Re-Envisioning Christianity: A New Era in Christian Theological Interpretation of Christian Texts.

Any post-Shoah theology must be constructed in dialogue and focused on dialogue, not on received traditions.

My work in various dialogues has given me the opportunity to see that theologians tend to incorporate only those materials that seem to be readily adaptable to the dialogue taking place. I have noticed that feminist theologians will often not be sensitive to the dramatic developments in the religion-science dialogue, while the people in that dialogue are generally unfamiliar with the basic criticisms posed by feminists about both religion and science. [1] I also see that many of the leading thinkers continue to work with theological ideas that fit in their domain of work but do not consider with any seriousness the radical challenges to theology posed by the Shoah and those theologians doing post-Shoah theology.

I was struck again by this phenomenon recently when I read John Polkinghorne's Belief in God in an Age of science. [2] Polkinghorne is surely one of the leading theologians in the science-religion dialogue, and this book adds to his many contributions to the development of a new theology in the face of the modern, scientific worldview. He poses one defense of traditional Christology (a Christian view of the nature of Jesus) as a challenge to other attempts to adjust such a view to fit more comfortably what we know about the world from science. That defense hinges on the necessity to provide an answer to a world full of suffering and evil, a world that produces Auschwitz. In making his defense, Polkinghorne turns to Jurgen Moltmann's claim in The Crucified God that "even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son. and the power of the Spirit." [3] The point for Polkinghorne is that Christians need a strong affirmation of the divine and human natures of Christ in order to reta in hope in the face of such evil as Auschwitz.

Since such arguments are fairly common in theological literature, I was not surprised--but I was reminded that what seems to make sense in one context can be outlandish in another. Polkinghorne posits a universalizing of Auschwitz as a symbol of inhumanity against all humans. What he ignores in this claim is the particularity of Auschwitz, the bald fact that this was a killing place where the victims were primarily Jews and the perpetrators primarily, if only nominally, Christians. Even more troubling is the implication that there is comfort and hope in this position for those who believe in a traditional Christology but no such hope for all the rest, including the great majority of the particular victims at Auschwitz. If we stretch even further our analysis, we will surely come to realize that this traditional Christology was one of the important factors that led to the possibility of Auschwitz to begin with. [4] What is hope for some is death for others, a trade-off hardly acceptable in a post-Auschwitz wo rld.

Post-Shoah Theology

Polkinghorne's position is possible only if he and other theologians holding similar views -- and there are many -- fail to account for the implications of the Shoah for doing theology. The problem is not wholly to be found in the ignorance of religious thinkers outside of the dialogue on post-Shoah theology but may also be deeply imbedded in the very process of developing such theologies. This essay is an initial effort to explore this problem and to begin to move in a direction that can increase the impact of post-Shoah thinking on the full range of theological reflection.

Polkinghorne's argument reveals interesting clues about the central problem for any post-Shoah theology in that he fails to make clear his distinction between ontological and ontic claims. [5] I believe that he blurs the difference and that leads him toward a basic theological distortion.

Ontological claims are about the way things really are, so that to speak of the divinity of Jesus is to speak of something more than just a metaphor but rather to speak of a reality. The difficulty with this line of argument is that there seems to be little difference between the ontological (the foundation of reality) and the ontic (what we experience as real in the normal sense): to speak of divinity actually enfleshed in Jesus (a traditional Christian view of the Incarnation) is to make the ontological the ontic. This is the centuries-old problem that has faced Christian theologians since the Council of Chalcedon defined Jesus as being one person with two natures (divine and human). This claim means that the ground of all being is reduced to the ontic, to a specific event or set of events in our human experience. If this is more than metaphor but is a claim about reality, as Polkinghorne claims, then we have a serious problem for the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

The problem is obvious to many of us. Since such a claim universalizes the particular Christian belief about Jesus into an ontological reality, all efforts to be open to the other become impossible because there is always in such a christology a universalizing, supersessionist claim -- what Rosemary Ruether meant when she said that antisemitism is the left hand of christology. [6] There is no dialogic problem, even in post-Shoah dialogue, in making the ontic claim of the uniqueness of Jesus. In that way, Jesus can be compared with similar claims made by other religious traditions, including Judaism, regarding what is true about our experience of reality as we know it. Shifting the attention to the ontic Jesus has been the central driving force behind my development of a midrashic approach to post-Shoah Christian theology. [7] Such an approach breaks the universal claim for Jesus by beginning with the assumption that Jesus is for Christians the oral Torah, giving preference for the Torah as the prime source f or our understanding of reality. [8] Of course, what this means is a dramatically different kind of Christology than the one Polkinghorne wishes to defend.

The particular theological problem that faces post-Shoah Christian theology is also symptomatic of a problem in most post-Shoah theologies. For the majority of thinkers engaged in trying to shape a post-Shoah theology, the central compelling feature is the assumption of the uniqueness of the Shoah. The problem is that making such a claim leads to a similar blurring of the ontological and the ontic. If the Shoah is absolutely unique in human history, then it becomes a defining event for reality as such, in this case for the reality of evil. But such theologies also reduce the ontological to the ontic in a way that universalizes the Shoah as a supremely defining event and thus reduces all other claims to lesser subsets of the defining event, the Shoah. The result is that too much attention is focused on harvesting the unique features of the Shoah for theological reflection and defending that uniqueness over against all other possible claims. The end result -- not what most theologians intend, any more than Pol kinghorne intends to reiterate a supersessionist Christology -- is that we cannot devise particular ways to respond to contemporary genocides when we are committed theologically to treat them as defined essentially by the particular and unusual features of the Shoah. Any such theology, even if it successfully guards the sanctity of the Shoah experience (for survivors, for example), falls because we have no way to treat other genocidal activities on their own terms.

Post-Shoah Theology as Postmodern Theology

The second problem may be even more troubling. Post-Shoah theologies tend to be retrieval theologies even when they are strikingly different in content and intent: they are efforts to make sense of the given religious tradition in the light of the events of the Shoah. Indeed, I began my efforts with precisely this objective [9] and did so because I took seriously the dictum of Irving Greenberg, among many others, that no theological statement can be made after the Shoah unless it can be made in the presence of the burning children. [10] I have expanded that assumption to imply that all post-Shoah theology must be dialogical, but I admit that the tendency even in dialogue was to return to the tradition in order to decide if that tradition makes sense--or sense could be made of that tradition -- in the light of the events of the Shoah. The focus became "the tradition" and most particularly the scriptural traditions. Even though my objectives were clearly defined from the outset, I cannot deny that my efforts an d those of my colleagues have been to retrieve in some fashion the tradition as meaningful, even if that meaning were to be a challenge to traditional Christian teaching (thus theology). [11] The approach led to an inter-textual consideration in which certain claims might be made about the genuineness of positions that could then be used to counter positions that are unacceptable in a post-Shoah world -- even if those latter positions were solidly traditional (like the christology that Polkinghorne seeks so diligently to defend).

The problem again is that this retrieval theology does not account for the radically new context for doing theology that we now face. A theology constructed in dialogue forces the dialogue partners to think about tradition in new ways, ways quite alien to the mindset of those who produced these scriptural texts. We do not account for the fact that the focus shifts from the texts to the dialogue--so that the dialogue becomes the authoritative foundation for the new theology. That shift is a vital aspect of the post-Shoah context for theologizing that means more than a shifting away from the authority of tradition: it is a relativizing of tradition as a source of meaning. In this shift, meaning is not resident in texts at all but in the action of dialogue.

I came to realize this fact only after being introduced to a wider range of reflections that can be labeled in general as postmodernism. I am especially indebted to the thought of Emanuel Levinas (among others) who has exposed for me the nature of theological reflection as it is done even in the radical context of post-Shoah theologies: all explanations are rationalizations after the act. [12] Our efforts to find meaning in texts, even sacred texts, are governed not by the so-called meaning carried by the text (as Paul Ricoeur has argued, the text bears a multitude, or surplus, of meanings that cannot be contained by a single interpretation but always produces a conflict of possible interpretations [13]) but are governed by the events, acts that demand explanation. Thus, meaning is really produced in action, in the process of acting toward others (even when our acting toward ourselves is like acting toward the other.) [14]

If theology is always rationalizing after the fact, then we err when we assume that theologies become means for deciding on acts. The many studies on rescuing during the Shoah indicate that rationalizing before the act is rare and often would have led to nonaction (which means the rationalizing does not affect the action in either way). [15] The notion that we would or could change peoples' actions in the future by changing their theologies (or worldviews or at least confounding their natural tendencies to think in certain ways) does not seem to hold. Meaning is not resident in texts, then, but is itself a process that emerges only when we act (as Levinas says, as we act for the other).

This insight has led me to believe that post-Shoah theologies must move away from the reconstructing of worldviews toward theologies rooted in ethics. All post-Shoah theology must be postmodern theology in which both of the problems I have addressed are answered with a radically new approach. All religious narratives turned toward theology have this universalizing tendency that creates barriers for dialogue. Certainly Christianity is a prime example. If we assume a postmodern position, however, we accept that there is no grand narrative of meaning within which all else is defined. Thus, the retrieving of a Christology as a unique feature of Christianity (even in the vein of Roy Eckardt who argues that only a crucified Jesus can do [16]) becomes a non-question, except as one candidate among many for providing meaning for our experience. The focus is on an unfolding narrative not on maintaining the status of a received narrative (thus a reshuffling of the way that post-Shoah theology handles the Shoah narrativ es). If we assume a postmodern theology, then we accept that meaning is emerging in the ways we act for the other (again, even when our acting is aimed toward ourselves as the other).

Moving Toward a Postmodern, Post-Shoah Theology

I was struck again by two examples of recent efforts at shaping a post-Shoah theology, one Christian and one Jewish. I choose these two because both are moving in the direction I am suggesting, but both, in the end, fall back into one or both of the two problems I have set forth here. Darrell Fasching's Narrative Theology after Auschwitz [17] is a prime example for me since he does in his book much of what I have tried to do in my work. I see so clearly in his work what doing post-Shoah theology in this way means. He is clear about the role of theology in a post-Shoah world as both constructing a new narrative and leading us toward a universal ethic of respect. [18] Indeed, his epilogue follows the pattern of a midrashic theology much like my own. He turns to Jacob as a narrative source for shaping a post-Shoah Christian theology. He appeals to Irving Greenberg as a challenge to be heeded for critiquing Christian theologies. He concludes by applying the insight of the Genesis text about Jacob to the contempor ary conflicts in the Middle East. His argument is striking in that, unlike other approaches which critique the Israelis for their handling of the Palestinian question, he aims his interpretations at Christians disowning a critique of Israelis, a fascinating effort to open the door for dialogue by making the Christian view one among many.

But Fasching's appeal to the text of Genesis inevitably leads to the conclusion that meaning is found in the text and that post-Shoah theology aims to bring genuine meanings of traditional texts to bear on contemporary conflicts. Instead of seeing that the multiplicity of meanings carried by texts leads us to ambiguity, Fasching sees that the unique character of Auschwitz forces us to see a meaning that must be the central defining ethic for Christians in a post-Shoah world (the ethic of respect for the stranger). In fact, there is much to commend in this argument and his position, which calls for Christians to take on this ethic, is interesting. The problem is that the text is shaped by a context different from both that of Auschwitz and the present Middle East conflicts. Imposing the meaning of the text on this particular conflict resolution is to impose a universal meaning from the text (even if the aim is one of persuasion) rather than to see that the dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians is the foc us of meaning, a meaning which must emerge from that dialogue and not from meanings resident in texts. I am fascinated by Fasching's appeal that it is finally time for all religions (cultures) to assume this ethic of respect for the stranger, but his appeal only shows how tempting this universalizing tendency is as we attempt to retrieve meaning in texts

Fasching's efforts are exemplary and represent the best of what we see in post-Shoah theological thinking. Nevertheless, a post-Shoah theology needs to make the next step toward a recognition that meanings emerge in the context of acting and with the other. Meanings are in process and the meanings of the text may not be retrievable as meanings for the future or even the present. What we produce are always already interpretations, even constructions, based on our own particular cultural context. The claim that a narrative tradition can provide guidance for all religions must be made with caution since we realize more and more that there is no grand narrative that can function in that way. Surely the narratives of the Hebrew scriptures, as pregnant with meaning as they are, are also subject to the radical suspicion that the Shoah itself thrust upon them.

Equally interesting is Peter Haas's Morality after Auschwitz. [19] Haas has developed an approach to ethics that moves toward the sort of effort that I am suggesting (an emerging ethic in the context of acting). The text concludes with a quotation from Albert Speer that emphasizes the transient nature of ideology in Nazi Germany. The developments toward a final solution produced actions that were not part of original conceptions and ideologies, at least for most in the Nazi camp. The Nazi ethic was an emergent ethic that was only partially dependent on an ideology that was well set in the 1920s. The ideology (rationalization for action) was itself an emergent reality so that with each new development we can see a shift in rationalization and thus ideology. Haas's book emphasizes this fact. For Peter Haas the most evident lesson we learn from the Shoah is that an ethic must and probably always does emerge in the context of particular acts and events. Thus, a post-Shoah morality must incorporate this recognitio n that ethics is an emergent reality and not effective if strictly shaped by tradition or ideology.

The issue for Haas and for me, though, must be why this is a lesson we necessarily must learn from the Shoah. There is no question that the Shoah is a unique historical event that draws together features that can be found at various times throughout Western history. Perhaps we can argue that the Shoah is a particularly transparent event that lets us see things that we would otherwise miss. Even so, I wonder about the validity of such claims that assume that a particular focus on the Shoah teaches us lessons that are otherwise not available to us. Assuming that pose leads us to two rather troubling tendencies. First, we assume that little or nothing is learned from the past, until the Shoah. By assuming that the Shoah is the defining event in history we assume that the history of humankind is a slippery slope toward the depravity of Auschwitz that finally reveals our evil. Any broader historical reading of genocide would, however, lead us to see that human brutality was at least as devastating in the past and that maybe humanity has learned some lessons along the way. It is all too easy to see our event as the defining one and to let that event shape our reading of human history, human nature, and ethics.

Second, the tendency is to assume that the Shoah is a universally defining event so that after Auschwitz we still return to those events as defining for us. We may be better served by placing the Shoah in the larger context of human violence that is still being defined by many other examples from which lessons can be learned. This does not diminish the importance of the Shoah but rather opens up even more our acceptance of the emergent nature of reality and morality, which is after all the real intent that Haas brings to his book.

Thus, I urge us to make the next step forward that means the move toward seeing that any post-Shoah theology must be a theology constructed in dialogue (an ever-expanding dialogue preferably) with the focus on dialogue and not on received traditions. What we have learned is that the demands of real dialogue do lead us toward radically new positions but have a more powerful potential if we abandon the necessity of finding meaning in the texts of our traditions. Of course, any new meanings that emerge from dialogue will, in themselves, be rationalizations that will tempt us to take them on as universal meanings. Thus, I am trusting that the dialogue itself will provide a check against seeing such meanings as universal, especially if we continue to expand the number of voices represented in the dialogue. Secondly, we need to make the move forward to see that the question of uniqueness is misplaced in a post-Shoah theology since this leads us to continue to put forward the Shoah as the defining event (in the same way that Polkinghorne needs to defend classical Christian christology as the defining-ontological--human event) under which all else must be subsumed. There is still in us a need to refuse all such universalizing tendencies, but even more to recognize that meaning is an emerging reality in the context of acting and not in rationality and ideologies (not even in noble theological ethics) which are, in fact, rationalizations after the act. Our attention moves away from constructing theologies toward narrating this emerging ethic, which I believe is the desire of both Haas and Fasching--and for that matter many if not most of those trying to do post-Shoah theology.

A Postscript--Religionless Theology

One of the more fascinating concepts that did emerge from the context of the Shoah was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's idea of religionless Christianity. [20] Interpreters have delighted in trying to understand what Bonhoeffer meant. My fascination is not so much based on what Bonhoeffer meant but by the possibility of the idea in the context of a postmodern, post-Shoah theology. It seems to me that when we follow the path described in this essay, we move toward a "religionless" theology. [21] If we are not about the task of retrieving a tradition as such, we are not trying to defend or continue that tradition into the future. The focus is not on moving away from retaining a tradition by giving it renewed meaning, but rather away from maintaining Christianity as a unique religious position as such. It is a search for something quite new and different. I am still challenged by my own dictum that any post-Shoah theology is obligated to support the survival of and thriving of Jews and Judaism (following Emil Fackenheim's famous commandment). [22] But now I see that my aim is not a theological one at all as if it were necessary for Christians to provide theological defense for Jewish tradition (whatever form of Judaism we may mean). Instead, I am arguing for an ethical principle that simply is one extension of the basic ethical principle of respect for all others as others. What a postmodern theology does, however, is to refuse to ground that ethic in Christianity, for the survival of Christianity as such is not necessary for such an ethic. Indeed, the future may lead us toward something quite other than Christianity. Even so, this ethical principle will likely continue to give us good reason to talk about texts and meanings in texts so as to challenge the idea that there is such a thing as a Christian reading, or meaning, or reality. Our hope may lie in the emerging realization of this reality and the emerging reality that does not need to preserve religious traditions as rationalizations for action.

JAMES F MOORE is Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. He is director of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science Symposium Series on Science and Religion and author of Sexuality and Marriage and Christian Theology after the Shoah: A Re-interpretation of the Passion Narratives, as well as numerous articles on Jewish Studies, Christian theology and the Holocaust, and science and religion.

Notes

(1.) I have tried to speak to this issue in: James Moore, "Cosmology and Theology: The Reemergence of Patriarchy," Zygon 30, no. 4 (December 1995): 613-34.

(2.) John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in on Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

(3.) Quoted in ibid., 44. The more extended context can be found in Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 278. In that context, Moltmann takes his cue from Elie Wiesel's imagery in Night and suggests that Auschwitz means that God is in Auschwitz and Auschwitz is taken up into God. It is the trinitarian God for Moltmann, however, so Polkinghorne reads him correctly, I think.

(4.) Cf. Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). The classic argument built on Isaac's study though comes from: Rosemary Radford Ruether, To Change the World (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 31-43.

(5.) Polkinghorne, Belief in God, 41ff.

(6.) Ruether, To Change the World, 31.

(7.) James Moore, Christian Theology after the Shoah (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993).

(8.) Ibid., 29ff. Of course, the early Christians, who adopted the current Jewish views on Oral Torah, would view Jesus in a different way because of that than current Christians would. Even if the Oral Torah image is a helpful way for us to understand how Christians understand the role of Jesus, we are careful to distinguish between this understanding and the way Jews would currently understand this notion of Oral Torah.

(9.) A thorough description of this approach can also be found in: James F. Moore, "Introducing the Dialogue," and "Thinking the Tradition Anew: A New Reading of Genesis 32 and Matthew 26 in Light of the Shoah and Dialogue," Shofar 15, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 3-37.

(10.) Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust," in Eva Fleischner, ed., Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1977), 13.

(11.) Cf. the special issue of Shofar 15, no. 1 (Fall 1996).

(12.) Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

(13.) Ricoeur has spent a lifetime detailing his interpretation theory, but two resources quite helpful in grasping the points related here are: Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), and Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).

(14.) Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 119.

(15.) Cf. Samuel and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (New York: Free Press, 1988). They also give a thorough bibliography of other important work on rescue.

(16.) A. Roy Eckardt and Alice Eckardt, Long Night's Journey into Day (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 125ff.

(17.) Darrell Fasching, Narrative Theology after Auschwitz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992].

(18.) Ibid., 192ff.

(19.) Peter Haas, Morality after Auschwitz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).

(20.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 140ff. Bonhoeffer spoke of this idea at various places in the letters and links it to a notion both of Christianity continuing without taking the form of religion and without the working hypothesis of God. These ideas are, of course, never fully developed, and they imply a link to the tradition even if that link is perceived in a radically new way. It is in this sense of a radically new link that I propose the argument that follows. His ideas, however, are akin to what might be found in various contemporary thinkers such as Don Cupitt, Gordon Kaufman, Raimon Panikkar, and David Tracy as presented in their articles in a recent issue of Cross Currents 50, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2000]: 56-67, 103-11, 185-95, 240-47.

(21.) This idea really does not mean a demise of religion as source but a position closer to that of John Caputo and, with that, to Jacques Derrida in his more recent writing on religion. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

(22.) See Moore, Christian Theology, 132. Also, this position connects with the important concept developed in Emil Fackenheim, God's Presence in History (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 84. The theoretical position I am presenting here, however, also owes much to the development of postmodern sociological thinking by Zygmunt Bauman--especially Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1989), and Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993). I present this dictum as a component of Christian theology. Even so, the sort of critique I am suggesting does have implications for any tradition passed on through texts. One hopes that the dialogue becomes an arena where both the respecting of traditions and the radical challenging of traditions can take place.