Abstract
The themes of “diaspora” and “kenosis” were of course well-known in Christian thought long before the advent of postcolonial discourse. Indeed, diaspora has long been a feature of Jewish tradition, and only more recently has it become prominent in Christian theology, and still more recently, in explicitly postcolonial theology. But putting aside any attempts to describe a genealogy of ideas, this chapter provides a preliminary analysis of the affinities between the concepts of diaspora and kenosis, as viewed through a postcolonial lens.
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Notes
See Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 46–61;
Susan Abraham, Identity, Ethics and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
Mark G. Brett, Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008);
and cf. Delwin Brown, Shiela Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner, eds., Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 129–130; cf. Taylor “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes,” in Gadamer’s Century, ed. J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, and J. Kerscher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 295–296.
See, for example, Daniel Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002), 1–26, 189–203;
Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” in Identities, ed. K. A. Appiah and H. L. Gates (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 305–337;
Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 257–258.
Alain Epp Weaver, States of Exile: Visions of Diaspora, Witness and Return (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2008), 42.
Cf. Mark G. Brett, “Interpreting Ethnicity: Method, Hermeneutics, Ethics,” in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Brett (Leiden, The Netherlands: EJ Brill, 1996), 16–21,
here responding in particular to Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. 252–259.
See, for example, George Rosendale, Spirituality for Aboriginal Christians (Darwin, Australia: Nungalinya College, 1993), 19;
Rainbow Spirit Elders, Rainbow Spirit Theology (Melbourne: HarperCollins, 1997), 69.
Cf. Sze-kar Wan, “Does Diaspora Identity Imply Some Sort of Universality? An Asian-American Reading of Galatians,” in Interpreting Beyond Borders, ed. Fernando Segovia (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 107–133.
Sarah Coakley, “Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing,” in Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. D. Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996), 82–111, quoting here from the reprint in Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 36–37. Cf. William Cavanaugh on kenosis in Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 75–88, drawing in particular on Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo Drama, vol. 3, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2002), 46–51, 162.
Wonhee Ann Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 86–87, 123–125; Abraham, Identity, 167–169, 146–147, 204–206.
See Brett, Decolonizing God, 112–131; Daniele Conversi, “Conceptualizing Nationalism,” in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World, ed. D. Conversi (London: Routledge, 2002), 10.
Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Reflections on Exile, and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000), 215; cf. Abraham, Identity, 36, 94; and Anselm Kyonsuk Min, The Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism (London: T & T Clark International, 2004).
Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 142.
Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs, eds., The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited: John Howard Yoder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 164;
on political “signs” see John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 204. Cf. Weaver, States of Exile, 62 and 93.
See Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008);
Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003);
Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1998);
and Mark G. Brett, “Feeling for Country: Reading the Old Testament in the Australian Context,” Pacifica 23 (2010): 137–156.
Jürgen Moltmann, “God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. J. Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 137–151;
cf. Moltmann God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM, 1985), 86–87;
Michael Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009);
and Stephen E. Fowl, Philippians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 96–97.
Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 155.
Cf. Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Person, Kenosis and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies on Conversation,” Modern Theology 19 (2003): 41–65,
which draws in particular on the influential work of Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 2nd edition (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
For a brief survey of secularizing accounts of kenosis, see Marie L. Baird, “Whose Kenosis? An Analysis of Levinas, Derrida, And Vattimo on God’s Self-emptying and the Secularization of the West,” Heythrop Journal 48 (2007): 423–437.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 277, cf. 158, 282.
See also Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 108: “Paul warns the philosopher that the conditions for the universal cannot be conceptual, either in origin, or in destination.”
Taylor, A Secular Age, 739. See also Werner Jeanrond, “Biblical Challenges to Theology of Love,” Biblical Interpretation 11 (2003): 640–653, who among others has pointed out that the Johannine conception of agape is more communitarian than universalistic. But even a “universalist” conception of agape must still work through actual relationships.
See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 78, responding to the idea of ethics as “absolute singularity”
in Emmanuel Levinas, Nomspropres (Montpellier, France: Fata Morgana, 1976), 113.
Christian attempts to overcome the tension between the particularity of love and the universality of justice through a conception of saintly agape cannot readily be sustained. Cf. Terry Veling, “In the Name of Who? Levinas and the Other Side of Theology,” Pacifica 12 (1999): 275–292; and Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury-Winston, 1983), 58–65.
See especially Walter J. Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament, 2nd edition (London: T T Clark, 2008);
George Gotsis and Sarah Drakopoulou-Dodd, “Economic Ideas in the Pauline Epistles of the New Testament,” History of Economics Review 3 (2002): 13–34.
Ibid., 69. See further, Mark G. Brett, “Abraham’s ‘Heretical’ Imperative: A Response to Jacques Derrida,” in The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Charles Cosgrove (London: T T Clark International, 2004), 167–178.
Cf. Abraham, Identity, 109–120, 129–134; Schreiter, The New Catholicity, and from an evangelical perspective, Kevin Vanhoozer, “One Rule to Rule them All?” in Globalizing Theology: Belief and Practice in an Era of World Christianity, eds. C. Ott and H. A. Netland (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 85–126.
Cf. Linda Hogan, “A Different Mode of Encounter: Egalitarian Liberalism and the Christian Tradition,” Political Theology 7, no. 1 (2006): 59–73. I am not convinced that John Milbank provides an adequate response to the universal imperatives of justice when he asks: “Would not anxiety about our necessary preference for some not others, and our apparent sacrifice of some for others, be eased in the knowledge that we are to love our neighbors, because we know that others are loving theirs?” (“The Midwinter Sacrifice,” 121).
See the useful discussion in Abraham, Identity, 195–206, addressing Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006)
and Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
See Taylor, A Secular Age, on the “disembedding” of identity (esp. 154— 155), and his argument that the “fragilization” of modern religious identities required the birth of exclusive humanism (19, 556 and 833 note 19). See further, Mark G. Brett, “National Identity as Commentary and as Metacommentary,” in Historiography and Identity (Re)formulation in Second Temple Literature, ed. Louis Jonker (London: Continuum, 2010), 28–40.
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” ed. A. Gutman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 67 and 70.
Cf the reformulation of “catholicity” in Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 48–55.
Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 75–88. For a useful survey of approaches, see John Sniegocki, “Neoliberal Globalization: Critiques and Alternatives,” Theological Studies 69 (2008): 321–339,
and from the Indian context Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (London: Zed, 1989); Shiva, Earth Democracy (Cambridge, MA.: South End, 2005).
Nicholas Wolterstorrf, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Cf. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997).
On. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997). On “inalienable gifts” in the New Testament, see John M. G. Barclay, “Paul, Reciprocity and the Modern Myth of the Pure Gift,” paper delivered at the conference “Paul: Then and Now,” Melbourne, June 2010.
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© 2012 David Joy and Joseph F. Duggan
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Brett, M.G. (2012). Diaspora and Kenosis as Postcolonial Themes. In: Joy, D., Duggan, J.F. (eds) Decolonizing the Body of Christ. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021038_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021038_8
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