Christ and the Other

In Dialogue with Hick and Newbigin

Reverend Dr Graham Adams

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351951883
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Teologia e religione
• Categoria: Religione

How should we relate to 'others' - those within a particular tradition, those of different traditions, and those who are oppressed? In the light of these anxieties, and building on the work of Andrew Shanks, this book offers a vision of Christ as 'the Shaken One', rooted in community with others. Shaped through dialogue with the theologies of John Hick and Lesslie Newbigin, Adams urges Christian communities to attend more deeply to the demands of ecumenical, dialogical and political theologies, to embody an ever greater 'solidarity of others' - a quality of community better demonstrating Christlike 'other-regard'.

Chapter 1
Why Christ and the Other?

This book is about three significant issues in human social relationships – identity, difference and solidarity. I argue that an alternative vision of Jesus Christ, understood in community with ‘others’, is needed to help us address them constructively. They are significant, for churches and the world, because of anxieties about who ‘we’ are, as constituents of a particular social group or tradition, in relation to ‘the others’, and the related ethical question: with whom should we be in solidarity? In fact, as I hope to demonstrate throughout, we are really all ‘other’ to one another, including Jesus; thus we ought to aim to be a ‘solidarity of others’,¹ yet we tend instead to think in terms of being in solidarity with others, implying a ‘privileged vantage point from which I or we look at others as other’.² Whilst we find ourselves seeing, and objectifying, ‘them’ as ‘the other’, the challenge is for us to recognize ourselves also as ‘other’ and that we are actively part of the othering processes. Jesus, his community and our vision of him are also subject to these processes, yet I argue that the Christian tradition can enable us to see these realities in such a way that we might reshape the world in terms of God’s basileia.³

This demands a constructive christology, which I see in terms of Jesus ‘the Shaken One’. This notion is a development of Shanks’s concept of ‘shakenness’: to use Žižek’s term, it consists of a ‘traumatic encounter’ with an other, which, as Shanks suggests, confronts us with the partialities of our worldview and experience, so opens us up towards transcendence.⁴ I argue that Jesus embodies such a reality in his relationships, being deeply attentive to others’ otherness, and that he effects others’ shakenness. While Shanks understands it primarily as something that happens to us, I suggest we should actively foster shakenness with each other.

‘Other’ Experiences

Identity, Difference and Solidarity

What are the personal contexts and observations which inform this quest for a constructive christology? Regarding the question of ‘identity’, I have experienced it as compound for as long as I can remember. My mother is Welsh and my father is English, so I am both Welsh and English. Since marrying Sheryl, whose mother is Singaporean Chinese and whose father is white English, my appreciation of the multi-faceted nature of identity has grown further. For most official documents require Sheryl to define herself as ‘Other’, which feels somewhat dismissive with regards to the richness of ethnic heritage. For we are all ‘other’ to one another. It is, for Min, about difference being significant, but not absolute,⁵ such that we should be free and able to affirm both difference and commonality; after all, identity can consist of a solidarity of the different. This is my experience.

As for my Christian identity, the same is true: identity, difference and solidarity are interrelated. I was brought up in a Congregational church and am now a minister of a church which also belongs to the Congregational Federation, a small but mainstream denomination in the UK. This gives me a particular notion of ‘church’, in which all members are understood to be equal and able to participate in church meetings where we aim to discern God’s way forward for the church in our locality. This suggests the importance of Christian attentiveness to the particularity of time and place; for what God asks of us in this local church might be quite unlike what God is asking of ‘others’ in a different local church, though we can still aim to be in solidarity with each other. I increasingly want to emphasize that this implies a distinctive theology of revelation. For the idea is that, through our corporate engagement with scripture and in prayer, we discern and discover together the Word which God is speaking – not by way of a monologue, but rooted in our dialogue with each ‘other’. (The nuances of this may not be typical of all Congregationalists, since many would still anticipate that God speaks more through the preacher than the conversation of the gathered Body, but it is of the very nature of my Congregationalism that I am wary of the presumption that a single individual – person or church – might ‘represent’ a whole tradition. It is due to a lack of attentiveness to differences within a group or tradition that we expect one to represent the whole, but still one’s relation to the whole must be affirmed.)

Congregational identity is not, however, the whole story. Firstly, an international youth workcamp in Penrhys, a housing estate in South Wales, with members of thirty Protestant denominations, opened me to all kinds of global connections, contradictions and inequalities. Identity was further developed, secondly, through the ecumenical nature of my Contextual Theology course and placements in Manchester; and thirdly, in encounters with people of other religious traditions, notably on a study tour of Israel/Palestine in 1999. Studying theology as the only Congregationalist gave rise to contrasting reactions: some included me as one of ‘the others’ (for there were a handful of individuals from small denominations), or forgot that I was not identified by use only of the dominant categories; but others made concerted efforts to see that I was remembered (some being bewildered by a ‘continuing’ Congregationalist, but genuinely supportive, and some presuming that I must represent all Congregationalists – generalizing on the basis of minimal experience⁶). The challenge was to aim for a ‘solidarity of others’. My religious identity is thus also compound: I am a committed Congregationalist, but not necessarily a typical one; I see myself as an ‘ecumenical’ Christian, a progressive, a constructive theologian, and, like Peter C. Hodgson, ‘committed to the agenda of liberal theology as modified in the direction of liberation theology and pluralistic inquiry’.⁷ Thus I might have more in common with some who are not religious than with many who are; I sometimes relish being nonconformist, an individualist, but it means a great deal to identify loyally with my tribe.

As part of these developments, especially through studying Contextual Theology, I encountered the work of both John Hick and Lesslie Newbigin. They are located ecclesiologically not too far from my Congregational part of the Reformation, being Presbyterians, and their theologies speak to these concerns about our identity, our relatedness to the religious other, and the question of our solidarity – that is, they discuss the nature of Christian faith in the modern world, and the possibilities for how we might relate to others. Their different visions of Jesus epitomize the contrasting ways in which they handle such concerns.

With regards to my understanding of solidarity – with whom am I called to be in solidarity? – my childhood and Christian nurture were largely coloured by a compassionate Christian conservatism. This taught me that we should show concern for those who are less fortunate; but I was not inclined to push against the status quo. First, the youth workcamp in an estate shaped by multiple deprivations; secondly, discussions at university about politics; and thirdly, my experiences in Manchester, including ministry in an inner-city ward, have conscientized me to the prophetic nature of faith. Who am I, in relation to those children who walk the streets without an adult knowing or apparently caring where they are? Who am I, and who is the Church, in relation to those whose low self-esteem is deeply ingrained? Who am I, in relation to those who have sought asylum in this country, but now suffer the indignity of legal limbo and social prejudice? I am an educated, middle-class, white man. In that light, I increasingly see my politics as social democratic – disturbed by inequality and social exclusion, committed to public space and the power of education, and concerned for democracy, human rights, non-violence, internationalist mutuality over narrowly national self-interest, and sustainable forms of development⁸ – though I am far better at the theory than the practice. Attention to the sociopolitical ‘others’, those relatively marginalized and oppressed, has raised questions for me about global capitalism, which Min, for example, sees today as ‘the context of contexts’.⁹ Globalization will reappear through this work, including in relation to the theologies of Hick and Newbigin. Essentially, my point here is that experiences have brought to my attention three kinds of ‘others’ – those within my (or one’s) particular tradition, worldview or tribe (often hastily generalized as ‘us’); those of plural other traditions (generalized as ‘them’); and those, in a more universal sense, who are invisible, pushed to or beyond the edges of each tradition or tribe, whose voices are being lost (who barely appear on the radar of ‘us’ or ‘them’). In other words, our ‘identity’ is invariably more compound than we imagine; our ‘differences’ are more nuanced; and we often opt for a more limited version of ‘solidarity’ than we might.

The Church and Docetic Christology

As a theological tutor on Congregational and ecumenical courses, I see hints of these same issues in the life and witness of churches. In each case, though admittedly I am generalizing on the basis of anecdotal experience, I see these things as being related to the dominance of docetic christologies, ones in which the humanity of Jesus is only ‘apparent’. It is arguably even docetic in those traditions which seek to affirm his humanity more than the divine presence, since the socially constituted nature of his humanity – to which I am committed – is invariably overlooked, thus he only appears human. I explain this further below. In essence, he is idealized; his ‘shadow side’ is suppressed;¹⁰ he is objectified so as to distinguish him from the rest of us. That is, he is ‘othered’ in the extreme. As I see it, this contributes to three problems in the (Western) Church, related to the issues of identity, difference and solidarity; the problems are: insularity, indifference and impotence. My alternative vision is of a ‘shaken’ Jesus, a fully human being, who can shake the Church out of its insularity, indifference and impotence, and enable it to re-engage constructively with a whole world of ‘others’. So how do I see this docetic christology affecting the Church?

Firstly, there is the (Western) Church’s insularity. Bewildered by such a fast-changing world, anxious about the intellectual challenges of post-Enlightenment culture, and shocked by the relative weakness of the Church in the face of assertive secularism, the Church can appear deeply insular and defensive. The privatization of faith, as Newbigin argues too,¹¹ in conjunction with an over-dependency on preachers and pastors, and a resignation to some elements of relativism, have left many of us nervous about expressing faith in public. While there is a good deal of devotion to the Church, and a desire to be compassionate towards others, it is taken for granted that we know our purpose and that we are like-minded. There is little basis for both assumptions, however, since we struggle to act so purposefully, and our like-mindedness is presumptuously oversimplified, neglecting the diversity of ‘others within’.

In terms of how this anxious insularity manifests itself in relation to others, there are conflicting but related trends. For the relatively ‘liberal’, the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ must be minimized, so as to emphasize our normality and make it seem easier for others to imagine themselves joining us. There is an implicit relativism here, indifferent to the differences between my truth and yours, because of an eagerness to affirm common ground. The point of Jesus, in this view, is to be the ultimate bridge-builder between us and them, to make hospitable space possible. However, our lack of confidence in our particularity, feeding our anxious insularity, sees us reliant on a Jesus who is beyond exemplary. Thus, even if we claim to affirm his humanity, he is still idealized, as a figure somewhat divorced from our human experience. (For example, when our church was wrestling with the fascinating case of Jesus’ inability to do ‘a deed of power’ (Mark 6:5), one member made a point of reasserting that ‘Jesus was Son of the Almighty God’, as though we must be misreading this apparent inability of his.) For Jesus is seen as one who leads a way we do not expect to be able to follow, as though he is beyond our human anxieties and ambiguities.

However, the more ‘conservative’ emphasize the substantial difference between ‘us’ (Christians) and ‘them’ (non-Christians), rooted in the belief in Jesus’ absolute difference as the ultimate gate-keeper between insiders and outsiders. Although this can inspire the desire to tell others about his absolute difference, for their own sake, still there is an insularity: for the Church’s purpose may be asserted clearly, but it is...