More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The categories “oppression/liberation” seem ill-suited to bring about reconciliation and sustain peace between people and people groups. Though the categories themselves are indispensable, we must resist making “oppressed/oppressor” the overarching schema by which to align our social engagement. As a consequence, we need to reject “freedom” as the ultimate social goal
As he argued in The Trinity and the Kingdom, the freedom of the triune God is neither simply the absence of interference nor self-control but “vulnerable love” (Moltmann 1981, 56). It is no different with authentic human freedom. It consists in being a friend of God and partaking in the glory of the triune God who is nothing but pure love (219ff.).
Both the modern project of emancipation and its postmodern critique suggest that a nonfinal reconciliation in the midst of the struggle against oppression is what a responsible theology must be designed to facilitate. Anything else would amount to a seductive ideology of a false liberation that would prove most unhelpful precisely for those in whose name it has been promulgated and who need it the most.
For reconciliation to take place, the inscriptions of hatred must be carefully erased and the threads of violence gently removed. This, I think, is one important lesson of Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God.
victims need to repent because social change that corresponds to the vision of God’s reign—God’s new world—cannot take place without a change of their heart and behavior
Again, forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. Forgiveness is no mere discharge of a victim’s angry resentment and no mere assuaging of a perpetrator’s remorseful anguish, one that demands no change of the perpetrator and no righting of wrongs. On the contrary: every act of forgiveness enthrones justice; it draws attention to its violation precisely by offering to forego its claims (Welker 1994a, 246). Moreover, forgiveness provides a framework in which the quest for properly understood justice can be fruitfully pursued. “Only those who are in a state of truthfulness through the
...more
For the followers of the crucified Messiah, the main message of the imprecatory Psalms is this: rage belongs before God (Janowski 1995, 173)—not in the reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of the soul. This is no mere cathartic discharge of pent up aggression before the Almighty who ought to care. Much more significantly, by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God who loves and does justice.
In the presence of God our rage over injustice may give way to forgiveness, which in turn will make the search for justice for all possible (see Chapter V). If forgiveness does take place it will be but an echo of the forgiveness granted by the just and loving God—the only forgiveness that ultimately matters, because, though we must forgive, in a very real sense no one can either forgive or retain sins “but God alone” (Mark 2:7).
Forgiveness is the boundary between exclusion and embrace. It heals the wounds that the power-acts of exclusion have inflicted and breaks down the dividing wall of hostility. Yet it leaves a distance between people, an empty space of neutrality, that allows them either to go their separate ways in what is sometimes called “peace” or to fall into each other’s arms and restore broken communion.
A Trinitarian theology of the cross leads us to ask, therefore, what “the life of the Trinity” untranslated into the world is, and how it should shape our relations to the other.
Note first the two dimensions of the passion of Christ: self-giving love which overcomes human enmity and the creation of space in himself to receive estranged humanity. This same giving of the self and receiving of the other are the two essential moments in the internal life of the Trinity; indeed, with the triune God of perfect love they are identical. Both those who espouse a hierarchical view of the Trinitarian relations, following the tradition, and those who join more recent trends and advocate a nonhierarchical view of Trinitarian relations, agree that the life of God is a life of
...more
Inscribed on the very heart of God’s grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do not resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us. Having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in—even our enemies. This is what we enact as we celebrate the Eucharist. In receiving Christ’s broken body and spilled blood, we, in a sense, receive all those whom Christ received by suffering.
Vivid or clouded, the memory of exclusion suffered is itself a form of exclusion—a protective one to be sure, but an exclusion nonetheless.
The four structural elements in the movement of embrace are opening the arms, waiting, closing the arms, and opening them again. For embrace to happen, all four must be there and they must follow one another on an unbroken timeline;
Without some such universal substantive values to form its premises covenant may well serve as the bond of political community, but the political community will be no better than the values it espouses; by itself, the covenant will certainly not provide an adequate standard by which a political community can judge itself.
The new covenant is God’s embrace of the humanity that keeps breaking the covenant; the social side of that new covenant is our way of embracing one another under the conditions of enmity. Reflection on social relations from the perspective of the new covenant (“embrace”) is not meant to replace but supplement reflection from the perspective of the old covenant (covenant), I said earlier.
Correspondingly, if the highest reality could be spoken of only in masculine metaphors, men would be more like God and therefore superior to women; similarly, if the feminine metaphors for God were intrinsically inappropriate or inferior to masculine metaphors, women would then be more unlike God and therefore inferior to men. As Johnson underscores, “the equal dignity of women” demands that we be able to speak in feminine metaphors of God (Johnson 1993, 211).
Most theologians would agree that God is beyond sexual distinctions. We use masculine or feminine metaphors for God not because God is male or/and female, but because God is “personal”
Since human beings, the only personal creatures we know, exist only in the duality of male and female, we must speak of a personal God by using masculine or/and feminine metaphors. This is a simple observation, but it has important consequences for our topic. If God is completely beyond sexual distinctions but our language of God is necessarily gendered, then all specifically masculine or feminine content of the language about God stems exclusively from the creaturely realm
Being gendered, language about God will shape how we understand femininity and masculinity, but it should not be used to legitimize a particular construction of femininity and masculinity.
Whether we use masculine or feminine metaphors for God, God models our common humanity, not our gender specificity.
Nothing in God is specifically feminine; nothing in God is specifically masculine; therefore nothing in our notions of God entails duties or prerogatives specific to one gender; all duties and prerogatives entailed in our notions of God are duties and prerogatives of both genders.
These variations make plain that gender identity is not simply biologically given but socially constructed; it is a result of interaction between men and women within a given culture.
Without such a somatic referent a grouping would have either to insist on its unchangeable essence or be always threatened by disappearance. Applied to gender this means that men and women continue to exist in a duality as male and female through all the changes of their gender identity precisely because of the stability of their sexed bodies. It is because of the sexed bodies that we can speak of two genders at all and reflect on their changing identities.
The struggle for survival, recognition, and domination, in which people are inescapably involved, helps forge self-enclosed identities, and such self-enclosed identities perpetuate and heighten that same
The self-giving of the divine persons no longer entails a dissolution of the self (Ratzinger’s Son). Instead, the self-giving is a way in which each divine person seeks the “glory” of the others and makes space in itself for the others. The indwelling of the one divine person in the other no longer entails colonization of the other (Ratzinger’s Father). Instead, the indwelling presupposes that the otherness of the other—the other’s identity—has been preserved, not as self-enclosed and static “pure identity” but as open and dynamic “identity-with-non-identity.”
Instead of setting up ideals of femininity and masculinity, we should root each in the sexed body and let the social construction of gender play itself out guided by the vision of the identity of and relations between divine persons. What is normative is not some “essence” of femininity and masculinity, but the procedures, modeled on the life of the triune God, through which women and men in specific cultural settings should negotiate their mutual relations and their constructions of femininity and masculinity.
Though the content of masculinity and femininity may vary from culture to culture and their boundaries may at times be blurry, the marks of maleness and femaleness are indelibly inscribed in human bodies. Gender difference is therefore an inalienable feature of human existence.
The oneness in Christ is a community of people with sexed bodies and distinct gender identities, not some abstract unity of pure spirits or de-gendered “persons.”
Coming from different sides, men and women need to make a journey into a common wholeness (Radford Ruether 1996, 251). Yet if we assume the permanence of gender differences (as I think we must), then the wholeness cannot be the same for both. Though both can become whole only together, the wholeness is specific to each. This in no way entails the affirmation of an unchangeable “essence” of genders, but follows from the recognition of an irreducible duality, rooted in the sexed body, of dynamically constructed gender
As we reject sameness, we must both affirm equality between men and women and seek to change social practices in which the inferiority of women is embodied and through which it is perpetuated even when their equality to men is formally endorsed.
Similarly, men increasingly feel the need to nurture their own masculinity. As Garrison Keillor notes in The Book of Guys, in advanced industrial societies men are in trouble; whereas years ago “manhood was an opportunity for achievement,” now it is just “a problem to overcome”
Not always true for every circumstance. Masculinity is some times challenged by an indwelling personality of femininity.
Gender identities are essentially related and therefore the specific wholeness of each can be achieved only through the relation to the other, a relation that neither neutralizes nor synthesizes the two, but negotiates the identity of each by readjusting it to the identity of the other.
Men cannot be defined simply as what “women are not”; women cannot be defined simply as “what men are not.” Such oppositional “logic of the same” would do violence to the identities of both men and women, which grow out of “the necessary interconnectedness of our (social) images of ourselves”
Much like human relations in general, relations between genders all too often lack respect and love and are sometimes suffused with enmity.
First, it means abandoning self-absorption and moving toward the other in order to “nourish” and “tenderly care,” in order to make “without blemish” and clothe in “splendor”
Second, self-giving means the opening of the self for the other, letting the other find space in the self—so much so that love for the other, who remains the other and is not transformed into an inessential extension of the self, can be experienced as the love of the self
There are no guarantees that self-giving will overcome enmity and that the evildoers will not try to invade the space that the self has made and crush those willing to give themselves for the good of others. We will have to resist such evildoers without betraying the commitment to self-giving. But though self-giving has no assurance of success, it does have the promise of eternity because it reflects the character of the divine Trinity.
Without justice, meaning threatens to give way to absurdity, social order is endangered by disorder, and peace is menaced by violence.
No doubt, there can be and there are numerous accounts of what is just. Only one of them can be correct, however. Like truth, justice is one and universal, valid for all times and all places, or it is no justice at all. Make that one justice reign, and you will have peace. It would seem that the only genuine problem is how to make that one justice reign.
what God holds to be just must be just for every person and every culture, apart from how any person construes justice.
To be a follower of Jesus Christ means both to affirm that God’s justice transcends all cultural construals of justice and to strive for that justice (Matthew
The argument of postmodern thinkers is not so much that every account of justice is particular, but that every account of justice which purports to be universal is inherently oppressive.
Notice, however, that we have come almost full circle, close to the liberal principle of justice: all should respect all; none should respect those who do not respect all.
All radical difference notwithstanding, there sits within most postmodern thinkers an undeconstructed liberal with universal commitments quietly subverting the work of her master. What gets dismantled in the end is justice as deconstruction.
Over against general laws, postmodern thought celebrates specific names. It would seem that the stress on “names” would secure both the agents in the struggle for justice and subjects in need of protection against injustice. In the postmodern view, however, a “name” is not a “person” in the sense of an agent with a stable identity. As a bearer of a proper name, an individual is “itself also a complex configuration of still further events, multiplicity or constellation unto itself. . . . The individual is a perspective, the perspective of the here, now, at this point” (Caputo 1993, 95).
I suggest that we lower our sights in conflicts over the issues of justice. Instead of seeking overall victory, we should look for piecemeal convergences and agreements. For this more modest endeavor MacIntyre’s tradition-based conception of justice can be of help, provided we resist the temptation to press traditions into coherent and well-integrated systems.
One: “Nobody stands ‘nowhere.’” Two: “Most of us stand in more than one place.”
We do not argue about justice (or anything else, for that matter) as disembodied and a-social “selves” suspended by some sky hook above the hustle and bustle of social conflicts. Social location profoundly shapes our beliefs and practices. We think and act as “encumbered selves” (Sandel 1982, 179–83). “Traditions” are inescapable. Even “the history of liberalism, which began as an appeal to alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be the tyranny of tradition, has itself been transformed into a tradition,” as MacIntyre has pointed out (MacIntyre 1988, 335). To leave all
...more
Christians inescapably inhabit two worlds—they are “in God” and “in the world”—the world of the biblical traditions and the world of their own culture. Consequently, Christian “tradition” is never pure; it always represents a merging of streams coming from the Scriptures and from given cultures that a particular church inhabits (Volf 1996, 99ff.).
