Christ’s life, which culminates in “the hour” of his passion, is the pneumatological foil to Genesis 11, the foil that reverses creation’s selfenclosure, first and ultimately, over against God and, second, but no less importantly, over against itself. Israel is crucial in effecting this reversal, for she is elected by God to mediate creation’s re-creation. Through Christ, the seed of Abraham, the world in its entirety becomes conscripted into Israel’s destiny in and for the world. Israel’s destiny is not, nor has it ever been, closed in upon itself; it is not solipsistic. Rather, her election is to be herself precisely by being more than herself, which is to say, by being for the world. Israel is called and chosen to be a non-nationalistic nation, a different kind of people—the people of God. This non-solipsistic destiny is brought to fruition in Christ, who is at once child of Israel and Son of God/Son of man. He is most truly the former as he is most fully the latter, inaugurating a New Covenant economy to the extent that he disrupts the logic of cultural and political nationalisms and identities. Having disrupted this faulty performance of language and therefore of identity, Christ re-performs it and, through the momentum of his life, draws creation into the grandiloquence of his re-performance. Such is the “pentecostalization” of the world. To be drawn into Christ’s incarnate, “passion-ate” way of existence is to be schooled in a new mode of speech and identity.
Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross anticipates the full “pentecostalization” of the world; indeed, it prefigures certain aspects of the miracle of languages in Acts 2. Note that the poverty or powerlessness of language signified in the cry is the very means by which Christ seizes anew the wealth of language and so re-articulates and redeems the meaning of identity, dignity and peoplehood. His life of linguistic dispossession, impoverishment, and powerlessness draws creation into the kenosis of the Logos. In this way he grants to creation a new, inflamed, Pentecostal tongue. Creation is now given “spiritual” ears to hear in Christ the language of God’s triune love. The surprising feature of this hearing, however, is that it is discerned precisely in and as the various languages (logoi) of creation itself. Creation hears the divine language by being swept into the embracing overabundance of God’s Logos, which at once creates the world and “passion-ately” releases itself into the world so that God might accompany creatures in their journey back to God and hence toward self-realization. The story of God’s journey with God’s creatures occurs, then, in history—the history and flesh of Israel, which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth. For in Jesus God has brought Israel’s history to an irrepeatably unique pitch, whereby Christ becomes translated into the languages of all nations. In brief, what emerges within this new economy of divine love is a self that is known in, through, and as another—a transformation which entails a re-imagining of identity on both personal and cultural levels. All of this means that the destiny of a given nation, its sense of peoplehood, is bound inextricably in Christ to the destinies of other nations and their sense of peoplehood. Indeed, this sense of “co-peoplehood” or “inter-nationalism” is theologically rooted in the unfolding of Christ’s existence in history as an eschatological movement towards the Kingdom of God, an unfolding in which the church haltingly and imperfectly, but for all that no less truly, participates.
J. Kameron Carter, “Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Idenity: A Theological Engagement With Douglass’s 1845 Narrative”, Modern Theology 21:1 (January 2005): 57-58
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