Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference. Chris Boesel

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And this is where things get tricky. The “absolutes” of the first two structural elements—absolutely distinguishable, absolutely prior—are complicated and seemingly compromised by the third, substantive element. For the God (and the God-relation) that is absolutely distinct from all historical relations of the ethical is a God who unaccountably chooses to be in relation to us—to all of history—by entering history and the historical relations of the ethical in a very particular way. For Christian faith, this particular way is the incognito of a particular human person amidst a particular people. So, how to distinguish the absolute God-relation from all other, creaturely relations if the former does indeed occur in the midst of the latter? How to distinguish the knight of faith from the petit bourgeois? How to distinguish Abraham from a murderer?23

Leaving these troubling questions for the moment, I suggest that a Christian faith taking Abraham as a model would most likely entail a particular, historically contingent, kerygmatic confession, e.g., that the God of Israel has acted decisively for all the nations in the particular person and work of Jesus Christ, the seed of Abraham, the promised Messiah of the Jewish people and the risen Lord of all creation.24 And this particular faith-relation, to this particular God as witnessed to in this confession, would be understood as absolutely (though, given the above, complicatedly) distinguishable from all other creaturely relations. As such, it would determine the nature, status, and meaning of all other, creaturely relations. More specifically, it would determine the Church’s understanding of and relation to the world and to the neighbor, including the Jewish neighbor. Consequently, it is no wild stretch of imagination to suggest that the theology of Karl Barth might come to mind as a contemporary example of an understanding of Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model. I will, in fact, make this very suggestion, and attempt to make good on it in the following two chapters.

      The other understanding of the nature of faith that takes shape within the contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel sees the ethical as the highest, and as such, as the highest expression and truest meaning, indeed the entire substance, of faith itself. It is assumed that only within the sphere of the ethical can we best understand the proper nature, status, and meaning of the God-relation of faith. Taking our cue from Kierkegaard’s mischievous characterization of Hegelian Christianity as “going further” than Abraham, we can say that this is a Christian faith that takes the supersession of Abraham as a model. I will suggest that the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether, as representative of many critical remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor (“leaving room” for the children of Abraham by “going further” than Abraham), constitutes a contemporary example of this understanding of faith.

      I am clearly up to a bit of mischief myself here in this choice of language. As I noted in the previous chapter, the Christian tradition of supersessionism—the supersession of Abraham and Israel by the Church in God’s economy of salvation—is considered a prime expression of that logic (interpretive imperialism) inherent in traditional Christian faith and theology that contemporary Christian theologians understand to be ethically problematic in relation to the Jewish neighbor. It is a rather obvious trick, then, for me to employ the language for the traditional problem in my characterization of the contemporary theological remedies of that very problem. However, I am not simply trying to be clever or mischievous. While perhaps an obvious rhetorical ploy on my part, I believe it is just as obvious to an attentive assessment of both the modern assumptions regarding faith and the ethical represented here by Hegel, and certain contemporary remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor, that what we are in fact dealing with is precisely a supersession of Abraham; the remedy of traditional supersessionism is accomplished by means of another kind of supersessionism. My employment of the language of supersession here is not, then, merely pithy, but finds its mark; it reveals a certain self-contradiction that does indeed complicate the prognosis of the administered remedy. This case remains to be made in later chapters. It is, however, given some provisional footing in the following consideration of the nature of the ethical breach enacted by the faith of Abraham (a breach, that is, according to Johannes’s rendering of the Hegelian view of the ethical as the highest in relation to faith).

      Abraham’s “Breach of the Ethical” as Imperialistic Violence

      While we find ourselves confronted with an either/or between two understandings of faith in the pages of Fear and Trembling, it is important to note that these two understandings do not stand side by side in an arbitrary and benign relationship. It is not the case that one is left to choose between them as if they were equally viable possibilities, choosing according to the tastes of personal religious preference or conviction, with no serious consequences attendant upon which option is chosen (this is, of course, what modernity longs to be the case: religious faith as benign choice of personal taste irrelevant to the public sphere). In both cases, the one understanding does not allow for a generally generous and respectful assessment of the alternative, and therefore of the decision for the alternative. Rather, each compels a decision in its favor to the necessary exclusion of the other as untenable. It is customary to identify the Abrahamic understanding of faith with this exclusionary logic of the either/or. However, this logic is characteristic of the Hegelian option as well, at least in relation to Abraham, or perhaps more accurately and more to the point, only—singularly—in relation to Abraham.

      This exclusionary logic of the Hegelian either/or is already before us. The Hegelian understanding of faith essentially entails both a polemical judgment upon the faith that takes Abraham as a model, and a remedy that, in “going further” than Abraham, brings faith into its own proper truth. What is the problem with a Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model that Hegel should find it necessary to supersede it, or more accurately, to supersede Abraham, for the sake of remedying Christian faith? For Hegel, a faith that takes Abraham as a model inevitably puts Isaac—the son, the brother, the neighbor, the ethical itself—under the knife. And therefore, in bringing faith into its own proper truth—by superseding Abraham—Hegel renders faith safe for the neighbor; he redeems faith from Abraham’s abusive patrilineage. He delivers faith from the dysfunctional and abusive house of Abraham.

Again, in Johannes’s reading of Hegel, there can be no God, as the telos of faith, which stands outside of and irreducibly distinct from the ethical. Within Hegel’s conception of the “self-enclosed” whole of human existence, “God becomes an invisible, vanishing point, an impotent thought.”25 Kierkegaard has Johannes wryly conclude that the love of God demonstrated by Abraham’s faith, the love of a God who stands outside and beyond the ethical, cannot but be “suspect, like the love referred to by Rousseau when he talks of a person’s loving the Kaffirs instead of his neighbor.”26 The implication of this reference to Rousseau (other than Rousseau’s implied racism) is that the faith of Abraham constitutes a betrayal on every level of the interlocking complex of the ethical. Fidelity to a relation with something other than the neighbor and the totality of neighbor-relations—that is, fidelity to God—appears to constitute a fundamental betrayal of the neighbor. And even more, since Abraham’s suspension of the ethical obligation of father to son cannot be seen to serve a higher sphere of the whole, the Hegelian ethical can only conclude, if it is consistent, that Abraham is a murderer.27 The echo of Rubenstein’s question about the logic of Christian faith that requires the murder of Jews should ring discomfortingly in our ears at this point. And the prescient reader will demand to know what I am up to? In anticipating how the argument will unfold, the reader has good reason to ask if this is a perverse joke—holding Abraham ultimately responsible for the killing of the children of Abraham at the hands of the Church. It may be perverse, but it is no joke. And it is not of my own making. It is a perversity entailed in the modern understanding of religious faith and the ethical. The horror of Abraham for such an understanding is precisely that he is a killer of his own child. Again, СКАЧАТЬ