CHAPTER XIV

DISTANCE AND BELONGING

MIROSLAV VOLF

Fuller Theological Seminary

COMPLICITY

            In the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism Edward W. Said writes that in the process of working on the book he came to a profoundly disturbing insight, namely "how very few of the British or French artists whom I admire took issue with the notion of ‘subject’ or ‘inferior’ races so prevalent among officials who practiced those ideas as a matter of course in ruling India or Algeria" (Said 1993, xiv). "Estimable and admirable works of art and learning," he con-tinues, were "manifestly and unconcealedly" implicated in the im-perial process (xiv). Writers who should have been a conscience of the culture were but a sophisticated echo of its base prejudices, their noble humanist ideals notwithstanding.

            It may well be that we should be surprised not at the writers, but at Said’s surprise. Ought he not to have suspected at the outset that the veneer of artists’ eloquent humanistic self--presentation might cover over a much coarser reality?1 As Friedrich Nietzsche noted over a century ago in The Genealogy of Morals, artists have all too often been "smooth sycophants either of vested interests or of forces newly come to power" (Nietzsche 1956, 236). In any case, whether we are disappointed or cynical about artists’ complicity in the imperial process, as Christians we should be slow to point the accusing finger. We have had our share of complicity in the imperial process. Though Frantz Fanon is not the most reliable guide on the matter, he is not entirely wrong when in The Wretched of the Earth he chides the church in the colonies for being "the foreigner’s Church" and implanting "foreign influences in the core of the colonized people" (Fanon 1963, 43). "She does not call the native to God’s ways," he writes, "but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor" (42). Of course, this is not all we must say about the impact of missionary endeavor on native populations, not even the most important thing. Lamin Sanneh has rightly pointed to the paradox that by insisting on translation of the Gospel into the vernacular foreign missionaries established "the indigenous pro-cess by which foreign domination was questioned" (Sanneh 1987, 332). He suggested that Christian missions are "better seen as a translation movement, with consequences for vernacular revitalization, religious change and social transformation, than as a vehicle for Western cultural domination" (334). Yet, such subversions of the foreign domination notwithstanding, the complicity -- witting or unwitting -- of Christian churches with the imperial process remains an undeniable fact.

            In one sense even more disquieting than the complicity itself is the pattern of behavior in which it is embedded. 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 ver-sions of them -- in God’s name and with a good conscience. Those who refuse to be party to our mimicry we brand sectarians. Con-sider the following stinging indictment H. Richard Niebuhr makes in The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) on the issue of race:

The color line has been drawn so incisively by the church itself that its proclamation of the gospel of the brotherhood of Jew and Greek, of bond and free, of white and black has sometimes the sad sound of irony, and sometimes falls upon the ear as unconscious hypocrisy—but sometimes there is in it the bitter cry of repentance. (Niebuhr 1954, 263)

Still today, many black Baptists or Methodists feel closer to black Muslims than to their white fellow Christians (cf. Berger 1996, 213f.). Or think of the big schism in the church, finalized in 1054 and today gaping wide as ever. It simply redoubled and reinforced religiously the boundary line that ran between Greek and Latin culture, between East and West. Slaves to their cultures, the churches were foolish enough to think of themselves as masters.2

            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. The empirical research conducted by Ralph Premdas in a number of countries has shown "that the inter-communal anti-pathies present in the society at large are reflected in the attitudes of churches and their adherents" (Premdas 1994, 55). Though the clergy are often invited to adjudicate, "the reconciling thrust quickly evaporates after the initial effort" (55f.). The most important rea-sons for failure are the "inter-locking relations of church and cultural section which spill into partisan politics marked by the mobilization of collective hate and cultivated bigotry" (56). 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.

            At times even a genuine desire for reconciliation is absent. Cultural identity insinuates itself with religious force; Christian and cultural commitments merge (Assmann 1992, 157ff.). Such sacrali-zation of cultural identity is invaluable for the parties in conflict because it can transmute what is in fact a murder into an act of piety. Blind to the betrayal of Christian faith that both such sacrali-zation of cultural identity and the atrocities it legitimizes represent, the "holy" murderers can even see themselves as the Christian faith’s valiant defenders (as Serbian fighters have in their recent war against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia). Christian commu-nities, which should be "the salt" of the culture, are too often as insipid as everything around them.

            "If the salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?" asked Jesus rhetorically (Mark 9:50). The feel of doom hangs over the question. Since you cannot season it, tasteless salt "is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot" (Matthew 5:13). Yet the very warning about being thrown out calls for "the bitter cry of repentance," as Niebuhr put it, and invites a turnabout. What we should turn away from seems clear: it is captivity to our own culture, coupled so often with blind self-righteousness. But what should we turn to? How should we live as Christian communities today faced with the "new tribalism" that is fracturing our societies, separating peoples and cultural groups, and fomenting vicious conflicts? 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.

            Yet what does distance mean? What does belonging mean? Distance in the name of what? Belonging to what extent? Many profound theological issues are involved in answering these questions. I will explore them by examining what kind of relation between religious and cultural identity is implied, first, in the original call of Abraham and, second, in its Christian appropriation. In the final section I will then discuss what kinds of stances toward "others" a Christian construction of cultural identity implies and what kind of community the church needs to be if it is to support these stances.

DEPARTING . . .

            At the very foundation of Christian faith stands the towering figure of Abraham (see Kuschel 1995). He is "the ancestor of all who believe" (Romans 4:11). What made Abraham deserve this title? "Faith" is the answer the Apostle Paul gave. Abraham was looking into the abyss of nonbeing as he contemplated his own body, "already as good as dead," and the "barrenness of Sarah’s womb." There was nothing his hope could latch onto. Yet, "in the presence of God . . . life to the dead and calls into existence the things which do not exist" (Romans 4:17, 19) Abraham "believed in the Lord" (Genesis 15:6) that he would have an heir—and became "the father of us all" (Romans 4:16).

            Before we read that Abraham "believed" (Genesis 15:6), however, Genesis records that he "went forth" (12:4). God said to Abraham:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (12:1–3)

Sarah being barren (Genesis 11:30), the command to "go forth" placed before Abraham a difficult choice: he would either belong to his country, his culture, and his family and remain comfortably in-consequential or, risking everything, he would depart and become great -- a blessing to "all the families of the earth" (Brueggemann 1977, 15ff.). 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. If he left, he would have to set out "not knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8); only if the divine promise comes true will the land of his ancestors that he left emerge as the land of expulsion, a land to which Adam, Eve, Cain, and the builders of the tower of Babel have been expelled from the presence of God. Abraham chose to leave. The courage to break his cultural and familial ties and abandon the gods of his ancestors (Joshua 24:2) out of allegiance to a God of all families and all cultures was the original Abrahamic revolution. Departure from his native soil, no less than the trust that God will give him an heir, made Abraham the ancestor of us all (see Hebrews 11:8).

            The narrative of Abraham’s call underlines that stepping out of enmeshment in the network of inherited cultural relations is a correlate of faith in the one God. As Jacob Neusner points out,

the great monotheist traditions insist upon the triviality of culture and ethnicity, forming trans-na-tional, or trans-ethnic transcendental communities . . . Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mean to overcome diversity in the name of a single, com-manding God, who bears a single message for a humanity that is one in Heaven’s sight. (Neusner 1997)

As I will argue later, from my perspective the talk about the "triviality of culture" and about "overcoming diversity" is too strong when taken at its face value (and there are reasons to believe that Neusner does not mean what he says in a strong sense). His main point, however, is well taken: the ultimate allegiance of those whose father is Abraham can be only to the God of "all families of the earth," not to any particular country, culture, or family with their local deities. The oneness of God implies God’s universality, and universality entails transcendence with respect to any given culture. Abraham is a progenitor of a people which, as Franz Ro-senzweig puts it, "even when it has a home . . . is not allowed full possession of that home. It is only ‘a stranger and a sojourner." God tells it: ‘The land is mine’" (Rosenzweig 1971, 300).3

            To be a child of Abraham and Sarah and to respond to the call of their God means to make an exodus, to start a voyage, become a stranger (Genesis 23:4; 24:1–9). It is a mistake, I believe, to complain too much about Christianity being "alien" in a given culture, as Choan-Seng Song has done, for instance, in the Intro-duction to his Third-Eye Theology about the place of Christianity "in the world of Asia" (Song 1991, 9). There are, of course, wrong ways of being a stranger, such as when an alien culture (say one of the Western cultures) is idolatrously proclaimed as the gospel in another culture (say one of the Asian cultures). But the solution for being a stranger in a wrong way is not full naturalization, but being a stranger in the right way. Much like Jews and Muslims, Christians can never be first of all Asians or Americans, Croatians, Russians, or Tutsis, and then Christians. 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. Since Abraham is our ancestor, our faith is "at odds with place," as Richard Sennett puts it in The Conscience of the Eye (Sennett 1993, 6).

            In today’s cultural climate Abraham’s kind of departure might receive censure from two opposite (though in some important respects unified) fronts. On the one hand it might be challenged as too goal oriented, too linear, not radical enough; on the other, it might be dismissed as too detached, too aloof, in some sense too radical. The first challenge comes from postmodern thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze. One way to describe his thought is to say that he made "departing" into a philosophical program; "nomadic" functions for him as a central philosophical category. "Nomads are always in the middle," writes Claire Parnet explicating Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet 1980, 37). They have no fixed location, but roam from place to place, always departing and always arriving. "There is no starting point just as there is no goal to reach," underlines Deleuze (10); every place of arrival is a point of departure.4 Indeed, there is even no stable subject, either divine or human, who could give direction to the departures. One is always departing pure and simple, flowing like a stream, to use one of Deleuze’s favorite images, merging with other streams and changing in the process, de-territorializing them as one is de-territorialized by them (57).

            Contrast the "nomadic" life of Abraham. Refusing to go with the flow, Abraham decided to go forth in response to a call of God. Both the call and the decision to obey it presuppose an acting agent, a stable subject. Moreover, Abraham’s departure had a starting point -- his country, his kindred, and his father’s house; and it had a definite goal -- creation of a people ("a great nation") and possession of a territory ("the land that I will show you"). Departure is here a temporary state, not an end in itself; a departure from a particular place, not from all sites (pace Robbins 1991, 107). And this is the way it must be if the talk about departures is to be inte-lligible. Departures without some sense of an origin and a goal are not departures; they are instead but incessant roaming, just as streams that flow in all directions at one and the same time are not streams but, in the end, a swamp in which all movement has come to a deadly rest. Of course, social intercourse happens not to follow the prescriptions of Deleuze’s theory, at least not yet. Though Deleuze has difficulty thinking of the concept of human agency, people do act as agents; they have goals, make things happen, and often enough these are evil things. 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 (Frank 1984, 404, 431). Against his intention (Deleuze 1991, 195ff.), Deleuze would have to say "yes" without being able to say "no," much like the Nietzschean "all-contented" ass who always says "yea" (Nietzsche 1969, 212). No, father Abraham, better to stay with your family and in your country than to follow Deleuze’s call to go forth.

            "Stay within the network of your relations"—this is what the critics from the other side would advise Abraham. Such advice might come from those feminists who, unlike Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, consider separation and independence ills to overcome rather than goods to strive for (de Beauvoir 1952). To them, Abraham could appear as a paradigmatic male, eager to separate himself ("go forth"), to secure his independence and glory ("great nation"), crush those who resist him ("curse"), be be-nevolent to those who praise him ("blessing"), and finally extend his power to the ends of the earth ("all the families"). Abraham is all transcendence and no immanence, the transcendence of a se-parated and conquering male "I" underwritten by the imposing transcendence of the divine "I." Such a transcendent self is "phallic" and destructive, the argument would go. Must not every son of Abraham count with the possibility that his father will be called to take him "to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering" (Genesis 22:2), with no guarantees that God will provide a lamb as a substitute? (Lyotard and Gruber 1995, 22). An "anti-phallic" revolution must bring down the detached and violent self, situate it in the web of relationships, and help it recover its im-manence. "Immanence," writes Catherine Keller in From a Broken Web, "is the way relations are part of who I am" (Keller 1986, 18). The new, she suggests, comes not through the heroic history of separating selves that respond to a transcendent call ("restless masculine roving"), but is created "with and within the field of relations" (18).

            Should Abraham have stayed "within the field of relations"?5 Notice, first, that Abraham’s departure does not stand for denial of relationality. He is not a lonely modern self, restlessly roving about. Modernity seeks "emancipation with no binding to the other" (Lyotard and Gruber 1995, 20); Abraham is most radically bound to God. In marked contrast to the builders of the tower of Babel who wanted to make themselves great (Genesis 11:4), Abraham will be made great by God whose call he has obeyed (12:2) (Brueg-gemann 1977, 18). Related to God, Abraham is, moreover, not "a divinely winged animal that soars above life but does not alight on it," as Nietzsche writes of philosophers’ ascetic ideal (Nietzsche 1956, 243). Rather, he is surrounded by a wandering community. Unlike Penelope of Homer’s The Odyssey, Sarah is not at home waiting and weaving while Abraham is voyaging and fighting. 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. Finally, Abraham and Sarah must remove themselves from "within the field of their ancestral relations" if they are to stand at the beginning of a history of a pilgrim people, the body of Jewish people. Without a departure, no such new begin-nings would have been possible. Novelty, resistance, and history all demand transcendence.

            Even if we admit that the Abrahamic departure was nece-ssary and salutary, we are still left with the question of how the people who trace their origin to Abraham’s departure should relate to surrounding peoples and cultures. Since I will address this question as a Christian (rather than simply as a fellow sharer in the Abrahamic faith), I will turn from the towering figure Abraham, the common ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to the Apostle Paul and his reflection on the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham in Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:16). The shift in interest from Abraham’s story to its early Christian appropriation means that I will explore the relation of the Christian children of Abraham to culture by examining the transformation of the original Abrahamic departure.

. . . WITHOUT LEAVING

            In contrast to Abraham, the Apostle Paul was not "accompa-nied by a believing wife" (1 Corinthians 9:4), he was not a proge-nitor of a people, much less a people with a land. Instead, he in-sisted on the religious irrelevance of genealogical ties and on the sole sufficiency of faith. His horizon was the whole world, and he him-self was a traveling missionary, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ -- the seed of Abraham who fulfilled God’s promise that through Abraham "all the nations will be blessed" (Galatians 3:8) -- and laying the foundations for a multi-ethnic community.

            Why the move away from the bodiliness of genealogy to the pure spirituality of faith, from the particularity of "peoplehood" to the universality of multiculturality,6 from the locality of a land to the globality of the world? Here is how Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin in A Radical Jew describes Paul’s original predicament, one which was resolved through conversion:

An enthusiastic first-century Greek-speaking Jew, one Saul of Tarsus, is walking down a road, with a very troubled mind. The Torah, in which he so firmly believes, claims to be the text of the One True God of all the world, who created heaven and earth and all humanity, and yet its primary content is the history of one particular People -- almost one family -- and the practices that it prescribes are many of them practices which mark off the particularity of that tribe, his tribe (Boyarin 1994, 39).

Leaving aside the question of whether this is an adequate fictive narrative of Paul’s conversion, Boyarin’s description of a problem that Paul’s own venerable religious tradition bequeathed to him, a bi-cultural citizen of a multicultural world, is correct. The belief in one God entails a belief in the unity of the human race as recipient of the blessings of this God, yet in order to enjoy the full blessings of this God a person had to be a member of a particular "tribe" (Wright 1992, 170).

            One way out of the dilemma not available to a child of Abraham and Sarah was to regard the different religions as only manifestations of the one deity, as was current among learned men and women in the Hellenistic period (Hengel 1974, 261). Par-ticularity, then, would not need to be a scandal; each culture could find both the one God and the ground of a deeper unity with other cultures by plunging into the depths of its own cultural resources; the deeper it went, the closer to God and to one another it would get -- a view not unlike the one proposed by John Hick in Interpreting Religion (Hick 1989). As the example of Hick shows, however, if the solution is to work it must operate with an unknowable God, always behind each and every concrete cultural and religious mani-festation (246-49). The trouble is that an unknowable god is an idle god, exalted so high on her throne (or hidden so deep in the foundations of being) that she must have the tribal deities do all the work that every self-respecting god must do. Believing in a god behind all concrete manifestations amounts therefore to not be-lieving in one: each culture ends up worshiping its own tribal deities, which is to say that each ends up, as Paul puts it, "enslaved to beings that are by nature not gods" (Galatians 4:8).

            The solution to the tension created by God’s universality and the cultural particularity of God’s revelation had to be sought, there-fore, in a God who is both one and who is not hidden behind con-crete religions. The only god that Paul, the Jew, could consider was the God of Abraham and Sarah. And yet it was precisely the belief in this one and true God that created the original problem -- this God was tied to the particularities of a concrete social entity, the Jews. At its core this concrete social entity is formed "by appeal to common origin with Abraham and Sarah" and entrusted with Torah as the revelation of God’s will (Neusner 1995, xii).

            As he worked it out in Galatians 3:1-4:11, Paul’s solution to the problem that touched the very core of his religious belief con-tains three simple, yet nonetheless momentous interrelated moves (which I have extrapolated from N. T. Wright’s analysis in The Climax of the Covenant). First, in the name of the one God Paul relativizes Torah: Torah, which is unable to produce a single united human family demanded by the belief in the one God,7 cannot "be the final and permanent expression of the will of the One God" (Wright 1992, 170). Though still important, Torah is not necessary for membership in the covenant. Second, for the sake of equality Paul discards genealogy: the promise "had to be by faith, so that it could be according to grace: otherwise there would be some who would inherit not by grace but as of right, by race" (168). Third, for the sake of all the families of the earth Paul embraces Christ: the crucified and resurrected Christ is the "seed" of Abraham in whom "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female" (Galatians 3:28). In Christ all the families of the earth are blessed on equal terms by being brought into "the promised single family of Abraham" (166).

            Paul’s solution to the tension between universality and particularity is ingenious. Its logic is simple: the oneness of God requires God’s universality; God’s universality entails human equality; human equality implies equal access by all to the blessings of the one God; equal access is incompatible with as-cription of religious significance to genealogy; Christ, the seed of Abraham, is both the fulfillment of the genealogical promise to Abraham and the end of genealogy as a privileged locus of access to God;8 faith in Christ replaces birth into a people. As a con-sequence, all peoples can have access to the one God of Abraham and Sarah on equal terms, none by right and all by grace. Put abstractly, the religious irrelevance of genealogical ties and the necessity of faith in the "seed of Abraham" are correlates of the belief in the one God of all the families of the earth, who called Abraham to depart.

            Paul’s solution might be ingenious, but what is the price of ingenuity? Does he not leave us with an abstract transcendence of a (masculine?) subject, detached much more than the father Abraham ever was from all communal and bodily ties and attached only to the one transcendent God? Does Paul not squander dif-ference and particularity in order to gain equality and universality, thereby making equality empty and universality abstract? This is what Boyarin charges Paul of doing (though Boyarin recognizes at the same time the necessity of the kind of move Paul made). Instead of simply objecting that Paul did not push the egalitarian project to its end,9 Boyarin, aware of the significance of communal identities, censures Paul for affirming equality at the expense of difference.10 Paul’s solution, Boyarin argues, was predicated on "dualism of the flesh and the spirit, such that while the body is particular, marked through practice as Jew or Greek, and through anatomy as male or female, the spirit is universal" (Boyarin 1994, 7). Commenting on Galatians 3:26–28, the magna carta of Pauline egalitarianism and universalism, Boyarin writes, "In the process of baptism in the spirit the marks of ethnos, gender, and class are all erased in the ascension to a univocity and universality of human essence which is beyond and outside the body" (24). Never mind that Paul occasionally does affirm cultural particularities; the grounds on which he affirms them -- the universality of the disem-bodied spirit -- will ultimately lead to erasure of particularities, for these are all grounded in bodiliness. Although the Pauline solution offered a "possibility of breaking out of the tribal allegiances . . . it also contained the seeds of an imperialist and colonizing" practice (234); Paul’s "universalism even at its most liberal and benevolent has been a powerful force for coercive discourses of sameness, denying . . . the rights of Jews, women, and others to retain their difference" (233).

            Boyarin, however, overplays the parallels between Paul and some platonic cultural themes, notably the belief that "the com-mitment to ‘the One’ implied a disdain for the body, and disdain for the body entailed an erasure of ‘difference’" (231). The "One" in whom Paul seeks to locate the unity of all humanity is not dis-incarnate transcendence, but the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. The "principle" of unity has a name, and the name desig-nates a person with a body that has suffered on the cross. In subsequent centuries Christian theologians have arguably made the particularity of Christ’s body the foundation of the rein-terpretation of platonic tradition. As Augustine puts it, he dis-covered in the Neoplatonists that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," but did not find there that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (Confessions VII, 9). The grounding of unity and universality in the scandalous particularity of the suffering body of God’s Messiah is what makes Paul’s thought structurally so profoundly different from the kinds of beliefs in the all-importance of the undifferentiated universal spirit that would make one "ashamed of being in the body" and unable to "bear to talk about his race or his parents or his native country" (Boyarin 1994, 229).

            Consider, first, the foundation of Christian community, the cross. Christ unites different "bodies" into one body, not simply in virtue of the singleness of his person ("one leader -- one people") or of his vision ("one principle or law -- one community"), but above all through his suffering. It is profoundly significant that, as Ellen Charry writes, "Jews and gentiles are made one body of God’s children without regard to ethnicity, nationality, gender, race, or class" precisely in "the cross of Christ" (Charry 1995, 190). True, the Apostle Paul writes: "Because there is one bread we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17). On the surface, the singleness of the bread seems to ground the unity of the body. And yet the one bread stands for the crucified body of Jesus Christ, the body that has refused to remain a self-enclosed singularity, but has opened itself up so that others can freely partake of it. The single personal will and the single impersonal principle or law -- two variations of the transcendent "One" -- enforce unity by suppressing and subsuming the difference; the crucified Messiah creates unity by giving his own self. Far from being the assertion of the one against many, the cross is the self-giving of the one for many. Unity here is not the result of "sacred violence" which obliterates the particularity of "bodies," but a fruit of Christ’s self-sacrifice, which breaks down the enmity between them. From a Pauline perspective, the wall that divides is not so much "the difference" as enmity (cf. Ephesians 2:14). Hence the solution cannot be "the One." Neither the imposition of a single will nor the rule of a single law removes enmity. Hostility can be "put to death" only through self-giving. Peace is achieved "through the cross" and "by the blood" (2:13–17).

            Consider, second, a central designation for the community created by the self-giving of Christ: "the body of Christ." "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and were made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:13). The resurrected Christ, in whom Jews and Greeks are united through baptism, is not a spiritual refuge from pluralizing cor-poreality, a pure spiritual space into which only the undifferentiated sameness of a universal human essence is admitted. Rather, bap-tism into Christ creates a people as the differentiated body of Christ. Bodily inscribed differences are brought together, not re-moved. The body of Christ lives as a complex interplay of differ-entiated bodies -- Jewish and gentile, female and male, slave and free -- of those who have partaken of Christ’s self-sacrifice. The Pauline move is not from the particularity of the body to the universality of the spirit, but from separated bodies to the com-munity of interrelated bodies -- the one body in the Spirit with many discrete members.

            The Spirit does not erase bodily inscribed differences, but allows access into the one body of Christ to the people with such differences on the same terms. What the Spirit does erase (or at least loosen) is a stable and socially constructed correlation be-tween differences and social roles. The gifts of the Spirit are given irrespective of such differences. Against the cultural expectation that women be silent and submit to men, in Pauline communities they speak and lead because the Spirit gives them gifts to speak and lead. 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 sal-vation and agency in the community. Correspondingly, unlike Plotinus Paul is not ashamed of his genealogy (see Romans 9:3); he is just unwilling to ascribe it religious significance.

            The consequences of the Pauline move away from (differ-entiating but internally undifferentiated) bodies to the (unifying but internally differentiated) body of Christ for understanding of iden-tities are immense. As I explore these consequences briefly here, I will take the discussion out of the specific context of Jewish-Christian relations (Hays 1996). In Christian theology Judaism and the Jewish people have a unique place -- gentile Christians are but "wild olive shoots" engrafted to "share the rich root of the [Jewish] olive tree" (Romans 11:17) -- and can therefore not be treated under the general rubric of the relation between Christian faith and group identities, which is my specific interest here.

            What are the implications of the Pauline kind of universalism? Each culture can retain its own cultural specificity; Christians need not "loose their cultural identity as Jew or Gentile and become one new humanity which is neither" (Campbell 1991, vi). At the same time, no culture can retain its own tribal deities; religion must be de-ethnicized so that ethnicity can be de-sacralized. Paul deprived each culture of ultimacy in order to give them all legitimacy in the wider family of cultures. Through faith one must "depart" from one’s culture because the ultimate allegiance is given to God and God’s Messiah who transcend every culture. And yet precisely because of the ultimate allegiance to God of all cultures and to Christ who offers his "body" as a home for all people, Christian children of Abraham can "depart" from their culture without having to leave it (in contrast to Abraham himself who had to leave his "country" and "kindred"). Departure is no longer a spatial category; it can take place within the cultural space one inhabits. And it involves neither a typically modern attempt to build a new heaven out of the worldly hell nor a typically postmodern restless movement that fears to arrive home. Never simply distance, a genuinely Christian de-parture is always also presence; never simply work and struggle, it is always already rest and joy (pace Lyotard and Gruber 1995, 16).

            Is the result of this kind of departure some "third race," as the early Christian apologist, Aristides, suggested when he divided humanity into Gentiles, Jews, and now Christians? But then, as Justo L. González points out in Out of Every Tribe and Nation, we would be faced with "the paradoxical notion that, in the midst of a world divided by racism, God has created still another race" (González 1992, 110). No, the internality of departure excludes a cosmopolitan third race, equally close to and equally distant from every culture. 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. They are distant, and yet they belong. Their difference is internal to the culture (Volf 1994, 18f.). Because of their internality -- their im-manence, their belonging -- the particularities, inscribed in the body, are not erased; because of their difference -- their tran-scendence, their distance -- the universality can be affirmed.

            Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys: I affirm my exclusive identity as Croatian and want either to shape everyone in my own image or eliminate them from my world. But distance without belonging isolates: I deny my identity as a Croatian and draw back from my own culture. But more often than not, I become trapped in the snares of counter-de-pendence. I deny my Croatian identity only to affirm even more forcefully my identity as a member of this or that anti-Croatian sect. And so an isolationist "distance without belonging" slips into a destructive "belonging without distance." Distance from a culture must never degenerate into flight from that culture but must be a way of living in a culture.

            This, then, was Paul’s creative re-appropriation of the original Abrahamic revolution. In the name of the one God of Abraham Paul opened up a particular people to become the one universal multi-cultural family of peoples. An eloquent witness to this radical re-interpretation of the relationship between religion and cultural identity is Paul’s seemingly insignificant replacement of a single word in a text from Genesis: the promise that Abraham will inherit the land (12:1) becomes in Paul the promise that he will inherit the world (Romans 4:13) (Wright 1992, 174). A new universe of meaning entailed in the switch from "land" to "world" made it possible, in Boyarin’s words, "for Judaism to become a world religion" (Boyarin 1994, 230). The original Abrahamic call to depart from his country, kindred, and father’s house remained; what Paul made possible was to depart without leaving. 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.

CULTURE, CATHOLICITY, AND ECUMENICITY

            Let us assume that Christians can depart without leaving, that their distance always involves belonging and that their kind of belonging takes the form of distance. What positive services does distance provide? In response, let us consider the reasons for which Christians should distance themselves from their own cul-ture. The answer suggested by the stories of Abraham and his seed, Jesus Christ, is this: in the name of God and God’s promised new world. There is a reality that is more important than the culture to which we belong. It is God and the new world that God is creating, a world in which people from every nation and every tribe, with their cultural goods, will gather around the triune God, a world in which every tear will be wiped away and "pain will be no more" (Revelation 21:3). Christians take a distance from their own culture because they give the ultimate allegiance to God and God’s promised future.

            The distance born out of allegiance to God and God’s future -- a distance which must appropriately be lived out as internal difference -- does two important services. First, it creates space in us to receive the other. Consider what happens when a person becomes a Christian. Paul writes, "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17). When God comes, God brings a whole new world. The Spirit of God breaks through the self-enclosed worlds we inhabit; the Spirit re-creates us and sets us on the road toward becoming what I like to call a "catholic personality," a personal microcosm of the eschatological new creation (Volf 1992a). A catholic personality is a personality enriched by other-ness, a personality which is what it is only because multiple others have been reflected in it in a particular way. The distance from my own culture that results from being born by the Spirit creates a fissure in me through which others can come in. The Spirit un-latches the doors of my heart saying: "You are not only you; others belong to you too."

            A catholic personality requires a catholic community. As the Gospel has been preached to many nations, the church has taken root in many cultures, changing them as well as being profoundly shaped by them. Yet the many churches in diverse cultures are one, just as the triune God is one. No church in a given culture may isolate itself from other churches in other cultures declaring itself sufficient to itself and to its own culture. Every church must be open to all other churches. We often think of a local church as a part of the universal church. We would do well also to invert the claim. Every local church is a catholic community because, in a profound sense, all other churches are a part of that church, all of them shape its identity. As all churches together form a world-wide ecumenical community, so each church in a given culture is a catholic com-munity. Each church must therefore say, "I am not only I; all other churches, rooted in diverse cultures, belong to me too." Each needs all to be properly itself.

            Both catholic personality and the catholic community in which it is embedded suggest catholic cultural identity. One way to con-ceive cultural identity is to postulate a stable cultural "we" as opposed to an equally stable "them," both complete in and of them-selves; they would interact with one another, but only as self-en-closed wholes, their mutual relations being external to the identity of each. Such an essentialist understanding of cultural identity, however, is not only oppressive -- force must be used to keep everything foreign at bay -- but is also untenable. As Edward Said points out, all cultures are "hybrid . . . and encumbered, or en-tangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements" (Said 1993, 317). The distance from our own culture which is born of the Spirit of the new creation should loosen the grip of our culture on us and enable us to live with its fluidity and affirm its hybridity. Other cultures are not a threat to the pristine purity of our cultural identity, but a potential source of its enrich-ment. Inhabited by people who are courageous enough not simply to belong, intersecting and overlapping cultures can mutually contribute to the dynamic vitality of each.

            The second function of the distance forged by the Spirit of new creation is no less important: it entails a judgment against evil in every culture. A catholic personality, I said, is a personality enriched by the multiple others. But should a catholic personality integrate all otherness? Can one feel at home with everything in every culture? With murder, rape, and destruction? With nationa-listic idolatry and "ethnic cleansing"? Any notion of catholic per-sonality which was capable only of integrating, but not of dis-criminating, would be grotesque. There are incommensurable per-spectives that stubbornly refuse to be dissolved in a peaceful syn-thesis (Mouw 1987, 114f.); there are evil deeds that cannot be tolerated. The practice of "judgment" cannot be given up (see Chapter II). There can be no new creation without judgment, with-out the expulsion of the devil and the beast and the false prophet (Revelation 20:10), without the swallowing up of the night by the light and of death by life (Revelation 21:4; 22:5) (Volf 1991, 120f.).

            The judgment must begin, however, "with the household of God" (1 Peter 4:17) -- with the self and its own culture. In the course of his discussion of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche pointed out that those who wish to make a new departure have "first of all to subdue tradition and the gods in themselves" (Nietzsche 1956, 251). Similarly, those who seek to overcome evil must fight it first of all in their own selves. Distance created by the Spirit opens the eyes to self-deception, injustice, and the destructiveness of the self. It also makes us aware that, as Richard Sennett pointed out, group identities "do not and cannot make for coherent and complete selves; they arise from fissures in the larger social fabric; they contain its contradictions and its injustices" (Sennett 1994). A truly catholic personality must be an evangelical personality -- a per-sonality brought to repentance and shaped by the Gospel and engaged in the transformation of the world.

            The struggle against falsehood, injustice, and violence both in the self and the other is impossible without distance. "How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity?" asks Julia Kristeva rhetorically (Kristeva 1986, 298). Of course, being a stranger pure and simple is a rather pathetic posture, verging on insanity. If I cut all the ties that bind me to any moral and linguistic tradition I become an indeterminate "self," open to any arbitrary content. As a consequence, I simply float, unable to resist anything because I do not stand anywhere.11 The children of Abraham are not strangers pure and simple, however. Their "strangeness" results not from the negative act of cutting all ties, but from the positive act of giving allegiance to God and God’s promised future. Stepping out of their culture, they do not float in some indeterminate space, looking at the world from everywhere and anywhere. Rather with one foot planted in their own culture and the other in God’s future -- internal difference -- they have a vantage point from which to perceive and judge the self and the other not simply on their own terms but in the light of God’s new world -- a world in which a great multitude "from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" is gathered "before the throne and before the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9; 5:9).

            In the battle against evil, especially against the evil in one’s own culture, evangelical personality needs ecumenical community. In the struggle against the Nazi regime, the Barmen Declaration called the churches to reject all "other lords" -- the racist state and its ideology -- and give allegiance to Jesus Christ alone "who is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and death." The call is as important today as it was then. Yet it is too abstract. It underestimates our ability to twist the "one Word of God" to serve our own communal ideologies and na-tional strategies. The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all too easily blur our vision of God’s new creation -- America is a Christian nation, we then think for instance, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multi-cultural community of Christian churches. We need to see our-selves 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." Barmen’s commitment to the Lordship of Christ must be supple-mented with the commitment to the ecumenical community of Christ. The two are not the same, but both are necessary.

            Let me suggest a confession -- like text that expresses the need for ecumenical community in the struggle against "new tribalism." I will follow the format of the Barmen Declaration:

"You were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation" (Revelation 5:9). "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

All the churches of Jesus Christ, scattered in diverse cultures, have been redeemed for God by the blood of the Lamb to form one multicultural community of faith. The "blood" that binds them as brothers and sisters is more precious than the "blood," the language, the customs, political alle-giances, or economic interests that may separate them.

We reject the false doctrine, as though a church should place allegiance to the culture it inhabits and the nation to which it belongs above the com-mitment to brothers and sisters from other cultures and nations, servants of the one Jesus Christ, their common Lord, and members of God’s new community.

            In situations of conflict Christians often find themselves accomplices in war, rather than agents of peace. We find it difficult to distance ourselves from our selves and our own culture and so we echo its reigning opinions and mimic its practices. As we keep the vision of God’s future alive, we need to reach out across the firing lines and join hands with our brothers and sisters on the other side. We need to let them pull us out of the enclosure of our own culture and its own peculiar set of prejudices so that we can read afresh the "one Word of God." In this way we might become once again the salt to the world ridden by strife.

            The two positive functions of distance from one’s own culture that I have highlighted invite two objections. The first concerns the notion of "hybrid identity." Do we not reach a point at which we must close the doors not simply to what is evil but also to what is foreign because if we keep the doors open our home will soon no longer be our own and we will no longer be able to distinguish home from a street? Put more abstractly, does not identity -- even hybrid identity -- presuppose boundary maintenance? A second objection goes in the opposite direction and concerns the struggle against evil: just as I am too loose with cultural identity, so I seem too rigid with moral responsibility. What right do I have to insist that one can distinguish between darkness and light, and that one must struggle against darkness in the name of light? If we operate with such stark dis-tinctions are we not in danger of demonizing and destroying what-ever we happen not to like? I would not dispute the claim behind the first objection and would argue against the second that it is both impossible and undesirable not to distinguish between darkness and light. In the following Chapter I will elaborate on these claims.

NOTES

            1. As one can read in his Representations of the Intellectuals, Said is aware of the tendency of artists and intellectuals to echo regnant opinions (Said 1994). His point is that we should be justified in our expectations that the good ones will do better than that.

            2. The slide into complicity with what is evil in our culture would not be nearly as easy if the cultures did not so profoundly shape us. In a significant sense we are our cultures and we find it therefore difficult to distance ourselves from the culture we inhabit in order to evaluate its various elements. The difficulty, however, makes the distancing from our own culture in the name of God of all cultures so much more urgent. The judgments we pass need not be always negative, of course. As I have argued elsewhere, there is no single correct way to relate to a given culture as a whole; there are only various ways of accepting, transforming, rejecting, or re-placing various aspects of a given culture from within (Volf 1995, 371ff.; Volf 1996, 101).

            3. I owe the reference to Rosenzweig to the Jewish scholar Michael S. Kogan. Referring to the Rosenzweig quote he wrote in a letter to me: "It makes the Jewish reader feel quite strange -- at home nowhere but in the Divine embrace."

            4. The images of "vagabond" or "stroller" would probably express better the idea Deleuze wants to convey; the course nomads take is much more charted and predictable than Deleuze suggests. In Life in Fragments Zygmunt Bauman has used images of "vagabond" and "stroller," alongside those of "tourist" and "player" to analyze the character of postmodern culture (Bauman 1995, 94ff.).

            5. In From a Broken Web Catherine Keller does not comment on the story of Abraham, and I have no way of knowing what she would have said had she chosen to comment on it. What follows is not a defense of Abraham against Keller. Her own proposal, rooted as it is in process thought, is not to deny transcendence but to challenge "the epic polarization of our creative spontaneities into sedentary feminine spinning (immanence without transcendence) and restless masculine roving (transcendence without immanence)" (Keller 1986, 45).

            6. In Children of the Flesh, Children of the Promise Jacob Neusner has argued that, properly understood, Israel is a tran-scendental, supernatural entity and no more "a circumscribed and ethnic religion than is Christianity"; it is "formed by God’s command and act, and whether its members have joined by birth or by choice, it is uniform and one" (Neusner 1995, xii). In the language of Judaism, he argues, Israel refers to "an entity of precisely the same type as church or mystical body of Christ in the language of Christianity" (5). The argument seems plausible, yet questions re-main. Does the fact that a rabbi will say "we are Israel by reason of (bodily) birth into Israel" (41) whereas a Christian theologian could never say "we are Christians by reason of (bodily) birth into a Christian family" not indicate an important difference between Israel and the church that makes the church so much more unlike an "ethnic group" than is Israel? Neusner has offered no ex-planation as to how membership by birth, even if accompanied by membership by choice, will not result in a community that is in significant ways "ethnic" even though it may speak many languages and diverge in customs.

            7. For my purposes here it is not essential to go into the debate on precisely why, in Paul’s view, Torah is unable to produce a single human family. In the chapter "The Seed and the Mediator" of The Climax of the Covenant Wright has argued that this is be-cause the Mosaic Torah was "given to Jews and Jews only" (Wright 1992, 173). Contrary to this view, Neusner has rightly underlined that Torah is "God’s revealed will for humanity" (Neusner 1995, 6). Correspondingly, from Jewish perspective "it is not God’s people -- which we comprise -- that forms an exclusive channel of divine grace. It is God who takes up a presence where God’s word lives. Israel is not elect because God chose Israel. Israel is elect because the Torah defines Israel, and the Torah is the medium of God’s grace to humanity. Israel is Adam’s counterpart, just as Christ, for Christianity, is Adam’s counterpart" (62). Elsewhere in The Climax of the Covenant Wright has argued that Torah cannot be "the means through which she [Israel] either retains her membership in the covenant of blessing or becomes . . . the means of blessing the world in accordance with the promise of Abraham" because "Israel as a whole has failed to keep the perfect Torah" (Wright 1992, 146). Following the lead of a more traditional school of interpretation, Hans-Joachim Eckstein has argued that, in Paul’s view, neither Israel nor the Gentiles could fulfill Torah, indeed that Torah was not given originally as a way of salvation at all (Eckstein 1996). For either interpretation, Torah had to be relativized if the blessing of Abraham was to come to all nations.

            8. For Paul this does not imply that there is now no distinction whatsoever between Israel and the Gentiles. In Romans Paul argues both that "the grace of God is extended to Gentiles" and "that God has not broken covenant with Israel" (Hays 1996, 582f.).

            9. The standard objection leveled against Paul in recent de-cades is that he is still too particularistic, that even at his best -- in Galatians 3:28 -- his egalitarianism stops at the boundary of Christian faith. He is unduly privileging the Christian way of salva-tion and thereby denying radical equality. The trouble with this objection is that so far no persuasive alternative to overcome par-ticularism has been proposed. No one has shown how one can intelligently hold to a nonparticularist universalism. And this for a good reason. As it happens, every claim to universality must be made from a particular perspective. Hence it is understandable why for Christians as well as for the Jews "the implementation of the universal agape of God necessarily entails particularity. Parti-cularity is always a ‘scandal,’ but it is also the only way of getting to the universal," as Douglas J. Hall has rightly stressed in polemic with Rosemary Radford Ruether (Hall and Ruether 1995, 107).

            10. Boyarin’s critique of Paul should be located not so much within the American liberation movements of the 1960s, which were about equity as, within the "politics of identity" concerns of the 1990s, which are about respect for discrete cultures (Menand 1994). The subtitle of his book is telling: "Paul and the Politics of Identity."

            11. Tzvetan Todorov has rightly pointed out that being an exile is fruitful only "if one belongs to both cultures at once, without identifying oneself with either." If "a whole society consists of exiles, the dialogue of cultures ceases: it is replaced by eclecticism and comparatism, by the capacity to love everything a little, of flaccidly sympathizing with each option without ever embracing any. Heterology," he concludes, "which makes the difference of voices heard, is necessary; polylogy is insipid" (Todorov 1984, 251).

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