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Miroslav Volf's Response

In asking me to engage Jon Levenson's book, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, and the discussion it has generated on this web site, Chris Leighton has invited a response from a person whose knowledge of Judaism and of Jewish-Christian dialogue is at best only scanty. I am not an expert; I am newcomer. And I am both well aware that things may not be the way they appear to me from a distance and eager to learn from the people who have dedicated their scholarship to redefining the relationship between Christians and Jews.

One of the most intriguing and challenging aspects of Levenson's book is his argument about the competitive nature of the relation between Judaism and Christianity. Sibling rivalry is the familiar metaphor he invokes. If this image reflects the reality of the relationship, a twofold challenge ensues for Christian theology.

The first concerns the issue of religious supersessionism and egalitarianism. Though Christianity has historically been supersessionist, and dangerously so, the old style supersessionism in which the church simply replaces Israel as the spiritual people of God is theologically inadequate. The thought of the Apostle Paul is more subtle on the issue. He maintained a lasting soteriological significance of the bodily Israel, and yet also contributed to the emergence of a religious alternative to Judaism--or was at least perceived to do so by his Jewish compatriots. This complex relation of the new faith to Judaism is appropriately described as "non-displacive rivalry"--a rivalry predicated on the recognition of the historical priority of Judaism and the abiding status of the Jews as God's beloved people. As I see it, a major challenge for Christian theology is to suggest ways of thinking consistently and responsibly about the peculiar combination of non-supersessionism and non-egalitarianism that is characteristic of the Apostle's Paul relation to Judaism.

Sibling rivalries are dangerous, of course, even when the rules define them as "non-displacive." They can even turn muderous. Which brings me to the second challenge. It concerns the negotiation of differences in the context of rivalry. A common assumption that undergirds much interfaith dialogue rests on the tacit belief that agreement in issues of faith is necessary for peace between adherents of different religions; in other words, if you can overcome the competitive relations between "religious claims" you will presumably have made an important step toward peace. Levenson, to the contrary, is cautious about "undue harmonizations" that aim at overcoming a competitive relation between Judaism and Christianity. I take him to be protesting against false universalism that not only levels the richness that inheres in religious traditions, but also betrays the commitments of concrete people to what most profoundly matters to them. If he is right (and if I read him correctly), the challenge in the encounter between religions is not to achieve consensus on religious claims (either by coming to make the same religious claims or by affirming that different religious claims are all equally true), but to acquire the resources necessary to eschew enmity as we engage in valid and fruitful "rivalry." For a Christian this challenge should be met through a double commitment to non-violence (renunciation of all religious justification for deployment of violence) and to self-donation (willingness to give ourselves to the other and provide space for the other in ourselves). Can serious rivals eschew violence and practice self-donation? Yes, if they refuse to let rivalry define the whole relationship, even most of it.

The commitment to non-violence and self-donation takes us into the immediate proximity of "sacrifice," which lies at the very center of Levenson's book. The most significant contribution of the book may lie in the compelling way in which it prods both Jewish and Christian theologians to reflect, each for themselves as well as in dialogue with one another, about the ways in which "sacrifice" functions in Judaism and Christianity both as the foundational act and as a model. If they respond to this prodding, they may not only rediscover each other in new and fruitful ways as siblings who are both alike and also very different, but also make a significant contribution to the wider culture, which is so woefully impoverished by having lost a good deal of conceptual and moral resources for appreciating, let alone emulating, Abraham's and Christ's most scandalous deeds.

Miroslav Volf is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of Exclusion and Embrace: A Theoloigcal Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).

David P. Goldman's Response

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