This paper argues for two basic claims, one methodological and the other constructive. The methodological claim is that, contrary to Enlightenment thinking, a thicker discourse within a discipline enhances rather than hampers its capacity for interdisciplinary dialogue. The constructive claim is a corollary of the first as it pertains to historical Jesus study, Christian ethics and political theory; it asserts that exile theology and diaspora ethics are at their historical, ethical and political thickest when kept in creative tension with a theology of territoriality and an ethics of just peacemaking. Accordingly, the arguments proceed from the fertile intersection that has begun to emerge between these three disciplines.[1] Although it is now possible to speak of this convergence with a presumed ease of fit and perhaps even a natural affinity, such a complementarity has not always been assumed nor, unfortunately, welcomed. Indeed a partial mapping of each helps diagnose the choke points of what has been a longstanding estrangement:
What we can discover upon observing these methodological frameworks, both individually and collectively, is not only an internal thinning at work but an external one as well. To wit, as Jesus is extruded through the critical filters of the Wredestrasse and the Schweitzerstrasse, not only is he reduced to a shadowy simulacrum of his New Testament self, but he also provides diminishingly little content with which to construct a viable Christian ethic or politic. By the same token, as the viscous syrup of Jesus’ thick prophetic ethic is boiled down into a watery pulp by the vicissitudes of history and the exigencies of political responsibility, not only is it difficult to discern a specifically Christian ethic, but it also hard to imagine how his lordship obtains much beyond the limited sphere of my own personal piety. Finally, the sequestering of political theory from normative discourse not only makes political practice more vacuous and nihilistic, but it also deprives it of the normative resources and shared understandings necessary to adjudicate between competing political goods.[12] Thus, as diagramed below, in each case a negative feedback loop is created whereby the methodological diminishment of the internal content in one field seals it off from the normative and analytical insights of the other two, which in turn only further emaciates the internal content of all three.
Thick → Thin → Thinner
New Testament Jesus Historical Jesus
Wredestrasse and Schweitzerstrasse No ethical or political content
Thick Jesus ethic → Thin Jesus ethic → Thinner Jesus ethic
Hitorical vicissitudes and political possibilities Spiritual lordship only
Thick moral discourse → Thin moral discourse → Thinner moral discourse
Kantian Universalism and No moral resources for
Machiavellian Realpolitik adjudicating political goods
We can be thankful, however, that a new flowering of scholarship within and between each of these fields is finally starting to provide some long overdue methodological correctives and along with them some much-needed thickness.
On the historical Jesus front, a coterie of Third Quest scholars like N. T. Wright, E. P. Sanders, John P. Meir, Craig Evans, and Ben Witherington are steadily taking hold of the investigative wheel and steering away from the dead end routes of the Wredestrasse and Schweitzerstrasse onto fresh new roads.[13] They are doing so in three important ways. First, by utilizing new insights gleaned from archeological discovery, the social-historical sciences, and continued reading of Jewish literature from the Second Temple period, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, they are re-contextualizing their understanding of Jesus by situating him back into the cultural, social, political, economic and theological world(s) of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Second, they are re-reading apocalyptic literature, both that of the New Testament and that of other Second Temple communities, not “merely [as] part of the dark backcloth against which the great light of the gospel shine more brightly” but “for the meaning it must have had for the audience of [Jesus’] own day, who had their minds full of poverty and politics, and would have had little time for theological abstractions and timeless verities.”[14] Third, they are beginning to see that rather than being just the accretion of layer upon layer of theological strata, the narrative superstructure embedded within the gospels actually provides the most plausible and compelling analytical framework for answering the important historical questions of how Jesus fits into Judaism, what his aims and sense of mission were, why Jesus was crucified, how and why the early church came into being, and how the gospels came to take their distinctive narrative character. [15]
A similar kind of correction has also been occurring within the confines of Christian ethics. Scholars like John Howard Yoder, Richard B. Hays, Ronald Sider, Ched Myers, Glen Stassen, and Walter Wink are appropriating the new socio-historical insights of the Third Quest as well as the ones generated by their own historical explorations to paint a portrait of Jesus as someone who was not only steeped in the political and social questions of his day, but also as someone who boldly proclaimed and embodied a prophetic and cruciform ethic. To these voices have been added a whole pastiche of others like Larry Rasmussen, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Christopher Marshall, all of whom are working in a constructive mode to more faithfully re-member [16] and analogically imagine[17] the way of Jesus within discussions of issues like ecological stewardship, gender relations and criminal justice.
And in no less fashion, a growing number of International Relations thinkers, current and former members of the diplomatic corps, as well as political theoreticians, have come to see that religious and moral discourse have a more prominent seat at the table of statecraft. For instance Stanley Hoffman has noted that the putative concept of “national interest” is hardly ever singular or self-evident, and therefore the capacity for ethical reflection is an indispensible evaluative component for political leaders trying to disentangle and prioritize the dense thicket of competing interests falling under its penumbra.[18] Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson are among those arguing that religious traditions are integral to preserving state security both by supplying a theological and moral grounding for concepts like human rights and also by providing international organization and states with practicable models for conflict resolution and post-conflict capacity building.[19] Finally, Michael Walzer has shown that discourse about principles such as justice and human rights cannot have any moral traction apart from being rooted in the thick particularity of a specific community’s shared understandings. However, Walzer maintains that being autochthonous to a specific community should not mean that their shared understandings are too parochial to be understood or reiteratively interfaced by other communities. On the contrary, their thickness allows for a moral minimalism whereby we can “[abstract] from social practices reiterated in many countries and cultures” to “locate commonality at the end of difference.”[20] Accordingly, Walzer contends that a right to communal “self-determination” is one example of a minimally construed maximalist moral principle that can do real analytical and ethical work in international political theory.[21]
Stepping back for a moment and juxtaposing the overarching tilt of where the leading methodological trend lines of these disciplines are heading now in the wake of developments just described compared to where they were leading previously, we notice a similar progression, albeit in exactly the opposite direction. In each case, as diagramed below, the internal content has been substantially thickened—which in turn has strengthened rather than weakened the possibilities for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. A thicker historical Jesus means a richer datum for ethical extrapolation. A thicker Christian ethic means a more robust understanding of Jesus’ political and ethical example as well as a greater source of raw material from which to work constructively. And a thicker political theory means a more nuanced understanding and textured forging of the national interest as well as a more supple capacity to draw upon and broadly reiterate the political practices of religious traditions.
Now that we have brought the story of the methodological estrangement and reunion of these disciplines into sharper view, I would like to examine a constructive paradigm that has bubbled up from the coalescence and whose thickness is particularly hefty in its own right. This is the paradigm of exile theology and diaspora ethics.In brief compass, exile theology and diaspora ethics can be defined as an integrative ethical, theological and political paradigm that appropriates Israel’s experience of galut or exile in Babylon during the sixth century BCE in order to construct a counter-hegemonic discourse and political praxis. It is a paradigm that is of added interest and importance in a world where a growing number of individuals and communities are suffering under the disorientation of dislocation in a variety of forms, whether that be the geographic and territorial dislocation experienced by refugees and internally displaced persons, or the more cultural and existential sense of having one’s communal identity assimilated into a larger ethnic group.
However, rather than let my more propositionally pinched definition of this paradigm stand in isolation, it is better that we read it alongside an examination of how those gravitating around its conceptual orbit have understood and appropriated its political and sociological tropes. Biblical theologian Daniel L. Smith-Christopher has stated that “diasporic theology challenges the virtual capitulation to the normative status of nationalism as the only viable context for Christian theology and Christian social existence.”[22] Similarly Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture, states in a more contrarian tone that
Diaspora can teach us that it is possible for a people to maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, without controlling the land, a fortiori without controlling other people or developing a need to dispossess them of their lands. … The renunciation of sovereignty (justified by discourses of autochthony, indigenousnesss, and territorial self-determination) combined with a fierce tenacity in holding onto cultural identity, might well have something to offer to a world in which these two forces, together, kill thousands daily.[23]
And for good measure Pnina Werbner, a critical cultural theorist, offers:
In a world of diaspora, transnational culture flows, and mass movements of populations, old-fashioned attempts to map the globe as a set of culture regions or homelands are bewildered by a dazzling array of postcolonial simulacra, doublings and redoubling, as India and Pakistan seem to reappear in postcolonial simulation in London, prerevolution Tehran rises from the ashes of Los Angeles, and a thousand similar cultural dramas are played out in urban and rural settings all across the globe. In this culture-play of diaspora, colony and metropole, “here” and “there,” center and periphery, become blurred.[24]
As each of these appraisals illustrates, the meaning and scope of exile theology and diasporic ethics is somewhat elastic and depends a good deal on where you stand. Smith-Christopher’s conception is decidedly more “theological” in taste than either Boyarin’s or Werbner’s recipes, although it is also heavily seasoned with strong hints of ethical reflection and political critique. Moreover, Smith-Christopher’s and Boyarin’s readings of exile/diaspora have a noticeably sharper and adversarial edge, especially with respect to nationalism, whereas Werbner’s seems to see exile/diaspora’s deconstruction and hybridizing of national identities in a more positive and opportunistic light. Despite the differences in tone and accent, however, each of these definitions seemed to be held together by three common thematic threads:
Returning now to our foregoing discussion of how exile theology and diasporic ethics constitutes a particularly thick nexus between historical Jesus study, Christian ethics and political theory, it is interesting to see how one or more of these themes surfaces within each.
The themes of exile and diaspora loom especially large within the historical Jesus scholarship of N. T. Wright and Craig A. Evans. Both have claimed in different contexts that Jesus’ beliefs, actions and indeed his overarching sense of mission are best understood and explained—both by his original audience and his subsequent followers—as a radical enactment of “his belief that the real return from exile, and the real return of YWHW to Zion, were happening in and through his own work.”[25] To adequately wade through the enormous amount of historical, textual and theological data that Wright and Evans marshal and meticulously sift through in order to substantiate their exilic thesis would require a paper of comparable or even greater length than the present one. So I will suffice it to say that its presentation coheres remarkably well with the three aforementioned methodological criteria the Third Quest is using to re-slather Jesus with historical thickness: 1) the return-from-exile theme resituates Jesus in the contextual milieu of Second Temple Judaism and first-century Palestine; 2) it illuminates the apocalyptic and eschatological motifs he was appropriating to inform his words and actions; and 3) its symbolic and thematic script hews very closely with the narrative arc(s) of the gospels.
There is, however, one aspect of Wright’s and Evans’s return-from-exile thesis I would like to scrutinize more closely and which is more peculiar to Wright than it is Evans. This is the role that Israel’s territorial reconfiguration plays in Jesus’ mission of restoration, or more precisely its lack thereof. According to Wright, by seeing himself as the conduit through which YWHW would enact Israel’s return from exile, Jesus was also mutatis mutandis leveling a stinging critique against those institutions and forces which he saw responsible for perpetuating its current exilic state, namely the Temple and its attendant sense of nationalism. In discussing Jesus’ symbolic demonstration against the Temple, Wright explains that “the Temple had become, in Jesus’ day as in Jeremiah’s, ‘the talisman of national violence, the guarantee that YWHW would act for Israel and defend her against her enemies.’”[26] And in disputing Horsley’s and Crossan’s claim that Jesus may in fact have been a “Jewish freedom-fighter,” Wright responds that the point is “not that Jesus’ agenda was not about ‘politics,’ but rather
It is that Jesus in his teaching, and his challenge to Israel, aimed precisely at telling Israel to repent of her militaristic nationalism. Her aspirations for national liberation from Rome, to be won through a great actual battle, were themselves the tell-tale symptom of her basic disease and had to be rooted out.[27]
Thus Wright holds that when we see Jesus “set his face against the central institutions and symbols of Israel” like the Temple, we should not see his “aim” as to “depart from ‘Judaism,’ from the traditions of Israel.” Rather, his aim was “to call Israel back to what he saw as the true meaning of those traditions.”[28] And what in Wright’s view, did Jesus understand Israel’s true meaning to be? It was the Isaianic eschatological vision and vocation that Israel “should be the light of the world.”[29]
If Wright is correct on this point, and I believe there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he is,[30] then we can see why his Jesus would find a territorial component to his restoration program, or an irredentism premised on revolutionary violence, as highly problematic and therefore in need of a radical reinterpretation if not an entirely new constitution. Although the symbol of the Land had been demoted behind the Temple in the Jewish hierarchy of national iconography by the Second Temple period, it nevertheless still remained a potent emblem of national pride and fervor, even if it was only an instrumental one.[31] Thus for Jesus to re-invoke expectations of a territorial reclamation under the mantle of restoration would be, in Wright’s mind, to invite the very same kind of jingoistic ethnocentrism that originally caused Israel to stray away from its Isaianic vocation in the first place. And so it was, according to Wright, that Israel’s “expectation of the restored land” were transmuted to focus instead “on restored human beings.” [32] Wright continues:
Jesus offered people “inheritance,” and greater possessions than they would have abandoned; but he regularly construed this in terms of human lives and human communities that were being renewed and restored through the coming of the kingdom. The pearl of great price was available for those who sold everything else; among the things that would have to be sold was the traditional symbol of sacred land itself. It was swallowed up in the eschatological promise. YWHW was now to be king of all the earth.[33]
John Yoder’s diasporic framing of what he calls Jesus’ ethic of “not being in charge” adopts a similar rhetorical inflection with respect to assaying the moral dimensions of territoriality. In an essay by the same name and in another entitled “See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun,”[34] Yoder elucidates what he sees to be a clear familial resemblance between Jeremiah’s exilic exhortation to “seek the welfare (shalom) of the city” and Jesus’ “Jewish pacifism.”[35] The ethical and political thrust of both, Yoder claims, is that neither Babylon’s Jewish exiles nor Jesus perceived their “statelessness” as a problem in need of rectification. On the contrary, they saw it as an integral part of their broader doxological vocation to proclaim to the wider world that “since God is sovereign over history, there is no need for them to seize (or subvert) political sovereignty in order for God’s will to be done.”[36]
To act and believe otherwise, to try to be “in charge” by manipulating and pulling the levers of society in such a way as to steer the course of history toward a predetermined conclusion, constitutes what Yoder calls the “Constantinian temptation.” There are a variety of forms this temptation can take but one of the most noxious in Yoder’s eyes is the nationalistic belief that the “universality of Christ’s reign is replaced by the particularism of a specific state’s intentions.”[37]
Although Edward Said was more of a cultural and literary critic than a political theorist, his essay “Reflection on Exile”[38] provides some trenchant political insights on the subject. One of the first things that one notices in reading Said’s exilic reflections and what distinguishes them from the more detached, analytic and in some instances sanguine otiose of Wright and Yoder is just how tragic and profoundly crippling an exilic existence is. This should not be surprising since Said’s Palestinian heritage made him keenly sensitive and aware of what that existence entailed. Nevertheless, the pathos is both gripping and halting. Exile, writes Said, “is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”[39] Thus Said is extremely weary and critical of literary attempts to romanticize exile, since to “think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to want to understand that it is ‘good for us.’”[40]
Nonetheless as devastating as the exilic condition is, Said still manages to salvage some semblance of political meaning from the detritus of meaninglessness. One of the critical capacities exilic experience endows one with is the ability “to stand away from” the anesthetizing narcotic of “home” and notice “the discrepancies between various concepts and what they actually produce.”[41] Another of exile’s critical capacities Said points toward is a cultural bi-focality that “gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.”[42]
The effect of juxtaposing Wright’s, Yoder’s and Said’s exilic explorations is to see a historical and normative thickness that holds across and unites all three. Wright’s thick reading of Jesus’ thematic appropriation of exile and return helps inform Yoder’s normative reading of Jesus’ diasporic ethic of “not being in charge,” which in turn finds critical resonances in Said’s exilic faculties of “standing away” and contrapuntal thinking. However, I would contend that this exilic thickness comes at the expense of territorial thinness and it does so precisely because of the way Wright’s, Yoder’s, and Said’s respective understandings of exile align, either in full or in part, with the thematic nodes we distilled from Smith-Christopher, Boyarin and Werbner. Neither Wright’s nor Yoder’s Jesus can be interested in Israel’s territorial restoration since such an interest would either conflict with the Isaianic vision of being “a light to the nations” or traffic in Constantinian politics, or both. By the same token Said’s insistence on the critical and perceptual limitations entailed in the territorial trappings of being at “home” seem to provide little, if any, possibility for Walzer’s notion of internal critique and the idea that “criticism does not require us to step back from society as a whole but only to step back from certain sorts of power relationships within society.”[43]
Thus the upshot of the Wright-Yoder-Said exilic axis is to re-instantiate some of the same hampering methodological barriers we observed earlier when discussing the interdisciplinary estrangement between historical Jesus study, Christian ethics, and political theory. Since Jesus railed against the nationalist fervor and symbols of his time, he a fortiori has little to offer by way of illuminating the moral dimensions of political concepts like sovereignty and the nation-state other than to critique them as Constantinian. And if critique is the only thing that Jesus can provide to a political theory of the state, then invariably political theorists will have to look to other more constructive sources.
There are, however, some compelling historical, ethical and theoretical points on which to mount a critique of the territorial thinness of Wright’s, Yoder’s and Said’s readings of exile albeit in a manner which still preserves, builds upon, and listens to the integrity of their historical, ethical and political thickness. Such a critique would have to thread an extremely narrow needle, however, inasmuch as it must develop a more positive and constructive political discourse on territoriality while at the same time still paying close attention to the prophetic way and ethic of Jesus.
As we observed above, Dainel Boyarin’s appropriation of an exilic political, cultural, and theological paradigm springs in large measure from the violence and oppression he sees underpinning the modern nation-state. To his credit, however, Boyarin understands that a valorization of exile combined with a categorical rejection of the nation-state model portends some pretty unsavory consequences for Jewish identity, both his own and that of the broader Jewish community. As he states in response to Yoder,
My difficulty, then, is not in being the kind of Jew that Yoder would want Jews to be; my difficulty is in the assumption that this is simply what Jews ought to be if they are Jewish. My own dilemma is between adopting a position in which I want to call for something that I perceive to be a better and an authentic Judaism, while not denying the right of others, even those whose position I find repugnant—and where human lives are at stake—the right to that name. This is a tricky moment, because, after all, it is precisely anti-zionist, out-of-chargeness, diasporism to which I have been in my work and political life calling Jews, Jewry, and Judaism as well. However, I have been trying to be careful—I hope—in not defining an essence to Judaism, while Yoder is, I think, not careful enough. The reason for such care is, on the one hand, an ethical respect, one that I know Yoder would share, for those with whom one disagrees, even most sharply, and an unwillingness to engage in a politics of virtual excommunication; on the other hand, the reason is to avoid even the appearance of apology and triumphalism.[44]
Building on these concerns Boyarin has worked to try to develop a “middle ground” politics of the diasporic state wherein a people “can be on their land without this landedness being expressed in the form of a nation-state, and landedness can be shared in the same place with others who feel equally attached to the same land!”[45] As far as I can tell though, Boyarin has not fleshed this alternative model of territoriality out beyond the realm of the theoretical, nor has he described the kind of concrete political practices that would be needed in order for it to come to fruition. Nevertheless, I think his premise of developing an alternative territorial model provides an interesting and useful point of departure for my own constructive project.
Along those lines, I want to propose a way that we can use both the rich historical, ethical and political insights of exile theology and diasporic ethics as well as the thick interdisciplinary methodology by which they were produced to help sketch out a thicker construal of Boyarin’s diasporic state while at the same time correcting for the problems we noted above. I believe this can be accomplished by putting exile theology and diasporic ethics into a creative and tensional conversation with a theology of territoriality and an ethic of just peacemaking. This obviously begs the question of how to create a theology of territoriality and ethic of just peacemaking. My contention is that the generative mechanism would have to resemble something like this:
Such a generative mechanism can be found, I believe, by synthesizing the insights drawn from Karen Wenell’s Jesus and Land, Gerald Schlabach’s discussion of the “Deuteronomic juncture” and Michael Walzer’s concept of reiterative universalism.
In Jesus and Land, Wenell makes the case that a historical reading of Jesus shows that
Jesus did recall the land promise and tapped into hopes that God would soon fulfill his promises to the nation. Yet he did this in a very different way from other contemporary groups: the Sadduceess, Pharisees, or even the Qumran covenanters. He did so as a prophetic figure, offering a symbolic alternative to the present structure of his society. His vision was not centered on the temple, nor reinforced by the ritual maintenance of the boundaries of purity within the land. It recalled a new tribal arrangement which opened up its borders and promised places for those outside, and for those without status or position.[47]
One immediately notices how closely Wenell’s thesis conforms to Wright’s, and for good reason. As she states in the book’s opening pages with respect to her historiographic methodology, “our discussions must consider the material in such a way that Jesus is recognizable within a first-century Jewish-Galilean context and also account for effects on the different streams of early Christian history.”[48] This is essentially Wright’s “criterion of double dissimilarity” only by a different description.
Wenell also follows Wright’s program of reading Jesus’ relationship to the land against the broader narrative relief of the gospels rather than W. D. Davies’s approach of combing through each gospel and aggregating a “survey of texts relating to the ‘land,’” since such an approach does “not tell us what the land meant for individuals and groups at a later time (such as Jesus and his followers).”[49] Accordingly, Jesus’ view of Israel’s restored territoriality is seen through three narrative frames: 1) Jesus’ Temple incident, 2) Jesus’ understanding of purity, and 3) the tradition of the twelve disciples. With respect to the Temple incident, Wenell agrees with E. P. Sanders that “Jesus’ action at the Passover celebration is most certainly linked to the reason for his being put to death,” although she disagrees with Sanders’s thesis that Jesus’ prophetic indictment of the Temple implied that he assumed its future eschatological restoration.[50] In trying to discern why Jesus would indict the Temple, Wenell follows Wright by focusing on Jesus’ midrashic appropriation of Isaiah 56:3-7 and Jeremiah 7:4, 10, 14 and subsequent announcement that the Temple would be destroyed since it failed to live up to its mission to be a “house of prayer for all nations” and instead became a haven for lestes or political subversives.[51] As she states, “The values of Jesus’ kingdom are contrasted with the values of the temple as a [den of lestes.] Different sets of values are in conflict, showing the temple as a contested place.”[52]
Where Wenell parts from Wright, however, is with his contention that Jesus was reinterpreting the tradition of the twelve disciples in order to proclaim the calling of a “restored, redefined family” that was “in principle open to all beyond the borders of Israel.”[53] She agrees with Wright that Jesus’ idea of the kingdom was more inclusionary than would be expected by his contemporaries like the Qumran community and the Pharisees, a point that is starkly demonstrated by Jesus’ less stringent view of purity in which “[e]nemies are not condemned as defiled, but included in the commandment to love”—an imperative or rather a transforming initiative that suggests it “is possible that the notion of purity, with its opposition between Israel and the nations, was not useful to the sort of mission [Jesus] embarked upon.”[54] However, she does not hold as does Wright that this means that the borders of the kingdom “are extended to the whole creation.”[55] Rather, there “does seem to be an element of the eschatological description—including the Twelve and ‘east and west’ language—which is actually quite particular and still evokes the symbolism of the land of Israel.”[56]
Wenell does not believe though that by invoking the restorationist imagery of the Twelve and its metonymic allusions to the gathering of the twelve tribes in the land of Israel Jesus was therefore calling for a nationalist demarcation between “insider” and “outsider.” Instead she asserts, in view of Jesus’ actions of table fellowship with “sinners” and interaction with Gentiles, that just as “John the Baptist in a very dramatic way brought to life the declaration of the way of the Lord in the wilderness, so Jesus has given meaning to the symbol of the Twelve and dramatically depicted the twelve tribes restored to their land in twelve followers of no particular pedigree. This defines a new type of restoration, which allows that some ‘outside’ may dine with the patriarchs, and which is connected to other beliefs such as resurrection.”[57]
In looking more closely at Wenell’s point that Jesus envisioned a territorial restoration of Israel, but one that was predicated upon an inclusion of “outsiders,” it does not take very long to notice the stunning parallel such a notion has with Israel’s covenantal dialectical understanding of the land as both a gift and an obligation. As Moshe Weinfeld has noted:
What is unique about Israel’s relationship to the land is neither the divine promise nor the permanence of the patrimony, but rather the religious and moral ramifications of the promise: the belief that, in order to dwell safely in the land, it was necessary to fulfill the will of the God who gave the land. The land was thus transformed into a kind of mirror, reflecting the religious and ethical behavior of the people; if the people were in possession of the land it was a sign that they were fulfilling God’s will and observing his commandments; if they lost the land, it was an indication that they had violated God’s covenant and neglected his commandments. All of biblical historiography is based upon this criterion: the right to possess land.[58]
And as Weinfeld goes on to explain, part of what it meant to obey YWHW’s commandments was for Israel to do justice, especially as stated in Jeremiah 22:3-5, to the robbed, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow.[59] Thus we could say that an integral part of why Jesus would envision a territorial restoration of Israel was so that it could learn how to share it and live justly with both those inside and outside its geographic borders.
The emphasis on sharing the land provides both the canonical and normative fulcrum for why Gerald Schlabach wants to pry Yoder’s Constantinianism out its primacy in Christian ethical reflection and instead pay more attention to what he calls the ‘Deuteronomic Juncture.’ Says Schlabach:
We would do better, then, to understand Constantinianism as only the most prominent instantiation of an even more basic problem, which bears with it an even more subtle temptation. This is the temptation of which Dueteronomy 6-9 warned God’s people, and which arose precisely because they were God’s people. Composing late in Israel’s monarchy but projecting their warning back across the Jordan and into the mouth of Moses, the Deuteronomic writers did not doubt that God wanted to give their once-possessed people a land in which to prosper securely. Nor did they question their identity as the people whom God had called into covenant. Even so, God’s very gift had brought with it the highest moment of danger. For the day in which they seemed most fully to have entered the land and appropriated God’s gift was actually the moment when they had proven most likely to forget the Lord, to trust and credit their own power, or to use selective memory of God’s gracious deliverance as irrevocable validation for them to possess the land in any way they chose.[60]
It follows then, Schlabach maintains, that the real ethical conundrum for Christian ethics is not one of whether “our ethical reflection” should be solely focused “on the effort to avoid evil and unfaithfulness” as it is in Constantinianism, but instead on the “challenge of embracing the good in a faithful manner,” which the “Deuteronomic Juncture” helps to do by asking “how to receive and celebrate the blessing, the shalom, the good, or ‘the land’ that God desires to give, yet to do so without defensively and violently hoarding God’s blessing.”[61]
And lest one read Schlabach’s “Deuteronomic Juncture” as just a figurative heuristic used to illustrate the insidious temptation that comes with properly administering God’s gifts, his discussion under the rubric of “Landedness and Diaspora” makes it perfectly clear that literal territoriality is one of the greatest gifts and temptations that ethical reflection has to adjudicate. “Those of us who are theological intellectuals,” he writes, “may be able to read the Exodus abstractly as a journey into ‘freedom’ or ‘history’ rather than into actual land, but human rights are more basic, less abstract and most earthy for those who need them most. If Constantinian ways of living in the land are what have left us uneasy about speaking to this question, then we should both renounce Constantine and demonstrate positive models for dwelling in the land without ejecting other inhabitants.”[62]
A description of such a model is, in one sense, what Michael Walzer does in his essay “Nation and Universe.”[63] In the essay’s introduction Walzer draws a distinction between what he calls a “covering-law universalism,” which stipulates “there is one God, so there is one law, one justice, one correct understanding of the good life or the good society or the good regime, one salvation, one messiah, one millennium for all humanity” and “reiterative universalism,” whose difference with covering-law universalism is “its particularist focus and its pluralizing tendency.”[64] Interestingly enough, to more vividly illustrate the difference between these two types of universalism, Walzer quotes Amos 9:7, which reads:
Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me,
O children of Israel? …
Have I not brought Israel out of the land of Egypt,
And the Philistines from Caphtor,
And the Syrians from Kir?
What these queries suggest, Walzer says, is “that there is not one exodus, one divine redemption, one moment of liberation, for all mankind, the way there is, according to Christian doctrine, one redeeming sacrifice.” Rather, “liberation is a particular experience, repeated for each oppressed people.”[65] Reading these two kinds of universalism into the political concept of communal self-determination, Walzer concludes that reiterative universalism provides a more instructive way of examining the issue since “if we value autonomy, we will want individual men and women to have their own lives.” [66] This is because the variety of national experience and nations themselves shows there “is no single mode of ‘having’ a life of one’s own.”[67]
Walzer makes a similar claim with respect to the nature of nationalism itself. “A nation,” he states, “is a historic community, connected to a meaningful place, enacting and revising a way of life, aiming at political and cultural self-determination.”[68] Thus Walzer believes that the “critical test” of nationalism “comes when it has to cope with the surprise of a new nation, or more accurately, of a new liberation movement laying claim to nationhood.”[69] Reiterative universalism is more conceptually and morally equipped to handle this test than is covering-law universalism, since its pluralistic understanding “provides the best account of nationalism in general and the most adequate constraint on its various immoralities.” [70] More specifically Walzer notes that while there “is no universal model for national culture, no covering law or set of laws that controls the development of the nation,” there is, nevertheless, a “universal model for the behavior of the nation toward others,” which Walzer thinks is characterized by Isaiah Berlin’s point that there is no reason “one community, absorbed in the development of its own native talent, should not respect a similar activity on the part of others.”[71]
But how does reiterative universalism ensure that this sense of mutual respect, which is another way of sharing the land, is kept amongst and between nations? Constructing a supra-national moral arbiter to enforce this universal norm of respect is not really a practical feasibility. But even if it were, Walzer would be highly suspicious of such a body since it would undoubtedly squelch the pluriformity of nations that could show that respect. Nevertheless, Walzer recognizes that politics “aims at unity: from many one.” So there are better ways at getting toward this unity than others. As Walzer explains, “this unity can be achieved in very different ways: by accommodating difference (as in the case of religious toleration) as well as repressing it, by inclusion as well as forced assimilation, negotiation as well as coercion, federal or corporate arrangements as well as centralized states.”[72] Accordingly, the value of reiterative universalism is that it “favors the first alternative in each of these pairs.”[73]
Walzer admits that his discussion of reiterative and covering-law universalism and its meaning for politics and international relations is “conceptual and not practical” in orientation.[74] Be that as it may, it is not that far a leap from the conceptual boat of reiterative universalism to the practical dock of just peacemaking. Just to name a few of the more obvious connections, the reiterative unity of accommodation corresponds to advancing democracy and human rights; inclusion to cooperative conflict resolution; negotiation to taking independent initiatives; and federal arrangements to strengthening the UN and other international bodies.
Let us now step back once again to see how this theology of territoriality and ethics of just peacemaking, as articulated by Wenell, Schlabach and Walzer, measures up to the internal and external methodological yardsticks of historical, ethical, and political thickness. With respect to the internal thickness of each, the result is obvious. Wenell’s territorially-minded Jesus resonates strongly with the first-century world of Second Temple Judaism and its moral and political views on Israel’s geographic restoration. Schlabach’s thoughts on the “Deuteronomic Juncture” pay close attention to Jesus’ view that the land was to be shared with others and especially with those who were enemies. And finally Walzer’s notion of reiterative universalism presents a compelling moral vision for how and why states can use the practices of just peacemaking in order to respect the cultivation of native talent. The assessment of external thickness is no less apparent. Wenell’s thick territorial account of Jesus further buttresses Schlabach’s caution that Christian ethics needs to pay attention to how territoriality is both a gift and a moral obligation, which in turn is fleshed out by Walzer’s description of how nations can respect each other’s right to self-determination within and without their borders. Furthermore, none of these voices, either individually or collectively, drown out or repress the individual and collective insights offered in the exilic theology and diasporic ethics of Wright, Yoder and Said. The theology of territoriality and ethics of just peace proves itself then to be a worthy and valued interlocutor.
Throughout this paper I have tried to demonstrate the importance of two claims: that methodological thickness makes for better historical, ethical, and political reflection and that a thick understanding of Jesus’ understanding of Israel’s territorial restoration makes for a thicker Christian political ethic as well as a thicker dialogue with exile theology and diasporic ethics. It is an interdisciplinary dialogue that continues to be of great importance today not only because of the fresh new insights it is generating but also because those insights have a very real and tangible impact on the lives and bodies of those who are living in exile and those who are at home in their own lands. Each conversation partner is needed and each has something important to say. And just to illustrate the point one more time, I close with this reflection from Emmanuel Levinas, someone who knew both the joys of being at home and the tragedy of being in exile:
The thing that is special about the State of Israel is not that it fulfills an ancient promise, or heralds a new age of material security (one that is unfortunately problematic), but that it finally offers the opportunity to carry out the social law of Judaism. The Jewish people craved their own land and their own State not because of the abstract independence which they desired, but because they could then finally begin the work of their lives. Up until now they had obeyed the commandments, and later on they fashioned an art and literature for themselves, but all these works of self-expression are merely the early attempts of an overlong adolescence. The masterpiece has now finally come. All the same, it was horrible to be both the only people to define itself with a doctrine of justice, and to be the meaning incapable of applying it. The heartbreak and the meaning of the Diaspora. The subordination of the State to its social promises articulates the significance of the resurrection of Israel as, in ancient times, the execution of justice justified one’s presence on the land.[75]