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December 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
Major opposition parties and governments of the major world powers are now some of the most ardent anti-globalists.
The whole globe looks now more like Yugoslavia did on the eve of the outbreak of hostilities among its ethnic groups than like Europe when the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the bipolar world, came down and the European Union was expanding.
The “Make America Great Again!” election campaign that brought Donald Trump into the White House was above all about identity, a choice between a white “Judeo-Christian,” nationalist America and a pluralist America of groups with distinct dominant identities coexisting under the same roof.
Some identity struggles, defensive and aggressive ones alike, are troublingly “innocent”: like birds of prey, to use Nietzsche’s metaphor, some groups engage in identity struggles by bracketing moral questions and exerting power as they feel they must in order to survive and thrive. Other identity struggles are morally hyper-charged and utterly devoid of self-criticism: with the zeal of fundamentalists, combatants inhabit different moral universes and struggle against each other in the name of their own nonnegotiable values. Still other identity struggles are culturally and morally self-aware.
But it is also true that religions are both an identity concern and force in their own right and that they often get attached to other identities and interests, legitimizing and reinforcing them.
In their origins and in their best historic expressions, all world religions are universal religions, addressing every person as a human being, a member of the global human “tribe,” rather than primarily as a member of any local cultural tribe.8 When such religions become markers of group identities and weapons in political struggles, they push their universal character into the background and morph into particular political religions.
In monotheist versions of political religions, God becomes a servant of the group, identifying who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should befriend and whom we should colonize or destroy, whom we should exclude and whom we should embrace.
To be clear, politically engaged monotheism is not betrayal of monotheism; monotheism as political religion is the traitor.
The religions of the first type are, as Karl Barth put it, “unreliable allies” of the state; the second are its faithful servants.
The first pillar of the identitarian movement is the primacy of ethno-cultural identity.
“The will to give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity.”
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.
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.
How should they think of their identity? How should they relate to the other? How should they go about making peace with the other?
theologians should 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.
Zygmunt Bauman has argued that modernity is “prominent for the tendency to shift moral responsibilities away from the moral self either toward socially constructed and managed supra-individual agencies, or through floating responsibility inside a bureaucratic ‘rule of nobody.’
postmodernity creates a climate in which evasion of moral responsibility is a way of life. By rendering relationships “fragmentary” and “discontinuous,” it fosters “disengagement and commitment-avoidance.”
Yoder implies that other aspects of Jesus’s life ought to serve as examples for Christians in addition to his passion, though the cross is the key for reading these other aspects of Jesus’s life.
The sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are “the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them.”
On the cross, Christ both “identifies God with the victims of violence” and identifies “the victims with God, so that they are put under God’s protection and with him are given the rights of which they have been deprived.”
The theme of solidarity with the victims26 is supplemented by the theme of atonement for the perpetrators.
Like solidarity with the victims, the atonement for the perpetrators issues forth from the heart of the triune God, whose very being is love (1 John 4:8). Moltmann writes, On the cross of Christ this love [i.e., the love of God] is there for the others, for sinners—the recalcitrant—enemies. The reciprocal self-surrender to one another within the Trinity is manifested in Christ’s self-surrender in a world which is in contradiction to God; and this self-giving draws all those who believe in him into the eternal life of the divine love.
To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology.
In The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson argued that the canonical Gospels “are remarkably consistent on one essential aspect of the identity and mission of Jesus.” He continues, Their fundamental focus is not on Jesus’ wondrous deeds nor on his wise words. Their shared focus is on the character of his life and death. They all reveal the same patterns of radical obedience to God and selfless love toward other people. All four Gospels also agree that discipleship is to follow the same messianic pattern. They do not emphasize the performance of certain deeds or the learning of certain doctrines.
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genuinely Christian reflection on social issues must be rooted in the self-giving love of the divine Trinity as manifested on the cross of Christ;
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.
Jesus’s greatest agony was not that he suffered. Suffering can be endured, even embraced, if it brings desired fruit, as the experience of giving birth illustrates. What turned the pain of suffering into agony was the abandonment;
The ultimate scandal of the cross is the all too frequent failure of self-donation to bear positive fruit: you give yourself for the other—and violence does not stop but destroys you; you sacrifice your life—and bolster the power of the perpetrator.
When violence strikes, the very act of self-donation becomes a cry before the dark face of God. This dark face confronting the act of self-donation is a scandal.
In the final analysis, the only available options are either to reject the cross and with it the core of the Christian faith or to take up one’s cross, follow the Crucified—and be scandalized ever anew by the challenge.
The disciples who neither denied nor deserted him were the women.
As Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza points out, right after Mark notes that “women were looking on from a distance” at the Crucified (15:40), he writes of women what we never read of Jesus’s male disciples: as Jesus came into the world to serve and give his life (Mark 10:45), so they “followed” him and “served” him (15:41); standing by him at the cross they are portrayed as “the exemplary disciples of Jesus.”
Whatever progress actually does take place, it also “keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of the feet” of the angel of history, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
Second, modernity has set its high hopes in the twin strategies of social control and rational thought.
“The right design and the final argument can be, must be, and will be found,” is modernity’s credo.
The “wisdom of the cross,” to the contrary, teaches that ultimately salvation does not come either from the “miracle” of the right design or from the “wis...
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This “weakness” is “stronger” than social control, and this “foolishness” is “wiser” than rational thought.
when the hope that rests on “control” and “reason” and is blind to the “unbearable” and “irremediable” has died, then in the midst of an “unbearable” and “irremediable” world a new hope in self-giving love can be born. This hope is the promise of the cross, grounded in the resurrection of the Crucified.
“embrace.” The metaphor seems well suited to bring together the three interrelated themes that are central to my proposal: (1) the mutuality of self-giving love in the Trinity (the doctrine of God), (2) the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross for the “godless” (the doctrine of Christ), (3) the open arms of the “father” receiving the “prodigal” (the doctrine of salvation).
the will to give ourselves to others and “welcome” them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity.
I stress the priority of the “will to embrace,” my assumption is that the struggle against deception, injustice, and violence is indispensable.
the embrace itself—full reconciliation—cannot take place until the truth has been said and justice done.
There is an asymmetrical dialectic between the “grace” of self-donation and the “demand” of truth and justice. Grace has primacy: even if the will to embrace—the opening of the arms to embrace the other—is indiscriminate, the embrace itself is conditional.
Friedrich Nietzsche noted in The Genealogy of Morals, that artists have all too often been “smooth sycophants either of vested interests or of forces newly come to power.”
Our coziness with the surrounding culture has made us so blind to many of its evils that, instead of calling them into question, we offer our own versions of them—in God’s name and with a good conscience.
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.
Blind to the betrayal of Christian faith that both such sacralization of cultural identity and the atrocities it legitimizes represent, the “holy” murderers can even see themselves as the Christian faith’s valiant defenders.
The belief in one God entails a belief in the unity of the human race as recipient of the blessings of this God,41 yet in order to enjoy the full blessings of this God a person had to be a member of a particular “tribe.”
