CHAPTER X

A BIBLICAL REFLECTION ON ETHNICITY AND CULTURE:

Response to George McLean and Reply

HENRI MARC YAKER

Oberlin, Ohio

            I have read Dr. McLean’s paper with care and interest. I am not an anthropologist but a scriptural person, and my response must be oriented along these lines. I find much in this paper that I agree with. Oftentimes I agree with the conclusions but not in the steps by which Dr. McLean gets there, and conversely often agree with the line of thought but not the con-clusions. It is to these issues that I wish to respond today.

            Let me initially restate what I have learned from his paper. Dr. McLean approaches the problem of ethnic conflict through anth-ropological insights of some of the classic studies of Levi Strauss, Durkheim, Kluckorn, and more recently Geertz. At the outset, and as a recurring theme, he separates ethnic conflict from religious issues, a position which I question later. He maintains that religious underpinnings will eliminate ethnic conflict. Having stated his thesis, he proceeds to an analysis of culture, hoping to separate the cultural forms from the religious enterprise.

            At the onset there is a rejection of British Associationism as developed in the Locke-Berkeley-Hume triad, as denying cultural freedom. In spite of the fact that Locke has some influence on American constitutional jurisprudence, I seriously doubt that any-one ever took Locke, Berkley, and Hume to be definitive of cultural systems except among logical positivists who reject all axiological systems. It was primarily an epistemology for natural scientific knowledge. I think the issue is a "straw man." In a like manner he rejects Kant’s "categorical imperative." Although Immanuel Kant is widely read in undergraduate philosophy, I doubt seriously if his Second Critique is of major importance today.

            Finally McLean turns to an hermeneutic method, the method of interpreting the meaning for the present time from the liturgy, myth, legend, and tradition of a people. I like this method because my generation some 40 years ago was reading Rudolph Bultmann1 and Karl Barth2 and doing precisely that to Scriptures. The hermeneutic analysis in Scripture follows the same procedure: recognition of the role of the Nabi, or prophet, the story or maggid, the use of the Sitz-im-Leben of the historic scene, and the pro-clamation of authority, the kerygma or message. In modern times, the sociologist Peter Berger has extended this method to the institutionalization of religion as a whole beyond the Scriptural application in his well-known Sacred Canopy3 and The Noise of Solemn Assemblies.4 In all cases is the emergence of value in the solidification of tradition. With the tradition, authority to pass the tradition becomes paramount. Every rabbinical ordination contains the formula "yore yoreah" -- "let him teach" (presumably the tra-dition). Rightly, McLean derives the semantic meaning of "value." In Hebrew, value is translated from kabodh meaning heavy and there-fore worthy. It has the obvious equivalent meaning of honor.

            Professor McLean now applies these insights, well known in Scriptural circles, to differentiate between technical knowledge and skill (techne) from an organic subject-object creativity, the kind that Alfred Whitehead5 developed. Here is the relationship of agno-sticism or perhaps episteme. It is from this relationship that the norms of society emerge, the nomos which Antigone proclaimed as higher than the physikos and the nomos which became in the New Testament a mistranslation for torah which means literally dida-skalos or teaching. Through the norms a "situation ethics" derives existentially applicable to different concrete situations but always developing the ideal in the concrete. It is at this juncture that McLean makes a statement which I believe needs to be challenged, namely that "current injustices are divorced from the traditions that produced them." Indeed we cannot show the development of Nazi Germany was a function of Luther’s conflict with Jews. But in Biblical circles there was always the term "higher anti-Semitism" or "theological anti-Semitism," perhaps the kind found in such an eminent Biblical scholar as Rudolph Kittel. Some fifty years ago Joshua Trachtenberg6 tried to trace anti-Semitism as derivative from the first century’ s view on demonology. Trachtenberg may not be entirely correct, but his method still raises questions that such a separation as proposed by Dr. McLean is artificial and naive.

            At any rate McLean proceeds to hold that Scriptural studies are a key to the reduction of ethnic conflict. His definition of religion following Geertz is quite correct, but it does not seem to be isolated from cultural tradition as a whole. McLean identifies the tautological character of Scriptures by showing that Islam emphasizes unity, the Old Testament emphasizes truth and the New Testament em-phasizes love. Everyone agrees that this is true, but does extensive knowledge of this fact in changing Sitz-im-Leben lead to a mean-ingful dialogue which is open? No one denies with him the need to expand one’s personal "horizon of meaning." Dialogue, if at all possible, requires this as a minimum. But does knowledge lead to dialogue? In fact, much modern dialogue has been mutual "back scratching" for common denominators that do not exist nor are important. There are fundamental differences between apocalyptic adventists and, say, the contemporary and growing movement known as the "Jesus Seminar."7 It is important to know the dif-ferences between these two movements, but can and does this produce dialogue?

            In summation, I am not persuaded by this paper that the con-clusions follow analysis which is more or less correct. Linking Scriptural study to an hermeneutic study of culture may produce scholarship and insight. But does it necessarily produce more? How is "openness" achieved?

            From my own point of view, divesting religious values from ethnic considerations may be impossible. Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as "symbolic thinking" quite appropriately. But equally well, ethnic traditions are symbolic and both are subsumed together. Religion and tradition both articulate the unconscious. This unconscious is tied to the cosmological world-view and the people and the language in an organic way in which the subject-object cannot be "bifurcated." Some years ago I attempted to de-monstrate in publication the view that the linear historical approach of Judaeo-Islam-Christian thought derives from the language of the Bible.8 In Hebrew the language is syn-categoramatic, tying every-thing in action-oriented activity. There is no well-defined tense structure. God always speaks in an imperfect tense, implying acti-vity in which past, present, and future are united. Passage through time is both as religious activity and human history.

            One must contrast this with the elaborate voices and de-clinations of the Greek Indo-European language which takes on spatial and a temporal if not eternal patterns. The Greek world is physical, but the Hebrew world is temporal. This cosmology develops a Scripture and a Tradition which are interwoven. One of the major claims of Orthodox Christianity is that Scripture and Tradition are one and the same. For them the New Testament was an Apostolic witness to its Lord, and Tradition was a hermeneutic response to the Apostolic witness. Christianity and Judaism differ by way of eschatology but not by structure of a God who acts in history or by the Divine-human encounter. Significantly enough, Islamic tradition maintains that the Qur’an was dictated to Mo-hammed by Gabriel and not by the Divine utterance. Again we see the human encounter.

            Given this development, liturgy, tradition, and Scripture all become an articulation of an unconscious Weltanschauung or World-view in a set time of history or Sitz-im-Leben. Hermeneutics asks what is the meaning for this hour of passage. Peter Berger in modern times has demonstrated how the institutionalization of the tradition produces a religious sanctification of the establishment, a "sacred canopy" over the secular society. Calvinism may be a canopy for the capitalist endeavor. Some years ago Will Herberg pointed out that identification of a person’s denomination frequently described his/her lifestyle including his/her clubs and social associations.9 The word ethnic is from the Greek ethos or "nation" translated into Hebrew as God or goyiim and represents the di-viding line between "we" and "they" of the nations. The daily liturgy of the Jewish prayer book of the fourth century BC specifically says "who has not made us like the other nations of the earth." To the extent that the horizons are blurred by similar world-views, dia-logue becomes easier. I find Jewish-Christian dialogue enjoyable (including Islamic thought). I find myself at a loss with, say, Mahayana Buddhists whose view of time, history, and meaning are so different from mine.

            I think that I am suggesting that Scriptural scholarship may not produce meaningful dialogue in reducing ethnic conflict, and our horizons of the other. I think all would agree that Islamic terrorists do not characterize Islam; neither did the Dukhabors of Canada mirror Christianity when they blew up the Canadian National Railroad; nor does the neturai karma of Jerusalem, who reject Israel because the messiah did not come on a white horse, represent mainstream Judaism. But knowing all this does not reduce the conflict. Allport once suggested in his monumental The Nature of Prejudice10 that association alone may increase the prejudice rather than weaken it. So while a reduction of conflict is possible, there is also the possibility of intensifying it.

            Moreover, Scriptural study has different meanings. The Fundamentalists maintain that Barth and Bultmann used the right vocabulary with entirely different meanings. Hermeneutics may disclose these differences in semantic meaning, but only if the term "resurrection" has a spectrum of religious meanings. Study may only show how these meanings are culturally defined to begin with. In recent times considerable attention has been given to the "Jesus Seminar," a scholarly group studying the historical Jesus in the light of recent linguistic and archaeological scholarship on the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls. Although many rely on a questionable docu-mentary source, namely The Gospel of Thomas, what has emerged is a picture of Jesus as a "marginal Jew" to use the term given by your own Catholic University scholar John Mayer.11 Thus Jesus must be understood as a Jew within the midrashic/rabbinic times, a Jew who marched to a different drummer in opposing the con-ventional wisdom of the age. Indeed this comes as relief in vindicating the bitter attacks on the Pharisees made by the Gospels. It portrays Jesus as within the Pharisaic Separatist tra-dition. The larger question looms: what does this say about anti-Semitism? I submit it is fascinating titillation for the Society of Biblical Literature, but the SBL never has had ethnic conflict from its beginning. Perhaps we are intellectually stroking ourselves into believing that scholarship is the key. Or are we in the throes of the Republic of Plato looking for philosopher-kings?

            It would seem that the problem lies far beyond the religious dimension although the good will or religious leadership must be a given. Ethnic conflict is tied to the traditions of a culture which include religion, its liturgical style, its mythology, its prophets, and its teachers. We live in a world of vast information sharing and the implosion of too much information may be the current malaise of our civilization, producing the anomie, alienation, and anxiety of our times, ethnically and universally. Be that as it may, Harvey Cox was more right than wrong in his Secular City in pointing out the bland sameness of the world and the same Coca-Cola in Bombay and the same death rated by suicide world-wide.12 Cox repudiated his book later, but I am convinced that he was more correct than not. This has led to a mass cross-cultural diffusion. When I was a child in the city of Boston, a bagel was something only a Jewish person ate and was regarded otherwise as mysterious forbidden food. Today supermarkets all over the world sell bagels, and I had one in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1968, never a remarkably Jewish city. I am not suggesting that culinary traditions are important but that cross cul-tural diffusion is slowly transforming ethnic identities.

            I do not propose that cross cultural diffusion including re-ligious traditions will solve ethnic conflict. Somehow I feel that the singing of Jewish songs in Christian services or the appearance of "soul music" is not a solution to anything but may reflect the slow cross cultivation of diverse cultures and ethnicities. But as a Biblical person rather than as an anthropologist, I am not sure that I share the solution presented in Dr. McLean’s paper. Is the problem of Bosnia-Herzegovina an ethnic one, a religious war of Muslim versus Christian, or a political struggle? Or are they all different modes of a particular world-view? I am reminded of the story Karl Jung told of the two boys talking. One said to the other: "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" "No," he replied: "It is like the devil. It turns out to be your father."

NOTES

            1. Rudolf Bultmann, The Theology of the New Testament, Vols. I-II (New York, 1951-1953).

            2. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York, 1959).

            3. Peter Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (London, 1969).

            4. The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (New York, 1961).

            5. Process and Reality (New York, 1959).

            6. The Devil and the Jews (New Haven, 1944).

            7. Cf., for example, Marcus J. Borg, The New Vision of Jesus (San Francisco, 1957).

            8. Henri M. Yaker, Humphrey Osmond, Frances Cheek, The Future of Time (New York, 1971).

            9. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (New York, 1955).

            10. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA, 1934).

            11. John Mayer, Jesus the Marginal Jew, vol. I & II (New York, 1993-94).

            12. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York, 1965).