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How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators?
The tension between the message of the cross and the world of violence presented itself to me as a conflict between the desire to follow the Crucified and the disinclination either simply to watch others be crucified or let myself be nailed to the cross.
Shades of Mel Gobson's quote, "At some point you have to decide whether you are going to hang on the cross or be the one driving in the nails!"
of all features of the post-Cold War world, the most consistently troubling are turning out to be the tribal hatreds that divide humankind by race, faith and nationality.
There it became clear to me what, in a sense, I knew all along: the problem of ethnic and cultural conflicts is part of a larger problem of identity and otherness.
The politics of difference rests on two basic persuasions. First, the identity of a person is inescapably marked by the particularities of the social setting in which he or she is born and develops. In identifying with parental figures, peer groups, teachers, religious authorities, and community leaders, one does not identify with them simply as human beings, but also with their investment in a particular language, religion, customs, their construction of gender and racial difference, etc.
Second, since the identity is partly shaped by recognition we receive from the social setting in which we live, “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being”
Instead of reflecting on the kind of society we ought to create in order to accommodate individual or communal heterogeneity, I will explore what kind of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others.
But it is Christian economists, political scientists, social philosophers, etc. in cooperation with theologians, rather than theologians themselves, that ought to address this issue because they are best equipped to do
concentrate less on social arrangements and more on fostering the kind of social agents capable of envisioning and creating just, truthful, and peaceful societies, and on shaping a cultural climate in which such agents will thrive.
To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology.
The meaning of the ministry of Jesus lies in its ending, and the abbreviated story of the ending is the model Christians should imitate.
This book seeks to explicate what divine self-donation may mean for the construction of identity and for the relationship with the other under the condition of enmity.
But one of the reasons we can conceive of a much better world than the one we inhabit is that the condition of reciprocity is so rarely fulfilled. Self-giving is not met with self-giving, but with exploitation and brutality. What some feminist thinkers object to is not so much the idea of self-donation, but that in a world of violence self-donation would be held up as the Christian way.
The overriding commitment to their culture serves churches worst in situations of conflict. Churches, the presumed agents of reconciliation, are at best impotent and at worst accomplices in the strife.
Along with their parishioners the clergy are often “trapped within the claims of their own ethnic or cultural community” and thus serve as “legitimators of ethnic conflict” (56), their genuine desire to take seriously the Gospel call to the ministry of reconciliation notwithstanding.
What should be the relation of the churches to the cultures they inhabit? The answer lies, I propose, in cultivating the proper relation between distance from the culture and belonging to it.
If he is to be a blessing he cannot stay; he must depart, cutting the ties that so profoundly defined him. The only guarantee that the venture will not make him wither away like an uprooted plant was the word of God, the naked promise of the divine “I” that inserted itself into his life so relentlessly and uncomfortably.
The oneness of God implies God’s universality, and universality entails transcendence with respect to any given culture.
At the very core of Christian identity lies an all-encompassing change of loyalty, from a given culture with its gods to the God of all cultures. A response to a call from that God entails rearrangement of a whole network of allegiances. As the call of Jesus’ first disciples illustrates, “the nets” (economy) and “the father” (family) must be left behind (Mark 1:16–20). Departure is part and parcel of Christian identity.
What can those who wish to depart without wanting to arrive do to resist the evildoer? Without subjectivity, intentionality, and goal-orientedness, they will be carried by the stream of life, “blissfully” taking in whatever ride life has in store for them, always saying and accepting everything, including every misdeed that those who have goals choose to commit
Since Abraham left his native country “forever” without an intention of returning to “the point of departure” (Lévinas 1986, 348), Sarah accompanied him, and his relationship to her, even if she was subordinate to him, helped define Abraham. Sarah is not simply the immanent other of Abraham’s wandering transcendence; if she stands for immanence at all, then this is an immanence of their common transcendence.
This reflects a relationship of marriage within mission and yet what happens if that marriage is strained by the transcendence of one over the other? While one wants to respond to the call of God to go into the unknown while the other does not?
The solution to the tension created by God’s universality and the cultural particularity of God’s revelation had to be sought, therefore, in a God who is both one and who is not hidden behind concrete
The Spirit creates equality by disregarding differences when baptizing people into the body of Christ or imparting spiritual gifts. Differentiating the body matters, but not for access to salvation and agency in the community.
The proper distance from a culture does not take Christians out of that culture. Christians are not the insiders who have taken flight to a new “Christian culture” and become outsiders to their own culture; rather when they have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their own culture while with the other remaining firmly planted in it.
Distance from a culture must never degenerate into flight from that culture but must be a way of living in a culture.
Hence whereas Abraham’s original departure is lived out in the one body of Jewish people, Christian departure is lived out in the many bodies of different peoples situated in the one body of Christ.
Both catholic personality and the catholic community in which it is embedded suggest catholic cultural identity
Other cultures are not a threat to the pristine purity of our cultural identity, but a potential source of its enrichment. Inhabited by people who are courageous enough not simply to belong, intersecting and overlapping cultures can mutually contribute to the dynamic vitality of each.
We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God’s future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ, “the one Word of God.”
“Segregation,” “holocaust,” and “apartheid” are Western equivalents of the Balkan “ethnic cleansing” from a more recent past that match in inhumanity anything we encounter outside the boundaries of the West.
As a power of normalization, exclusion reigns through all those institutions that we may associate with inclusionary civilization—through the state apparatus, educational institutions, media, sciences. They all shape “normal” citizens with “normal” knowledge, values, and practices, and thereby either assimilate or eject the “ab-normal” other.
Without boundaries we will be able to know only what we are fighting against but not what we are fighting for.
The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.
The first is that of generating new forms of exclusion by the very opposition to exclusionary practices: our “moral” and “civilizing” zeal causes us to erect new and oppressive boundaries as well as blinds us to the fact that we are doing so. The second danger arises from the attempt to escape the first. It consists in falling into the abyss of nonorder in which the struggle against exclusion implodes on itself because, in the absence of all boundaries, we are unable to name what is excluded or why it ought not to be excluded. For the sake of the victims of exclusion, we must seek to avoid
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Vilify all boundaries, pronounce every discrete identity oppressive, put the tag “exclusion” on every stable difference—and you will have aimless drifting instead of clear-sighted agency, haphazard activity instead of moral engagement and accountability and, in the long run, a torpor of death instead of a dance of freedom.
The human self is formed not through a simple rejection of the other—through a binary logic of opposition and negation—but through a complex process of “taking in” and “keeping out.” We are who we are not because we are separate from the others who are next to us, but because we are both separate and connected, both distinct and related; the boundaries that mark our identities are both barriers and bridges.
“Formless void” may be the ultimate result of sin if left unchecked, but sin’s more immediate goal is not so much to undo the creation, but violently to reconfigure the pattern of its interdependence, to “put asunder what God has joined and join what God has put asunder,” as Plantinga states more correctly (30). I will give the name “exclusion” to this sinful activity of reconfiguring the creation, in order to distinguish it from the creative activity of “differentiation.”
First, exclusion can entail cutting of the bonds that connect, taking oneself out of the pattern of interdependence and placing oneself in a position of sovereign independence.
I reject exclusion because the prophets, evangelists, and apostles tell me that this is a wrong way to treat human beings, any human being, anywhere, and I am persuaded to have good reasons to believe them.
The center of the self—a center that is both inside and outside—is the story of Jesus Christ, which has become the story of the self. More precisely, the center is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected who has become part and parcel of the very structure of the self.
We want a pure world and push the “others” out of our world; we want to be pure ourselves and eject “otherness” from within ourselves.
Wow! Can then the "Church" itself be pursuing the "One World Order" it so is terrified of in the "end times"?
Like the robbers in the story of the Good Samaritan, we strip, beat, and dump people somewhere outside our own proper space half-dead (Luke 10:30). This is exclusion as elimination, most recently at work with such shameless brutality in places like Bosnia and Rwanda. The more benign side of exclusion by elimination is exclusion by assimilation. You can survive, even thrive, among us, if you become like us; you can keep your life, if you give up your identity.
More insidiously, they insert the other into the universe of moral obligations in such a way that not only does exclusion become justified but necessary because not to exclude appears morally culpable. The rhetoric of the other’s inhumanity obliges the self to practice inhumanity.
Symbolic exclusion is often a distortion of the other, not simply ignorance about the other; it is a willful misconstruction, not mere failure of knowledge. We demonize and bestialize not because we do not know better, but because we refuse to know what is manifest and choose to know what serves our interests. That we nevertheless believe our distortions to be plain verities is no counter-argument; it only underlines that evil is capable of generating an ideational environment in which it can thrive unrecognized.
The question cannot be how to locate “innocence” either on the intellectual or social map and work our way toward it. Rather, the question is how to live with integrity and bring healing to a world of inescapable noninnocence that often parades as its opposite.
Under the conditions of pervasive noninnocence, the work of reconciliation should proceed under the assumption that, though the behavior of a person may be judged as deplorable, even demonic, no one should ever be excluded from the will to embrace, because, at the deepest level, the relationship to others does not rest on their moral performance and therefore cannot be undone by the lack of it.
The Powers, he claims, are neither simply human institutions and structures nor an order of angelic (or demonic) beings. They are both institutional and spiritual; they “possess an outer, physical manifestation . . . and an inner spirituality or corporate culture” (Wink 1992a, 17). The Powers are essentially good, but when they become “hell-bent on control,” Wink claims, they degenerate into the Domination System. This system itself is neither only institutional nor spiritual; rather the “forces of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:2) are the interiority of warped institutions, structures,
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It has been often pointed out that the power of evil rests on the power of “imperial speaking,” the power by which evildoers seek to create an illusion that “all is well” (Aukerman 1993, 53) when in fact all is anything but well; ruin is about to take place (cf. Jeremiah 6:13–15; Ezekiel
The other, more important part is that evil is capable not only of creating an illusion of well-being, but of shaping reality in such a way that the lie about “well-being” appears as plain verity. Much of the power of evil lies in the perverse truth it tells about the warped well-being it creates
The central thesis of the chapter is that God’s reception of hostile humanity into divine communion is a model for how human beings should relate to the other.
