism and Christianity were not formed in isolation and are what they are because of each other, and provides a comprehensive generation-by-generation political history of the Jews from the fall of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile through the rise of Christianity out of Judaism, to the point where both are fully defined against each other at the start of the Middle Ages. This thick volume is accompanied by a CD that contains the entire book as a searchable PDF.

A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations edited by Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008. 507 pp. $29.99. ISBN 978-0-521-730-78-5.

This paperback edition of the 2005 Dictionary explores and defines the many factors that characterize the historical and ongoing relationship between Judaism and Christianity. From “Aaron” to “Zionism,” the editors have brought together over 700 entries—including events, institutions, movements, people, places, and publications— contributed by Jewish and Christian scholars from around the world. The Dictionary addresses not only the theological,

Evoking Lament edited by Eva Harasta and Brian Brock T & T Clark, London, 2009. 228 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978-0567-03390-1.

Lament, a central part of the biblical prayer tradition, is prayer that does not resign itself to the inevitable, but expresses one’s vulnerability to the suffering of the world. This volume of essays contends that lament merits recovery and a central place in Christian theology and worship, but needs to be accounted for within a systematic understanding of prayer. Twelve European theologians uncover both the problems and possibilities with the church’s appropriation of lament.

Old Testament Prophets for Today by Carolyn J. Sharp For Today Series. Westminster John Knox, 2009. 111 pp. $12.95. ISBN 978-0664-23178-1.

This lay-friendly volume, suitable for Christian education classes, addresses the question, “What is a prophet?” It also provides a brief introduction to each OT prophet and illuminates the themes present in each of them, with an eye toward the many ways in which their messages remain relevant today. Each chapter includes questions for discussion at the end, making the book a useful resource for group or individual use.

Encounter with the New Testament: An Interdisciplinary Approach by Russell Pregeant Fortress, Minneapolis, 2009. 369 pp. $30.00. ISBN 9780-8006-6348-3.

Designed primarily as an introduction to the

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study of the NT in an academic setting, this volume is an abridgment and updating of Engaging the New Testament: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Fortress, 1995). The original text has been revised and shortened by one-third, and new topics, such as postcolonial approaches, have been introduced.

The Gospels and Christian Life in History and Practice by Richard Valantasis, Douglas K. Bleyle, and Dennis C. Haugh Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Md., 2009. 314 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-7425-5922-6.

This book approaches the four canonical Gospels as handbooks for religious formation through communal practices. It focuses on the communities that produced each gospel, the dynamic energy each gospel displays for creating and sustaining community life, the different interpretations of the person of Jesus, and the different systems of organization and leadership each gospel promulgated.

Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle edited by Mark D. Given Hendrickson, Peabody, Mass., 2010. 210 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-59856-324-5.

This collection of essays provides the advanced undergraduate, graduate student, or interested layperson with an introduction to a wide range of recent approaches to Paul that are relevant to, yet go beyond, traditional theological and historical concerns. Eight contributors explore the interface between the Pauline letters and contemporary interests of the academy, such as empire, economics, ethnicity, patronage, gender, issues, rhetoric, and power, in addition to more traditional Pauline subjects.

The Bible and the American Future edited by Robert L. Jewett with Wayne L. Alloway, Jr. and John G. Lacey Cascade, Eugene, Ore., 2009. 295 pp. $34.00. ISBN 978-1-60608-993-4.

What does the Bible have to say about the Amer-

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ican future? The vision of dispensationalist apocalypticism has dominated public discussion in the past generation. Here, thirteen scholars explore other alternatives, discussing what the biblical prophets, Deuteronomy, Jesus, Paul, and other biblical writers had to say about a responsible public ethic and vision for the future. Walter Brueggemann, Robert Jewett, Terence Fretheim, Kathleen O'Connor, Richard Horsley, and John Dominic Crossan are among the contributors.

Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened by Craig A. Evans and N. T. Wright, edited by Troy A. Miller Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 116 pp. $14.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23359-4.

This slim volume collects three lectures: two by Craig A. Evans (one each on Jesus’ death and burial) and one by N. T. Wright (on Jesus’ resurrection). Both authors examine these events in Jesus’ life from a historical perspective, reviewing the pertinent evidence to surmise what really did happen in those final days. Both contend that history is vitally important to the validity of the Christian faith.

Christology: Key Readings in Christian Thought edited by Jeff Astley, David Brown, and Ann Loades Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2009. 131 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23269-6.

With a focus on specific doctrines and themes, this reader includes selected primary readings that track the development of the doctrine of Jesus Christ, including the important questions and debates surrounding it. Selections consider both the person and the work of Christ. Topics include the development of classic Christology from its biblical roots through patristic debates, responses to the modern distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, the understanding of incarnation as kenosis, and the critical and constructive developments of liberation and feminist theologies.

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Preaching the Incarnation edited by Peter K. Stevenson and Stephen I. Wright Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2010. 229 pp. $19.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23280-1.

This follow-up book to Preaching the Atonement (Westminster John Knox, 2009) offers a theological discussion of twelve significant Bible passages dealing with the doctrine of incarnation. Each chapter includes a theologically-focused study of a key OT or NT text, drawing on aspects of biblical scholarship and Christian tradition; a sermon on the text by a noted preacher (Tom Long, Rowan Williams, William Willimon, and Anna Carter Florence among them); and a reflective commentary highlighting the rhetorical strategy of the preacher.

The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich edited by Russell Re Manning Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. 322 pp. $29.99. ISBN 978-0-521-67735-6.

These accessible accounts of the major themes of Tillich’s diverse theological writings draw upon the best of contemporary Tillich scholarship. Each chapter introduces and evaluates a specific topic and includes suggestions for further reading. The eighteen contributors assess Tillich’s place in the history of twentieth-century Christian thought, as well as his significance for current constructive theology.

Women Out of Order: Risking Change and Creating Care in a Multicultural World edited by Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner and Teresa Snorton Fortress, Minneapolis, 2010. 418 pp. $29.00. ISBN 9780-8006-6444-2.

This volume explores pastoral care of and by women in light of differences in racial and ethnic background, class, generation, sexual orientation, and experiences with cultural realities that typically assail women. Twenty-five contributors address ways in which women may be regarded as being “out of sync” with cultural stereotypes and present alternative

affirmative images beyond the norms of monocultural thinking. They contend that pastoral practitioners must “risk change” in exploring other methodologies to provide relevant guidance and to engage the challenges of the emerging frontier of multicultural care.

Testing the Spirits: How Theology Informs the Study of Congregations edited by Patrick Keifert, foreward by Craig Van Gelder Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2009. 205 pp. $24.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-0740-3.

This collection of essays charts a number of shifts taking place today at the intersection of theological education and congregations. Written mostly by professors at Luther Seminary for theological students, teachers of those students, local pastors, and judicatory officials, the essays demonstrate the critical importance of taking the everyday life of congregations seriously as theological subject matter. They also highlight the essential relationship and shared mission of theological schools and local congregations.