Category Archives: World Religions

Milbank, Islam, and Mission

Posted by on September 6, 2010 23 comments

My long silence around here must now come to an end. As folks get back to school and other such pursuits, I will do my part to send some distractions peoples’ way via the blog.

For now, folks would do well to check out a recent post by Tim McGee about John Milbank’s inherently imperialistic theology and its detrimental relation to Christian mission and Christian approaches to Isalm (I would also suggest browsing through the old posts at Rwanda and Theology — there’s a lot of good stuff there). McGee rightly points out that, for all Milbank’s talk of an ontology of peaceable difference, for him “the form of harmonic difference is simply a nondifferential difference, an irrelevant difference, for they will basically become like us (and thus the binary still reigns supreme).”

McGee concludes, rightly, that for Milbank:

For the sake of a better Islam, Islam must be subjugated to Euro-Catholic cultural forms.  Since there are some small strands of this culture within Islam, Euro-Catholic Christians can and ought to form them in this way.  Since they are small and minor traditions, such a transformation can only be secured by Euro-Catholic rule.  Finally, since the differences between Islam and Christianity are irreducible, such Euro-Catholic rule must be perpetual:  Muslims must be continually coerced into striving to become what will forever escape them, that is, a proper (Western, Christian) human community.  That is missions-qua-Milbank, which is utterly incompatible with missions-qua-scripture (Acts).

Mission, skepticism, and uncertainty

Posted by on June 19, 2010 11 comments

The skeptic who in the face of missionary Christianity says, “Yes, but what about all those good Hindus who lead decent lives and don’t believe that Jesus is the only one?” is not really expecting to become a good Hindu or even to be friends with good Hindus. Certainly this skeptic does not plan to get involved at all in the problems of differentiating between good Hindus and bad Hindus but only to back away from the call of Jesus, who has always admitted that if we entrust our life to him and his cause, we will never be proven right until beyond the end of the story and cannot count on being positively reinforced along all of the way. What is thus stated in the form of a general rejection of all particularity in favor of a vision of universal validity it, when more deeply seen, more particular and more negative; namely, a specific pattern of avoidance of the particular claims of Christian loyalty in its continuing risk and uncertainty.

~ John Howard Yoder, A Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 112-13.

If I didn’t know better I’d almost think that Yoder’s channeling Lesslie Newbigin and Rowan Williams here.

Judaism and the State of Israel

Posted by on September 11, 2009 12 comments

John Howard Yoder’s The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited is helpful on many levels, but one of the most imporant points he makes therein is the way in which Christianity brought about what we know today as Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today was not around in the time of Paul and Jesus. Rather it is precisely the relationship between the church and the Jewish people in the centuries after Jesus that have brought about what we know as Judaism.

Unlike how we have come to think of Judaism, the Judaism that was present in the time of the early church did not automatically consider belief in the messiah a reason to be excluded from the synagogue, nor was it closed off to gentiles. Rather Judaism in the first century was a decidedly missional religion (cf. Matt 23:15; Acts 2:9-11). Only after the church became decidedly identified as a gentile movement did the hardening of the lines between Judaism and Christianity truly take hold and culminate in the sort of ethnic definition of Judaism we know today. Yoder describes the phenomenon in this way:

It may be  that ‘Christians’ progressively differentiated themselves from from Jews in order not to suffer persecution, and thereby diverted the anger of Gentiles toward the non-messianic Jews. Yet this in itself would not explain Jews’ abandonment of their missionary openness. In fact it could well have had the opposite effect. Jews no less than ‘Christians’ could argue that they had no secrets, that thier God was for everyone, that their law was reasonable, open to others, as their thinkers were doing at that time anyway.

In any case the outcome is that Judaism will be an ethnic enclave, less missionary than before, at some points in fact practically discouraging the accession of Gentiles to membership in the synagogue. This abandonment of missionary perspective on the part of Judaism is an adjustment not to the Gentile world but to Christianity. Non-missionary Judaism is a part of, a product of Christian history. For Jews to renounce mission means that they have been contextually ‘Christianized.’ They have accepted their limited slot within a context where telling the Gentiles about the God of Abraham is a function left to others and the Jews are willing to leave it that way. (p. 153-54)

The Christianization of Judaism ends in reducing Judaism to the non-missionary religion of an ethnic group. It turns the formerly universal message of the God of Abraham who created all nations and peoples, to the provincial religion of a sectarian enclave. However, this is only the begining. Yoder describes the culmination of the event of the Christianization of Judaism:

If the abandonment of openness to the Gentiles was the first stage of Judaism’s being influenced by Chistianity, one of the latest is the acceptance of the Jews of their assimilation into western pluralism. Protestants, Catholics and Jews are seen as the three equally legitimate forms of moral theism called ‘the Judaeo-Christian heritage.’ In some cases this has lead to a degree of theological assimilation, but the same tirpartite division of labour within pluralism can also be appealed to by Jews (or Protestants) who are much more orthodox. (p. 154)

The abandonment of missionalit culminates in the assimilation of Judaism into the tapestry of western pluralism, and specifically into the ideological construct known as the ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage.’ Where does this finally leave us?

The culmination of the Christianization of Judaism is the development of Zionism. Zionism creates a secular democratic nation state after the model of the nation states of the West. It defines Jews, for the purpose of building the state, in such a way that it makes no difference if most of them are unbelieving and unobservant. In America the Jews are ‘like a church’ with a belief structure, lifestyle commitments, and community meetings; in Israel Judaism is a nation and the belief dimension no longer matters. To be born in the State of Israel makes one less a Jew, in the deep historical sense of the term, than to be born in a ghetto. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that the Zionist state has taken on the challenge of governing subject populations who are not even ethnically Jewish. Committed Judaism, i.e. people who visibly order their lives around the Torah, is a minority sect in Israel just as are the Christians. (p. 154)

The upshot of all this is that the form of life embodied in and fostered by the secular state of Israel is the polar opposite of what the deep historical definition of Judaism entails. In fact, it is a betrayal of it. As such, support for the state of Israel cannot be construed as support for the Jewish people, let alone Judaism as a faith. Indeed supporting Israel should be seen as fundamentally anti-Jewish in nature. The state of Israel is, in fact the antithesis of the Judaism from the time of Jeremiah through the second century. To support the state of Israel is to continue the Christian mistake that began with the Jewish-Christian schism. Indeed, supporting the state of Israel is the most anti-Jewish act Christians can take, as it constitutes a hyperextension of the Christian (indeed, Constantinian) disciplining of Judaism. To the extent that the church supports Israel (as much of it rabidly does) the church commits itself to a most despicable form of anti-Judaism that should be repudiated by all.

A Yoderian Camping Trip

Posted by on July 20, 2009 36 comments

And yet again I am back. The trip ruled. Rivers were floated down and swimmed in. Conversations were had. I totally used my massive Dutch oven for the first time ever. Fantastic trip. I recommend them.

I also finally did a cover-to-cover reading of John Howard Yoder’s The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. I really regret waiting so long to really bite into this one. Honestly I’m not sure we can really understand Yoder and his important critique of Constantinianism without this book. I’ll probably post more on it shortly, but for now, here’s just one of the many money quotes:

Radical reformation and [Jeremian] Judaism have in common that they see God as active in correlation with historical change and criticism more than with sanctifying the present. For one tack of socio-cultural analysis, it is possible to distinguish ‘religion’ as that which sanctifies and celebrates life as it is, things as they are, the personal cycle of life from birth to death and the annual cycle of the sun and the culture from spring to winter. Over against this understanding of ‘religion’, the category of ‘history’ represents the morally meaningful particular processes, which may not go in a straight line but at least go somewhere; they are non-cyclical, stable, repetitive.

Such a blunt pair of prior categories is far to simple to deal with many important distinctions we need to make: yet there is something to it. Where it does fit, we find majority Christianity on the ‘religion’ side, and on the ‘history’ side we find the Jews, radical Protestants, and (today) the theologies of liberation.

This means that God is not only spoken about and prayed to as the One who once acted. God is expected to keep on acting in particular identifiable events within history, in discernible and in fact to some extent even predictable ways. The way God acts will be the same, yet will continue to challenge and to change. Salvation or wholeness or peace will come, often at great cost for God’s best friends and at the price of surprise, paradox and humiliation for those who felt the power game was already clear.

~ John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, 108.

Well, they still have some standards I guess…

Posted by on April 2, 2009 6 comments

The Episcopal church has defrocked one of its ministers for being both Christian and Muslim. Well, don’t that beat all! At least they managed to defrock her, I suppose. Even though she has been practicing both faiths and seeing no real contradiction there for two years.

Stories like this are almost too ridiculous. This is what happens when the construction of religion in the modern West is taken seriously as a way of living one’s life. After all if all its about is whatever we think our spiritual or existential needs are then why the hell not?  According to Ann Redding, the defrocked minister, the issue is just doing all that you feel you need to for personal fulfillment. “I am not saying you have to go somewhere else to be complete” she says. “Some people don’t need glasses, some people need single lenses. I need bifocals.”

What I find funny is why her imam or mosque put up with this while the Episcopals managed to step in and put their foot down. Aren’t Muslims supposed to be really serious about their faith and stuff? I can see why and Episcopal might look at faith as a pair of glasses you might need to see the world how you want to, but a Muslim? Crazy.

Terry Eagleton in Commonweal

Posted by on March 31, 2009 Comments Off

The always interesting and entertaining Terry Eagleton has a fascinating article in the latest issue of Commonweal entitled “Culture and Barbarism.” A couple quotes:

Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all-and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.

That problem encompasses a contradictory fact: the more capitalism flourishes on a global scale, the more multiculturalism threatens to loosen the hold of the nation-state over its subjects. Culture, after all, is what helps power grow roots, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip on us. A power which has to sink roots in many diverse cultures simultaneously is at a signal disadvantage. A British defense think tank recently published a report arguing that a “misplaced deference to multiculturalism” that fails “to lay down the line to immigrant communities” was weakening the fight against political extremists. The problem, the report warned, was one of social fragmentation in a multicultural nation increasingly divided over its history, identity, aims, and values. When it came to the fight against terrorism, the nation’s liberal values, in short, were undermining themselves.

H/T to Horstkoetter.

Should Jews Become Christians?

Posted by on October 24, 2008 27 comments

In light of some of the recent discussions of supercessionism, I want to probe one key question that I think pertains to the possibilities and scope of a non-supercessionist Christian theology. This question is whether or not Jews should continue to become Christians, or more accurately, be exhorted to themselves become followers of the Messiah.

Clearly, as John Howard Yoder argues in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, the early Christians did not see themselves as breaking with Judaism in the sense of starting a new religion, rather they saw themselves as standing within Israel and calling all Israelites to become followers of the Messiah, whose apocalypse had inaugurated the promised kingdom of God. The question then remains whether or how those who remain within ethnic and religious Israel continue to be “God’s people” in some sense “alongside” the church in a way that allows us to affirm the place of Israel and the practice of Judaism within God’s salvific economy. The reason this question is so pressing has much to do with the historical relations between the largely Gentile church and the Jewish people in Medieval and Modern history. In light of the devastating effects of theologies of supercession, is there a non-supercessionist theology that Christians can affirm that allows Christians to view Judaism as in some sense, continuing to exist in God’s salvific economy? This is the question that is being probed in many sectors of Christian theology.

The question, however is not whether or not the fallout of the Jewish-Christian schism has produced a situation in which the call to Jews to become followers of the Messiah has become historically complexified and problematized. Clearly it has. The question however, from the standpoint of Christian theology, is that, regardless of this historical contingencies — including radical Christian unfaithfulness and anti-Semitism — that have ensued in the relationship between the Christianity and Judaism is it still appropriate for the church to call on Jews as well as Gentiles to become followers of Jesus the Messiah? Given the testimony of the early Church I cannot see how we can answer in the negative to this question. An essential element of our christological confession is that the salvation of God, God’s presence is located in Jesus and our covenantal union with God and election as God’s people are tied up with whether or not we are followers of this particular Nazarene. If we want to answer the question “Should Jews be called to follow the Messiah?” with a “no” then I think we need a really good theological reason, and I am at an utter loss to find one

Church and Israel — Christianity and Judaism

Posted by on October 19, 2008 17 comments

Lately the question of the relation between Israel and the Church and Christianity and Judaism has been raised. What I think is crucial in such discussions is that we not equivocate on the terms employed. What is the relationship between the religion of “Christianity” and the theological reality of “Church”? Or the religion of “Judaism” and the theological reality of “Israel”?

These are, I think the supremely crucial points because they deal with the Barthian issue about revelation versus religion. Certainly the revelation of God stands as judge over all religions, including Christianity. But, can the categories of “Church” and “Israel” be coordinated as subsets of the religions of “Christianity” and “Judaism”? Or do “Church” and “Israel” belong to the substance of revelation itself in a crucial way? I think for Barth the answer is yes, but how that is all shaped is a very complex theological articulation.

All of this is only to note that I think we sometimes skip far too quickly from “Israel” to “Judaism” and from “Church” to “Christianity” in some of these discussions. Clarity on these points is absolutely necessary. In other words, I think that the relationship between Christianity and Judaism as world religions may be something quite different than the relationship between the Church and Israel in God’s economy of revelation and salvation. What precisely that difference is and how it matters theologically is the very stuff of truly theological dialogue between Christians and Jews.

Illegitimate Children of Abraham

Posted by on October 13, 2008 12 comments

There are three “Abrahamic” faiths. Judaism, Christianity, Islam alone among world religions trace the beginnings of their story back to a single patriarch, all of whom claim to be his true heirs, interpreted variously of course. But herein lies the fundamental difference between Christianity on he one hand and Judaism and Islam on the other. For Christianity it is precisely not legitimate ethnic or national descent from Abraham that places one within the people of God. This is a distinctly biblical point. God is able to raise up true children of Abraham from stones (Luke 3:8), it is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no value (John 6:53). The incorporation of persons into the people of God according to the Christian faith, be they Jew or Gentile is always a distinctly unnatural event.

This is clear in the Pauline corpus with regard to the Gentiles (see especially Romans 11  cf. Eph 2:12-13). However the Johannine corpus goes even further in arguing that being reborn into the true community of God’s people is a miraculous novum, not just for Gentiles, but for the Jews as well. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:11-13). The people of God, in John’s gospel in particular are constituted not by any sort of legitimate, natural, historical succession. Rather the people of God are constituted by the miracle of being reborn by the Spirit into a radically new community that interrupts and scandalizes all “natural” communities.

Thus, from the perspective of inter-religious dialogue, one key element that distinguishes Christianity from the other two Abrahamic faiths is Christianity’s explicit denial of what the other two vehemently claim, namely that “legitimate” descent from Abraham substantiates the claims of their faith. Christians make no claim to be legitimate children of Abraham, rather they claim that their status as God’s people is derived from nothing inherent within themselves either ethnically or politically. We are the people of God solely and only because of the radical miracle brought about in Jesus Christ which shatters and scandalizes any “natural” claim to be God’s people through historical natural succession.

Children of Abraham

Posted by on September 18, 2008 16 comments

There is one thing and one thing alone that distinguishes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam from all other world religions: they all trace themselves back to the same person, Abraham. For all three of these religions, the connection to the patriarch, Abraham is a central part of their identity. These three religions, unique among all others, consider themselves in some sense deriving from Abraham.

The Jewish theologian Peter Ochs has often highlighted the importance of the common Abrahamic heritage of these three faiths in his dialogues with John Howard Yoder and in his response to 9/11. If there is any theologian who takes the issue of “Abrahamicity” seriously in terms of inter-religious dialogue, it is him.

Here is my question: what theological significance, if any, does the common Abrahamic heritage of Judaism and Islam have from a Christian theological perspective? Clearly we cannot think about Judaism and Islam the same way we think about, say, Hinduism. At some level our stories are connected. What theological difference does this connection make?

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