A promise is a doubled and extended gift. This definition of
promise, crucial to the overall program of Gregory Walter's new book, requires
(and rewards) unpacking. A promise is a gift. It is something one gives. It is,
first of all, two kinds of gifts at the same time. It is an archaic, reciprocal
gift encompassing exchange and obligation (the Marcel Mauss anthropological
type of gift), sent in a circle, requiring as part of the exchange reciprocal
response. But it is also a pure, unilateral, free gift, a gift with no strings
attached, the kind of gift Jacques Derrida in his phenomenology of the gift considered
to be the only condition for a true gift, but just so conditioned making the
gift impossible.
In this sense promise is two kinds of gift simultaneously,
in that it is a kind of gift that can be both pure and exchanged at the same
time. Or if it is not two kinds of gift simultaneously, it is a middling gift,
a gift that "properly lies between the two forms of a pure and a purified
gift. It upholds the nature of exchange with the field of love created by the
initial token but defers the obligation that any gift bears" (33).
Additionally, a promise is an extended gift because it
"is both less than a gift and more than one" (24). Promises are
extended because they are more and less fragile than a pure gift, relying on
the trust of the receiver for their fulfillment. This is the other way they are
doubled, because although the promise before it is received by a trusting
recipient is weaker than any gift since it does not yet give what it promises,
it is stronger than other gifts because in not divesting itself into the kind
of exchange intrinsic to archaic gifts, it takes on a body archaic gifts lose
in the giving.
All of this work bracketing concepts in order to describe
gift and promise illustrates to what degree Walter's work engages the
anthropology of the gift and the phenomonology of promise. In fact, the book as
a whole serves an excellent primer in a post-foundational engagement between
theology and disciplines such as cultural anthropology and philosophical
phenomenology. What is unique about Gregory Walter's work in relation to other
theologians is his intentional and regular engagement with the discourses of
neighboring disciples, precisely because he believes post-foundational theology
lives in a situation of radical plurality and so requires a different way of
making arguments. He finds promise to
be particularly generative for this kind of argument making, because it is a
"weak power that gives possibility directed toward the neighbor. It is
open to public criticism and evaluation. Promise occupies no place and gives
the place to the neighbor, requiring a radical kind of hospitality" (13).
It is then no surprise that in Walter's second chapter, he
takes up the topic of hospitality directly, specifically in conversation with
the event of Sarah's laughter.
Phenomenologists of all sorts are taken with (perhaps even obsessed with) the event. It is a crucial concept to
Derrida, Badiou, and others. It is closely related to what the great
phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion identifies as saturated phenomenon. Theologians
like John D. Caputo are picking it up as a primary leitmotif in their
postmodern theological endeavors. Walter turns phenomenological attention to
the event into a hermeneutical
resource for reading the stranger's promise at the oaks of Mamre to Sarah and
Abraham.
In terms of archaic gift exchange, the strangers give too
much. Their gift is so beyond appropriate for the context that Sarah's laughter
erupts. Her laughter is an event beyond full interpretation. It is surpassingly
strange and just right at the same time. It expresses incredulity, doubt, even
as she attempts to disguise it. However, the strangers roll that doubt into the
promise itself by naming the promise (Isaac) after the laughter itself. The
event is so full it is actually pregnant, full both of what is in the situation
of hospitality and what is promised in expecting a child.
Walter shifts in chapter 3 to the relationship between the
weakness of promise and the gift of time. The chapter is a meditation on the
icon of Pentecost in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, again utilizing
phenomenological conversation partners (such as John Milbank, Pierre Bourdieu,
and Paul Ricoeur). In Walter's analysis, promise gives time where time has run
out, in this sense liberating the recipient from the reciprocal time that is
always time coming to an end.
Promise, phenomenologically speaking, has a weak power,
inasmuch as it takes a hospitable approach to time and God's future. Weak for Walter means open to the other,
welcoming of the new, a power that does not "attempt to preserve the
present in the face of the past or the future" (49). Because the Spirit is
this weak power, the future is not a
already realized place to which the Spirit invites or from which the Spirit
blows--rather, the Spirit is the future itself, a "welcome that allows one
to expect the unexpected" (54).
Because this way of speaking of the Spirit prioritizes
possibility over actuality, it is by definition the kind of theology Walter is
hoping to prioritize in his work, non-foundational and post-metaphysical.
Taking account of Giorgio Agamben's political theology, Walter concludes that
the Spirit is itself the kind of promise phenomenologically analyzed in the
early chapters, a doubled and extended gift. "Promise extends the future
into the present as arrabon or down
payment of the Reign of God even while the end is constantly arriving"
(60).
In the meantime, nothing is pure. Walter's final two
chapters fund the theological imagination for promise embedded in the
nitty-gritty of everyday life and the give-and-take of liturgy. Walter
surprises at every turn, even as he demands close reading and re-reading. This
reviewer read the book three times as preparation for writing the review, and
the rewards of reading through these last two chapters a third time were
particularly rich.
Specifically, Walter offers a completely fresh definition of
the concept of place and taking place. After offering a brief
summary of Heidegger's definition of place, and the challenges to this
definition of place forwarded by Catherine Pickstock and Jean-Yves Lacoste,
Walter offers the Eucharist as itself a place "as non-place, a
dis-place-ment of all local rootedness that moves toward another home... porous
to the other's place... a doubled and extended gift... look[ing] forward to a
place of community...nowhere except
the neighbor" (87, italics added).
Walter perceives Eucharist as this kind of taking place
phenomenologically. Like the basic phenomenological insight that the event is
what is taking place in the event, so too it is what takes place in a place
that is that place. This kind of bracketing, which reduces giver and gift to
pure givenness, is precisely what happens in the Eucharist itself, because the
giver (Christ) is elided. "[The Eucharist] circumvents the ordinary
dyanamics of host and guest by the elision of the host" (90). In addition,
because there is no host, there are also no guests, by the very nature of the
case. "A host can discern who belongs to the community and who does not.
But the promise rules out any sense that its location can be dominated or ruled
by those charged to declare it. This does not mean that the churches have not
and will not have tried to do so, domesticating this meal and making it their
own feast instead of one that is itinerant, iterable, and open" (91). But
the basic Husserlian rule applies, "More reduction, more givenness."
The more the host and guest are reduced, the more promising the actual giving
of the gift of the meal becomes.
Walter's concise prose and precise theological formulations
are nothing if not demanding. Pastoral readers will immediately want to make
the leap to practical implications, and may struggle on first read through the
text to make the creative connections. However, let me make a suggestion. First
of all, try reading Walter's book, then return to read the Genesis account of
Abraham and Sarah's hospitality to the strangers and Sarah's strange laughter,
and see if you can avoid thinking about promise in phenomenological terms.
Similarly, view an icon of the Pentecost, and note if it does not radiate newly
saturated light. Similarly, preside over the sacrament, the Eucharist, and try
not to consider the implications of weak promise and porous place taking. Try
not to think of the taking place of the neighbor in this meal of betrayal. As
Walter concludes, "the Eucharist gives the place of the neighbor. Since
the Eucharist is not its own place, it makes the church out to be no place at
all, a place that is porous, anticipatory, and mutual" (93). The church as
no place at all? In this sense, it is less that practical theologians have
little to work with in appropriating Walter's work in their context, and more a
question of whether they will have the courage to do so.
Confession: Somewhere just beneath the surface of my
thankfulness for this book lurks a doubt, Can
there really be anything new to say about the Bible through a specific
liberationist lens? Rationally, I
know this doubt is unfounded, because many of the most important hermeneutical
insights of the last century came as a result of trusting the experience (and
struggle) born of oppression, of occupation by empire.
This lurking doubt puzzles me. I do not have the same
reaction when a new work of Christology is penned by a scholar I respect. In
this sense, the critique of Western assumptions Raheb offers in the
introduction is valid. I am (conditioned by my culture and context) insular and
obsessed with fixed and rigid Eurocentric questions (6). For this reason, I
need to read, and keep reading, the voices from the margins, voices that are,
in the end, not the margins at all, but are marginalized only by my failure of
imagination to realize that voices, and preeminently among them the Palestinian
voice, are central rather than marginal, even if they are simultaneously
silenced and ignored by Western theologians.
This book is Mitri Raheb's tour de force. In six tight
chapters Raheb offers a post-colonial Palestinian liberationist hermeneutic
that questions the prevailing evangelical and liberal Christian narratives (and
to a certain degree Jewish and subjugated Palestinian narratives) that overlooks
the native people of the land--the Canaanites and the Palestinians--and then
making "the natives of the land... strangers in order to make room for an
invented people to occupy the land" (38). This is not an anti-Semitic
argument per se, although staunch Zionists will likely hear it as such.
Instead, it is a geo-political re-reading of the place of Palestine, and the
role of the people of that land, in biblical and world history.
In a way quite comparable to James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree (which I
reviewed in a recent issue of Word & World), Raheb notes the complicit
silence of liberal theologians in the oppression of a people. Raheb notices
that the very theologians who should be the most sensitive to Palestinian
concerns are blind to the Palestinian plight precisely because the role of the
modern state of Israel plays a part in the hermeneutics of liberalism, which is
itself influenced by its Orientalism (a term coined by the Palestian Protestant
Christian Edward Said).
Raheb sees promise in some recent developments in both
Jewish and Christian theology which have begun to attend to the Palestinian
situation (for those who hope to read further, the chief Jewish voice is Marc
Ellis, chief Palestian Christian voices include, Yohanna Katanach and Munther
Isaac, and prominent U.S. Christian voice is Walter Brueggemann).
After middle chapters on geo-politics, Palestine and Empire
(chapters four and five), Raheb proceeds to roll out generative exegetical
insights into the biblical texts informed by the Palestinian experience of
exile in their own land. Here his concept of the longue durée takes center stage. It is not just that Palestine is
occupied now, it is that Palestine
has, almost in uninterrupted fashion, always
been occupied. In the context of occupation, one prayer to God is lifted
over and over, "Where are you, God?" This is the
"three-thousand-year-old lament that the inhabitants of Palestine have
passed from one generation to the next" (68).
Those occupied by empire inevitably ask themselves: What is
the best way to obtain liberation (74). Raheb catalogs five traditional ways
occupied peoples have responded to oppression and sought liberation: fighting
back, observing the law (like the Pharisees), accomodation (the Sadducees), collaboration,
and retrieval (Qumran). Having outlined these five quests for liberation, Raheb
then offers a modest Trinitarian theology, with chapters on God, Jesus, and the
Spirit.
God is who we turn to in the face of omnipotent empire. In
Raheb's analysis of Palestinian liberation theology, "it wasn't the notion
that there is a God that was
revelatory, but the response to that existential question, 'Where are you,
God?' The people of Palestine were able to discover a unique answer to this
question, and the answer made history" (86). The answer, in short, is that
the oppressed Palestinians learned to spot God where others could not see God.
God accompanies them into exile in Babylon, in the destruction of the temple,
and so on. "The salient feature of this God was that he didn't run away
when his people face their destiny but remained with them, showing solidarity
and choosing to share their destiny" (87).
Jesus lives this solidarity also, and reveals this God on
the cross. In the chapter on Jesus, Raheb offers a fascinating interpretation
of Matthew 5:5, the meek shall inherit the earth. The meek inherit, according
to Raheb, by staying in place. Empires come and go, but the meek people of the
land remain. Jesus understood this geopolitics, and deeply identified with
these people, the people of villages and of the countryside. He did not aim for
Rome, and mostly avoided Jerusalem. He was a man of the land.
Finally, the Spirit is at work as the presence of this God
in ways that quietly offer creative resistance and foster cultures of life. The
Spirit calls the people to lives of hope, "living the reality and yet
investing in a different one" (130).
These final chapters only begin to hint at a systematic
theology, and exegete wonderfully brief passages of Scripture. Given Raheb's
busy life (President of Dar al-Kalima University College in Bethlehem as well
as president of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the
Holy Land and Senior Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in
Bethlehem, Palestine), it is a wonder he has produced this book at all, and yet
if I wished for anything as I finished reading it, it is that it would be,
perhaps in a second edition or future volume, a more expansive systematics or
work of biblical theology that fleshes out the hermeneutic so wonderfully on
display out of the Palestinian perspective.
There may have been an era when even mediocre pastoral ministry led to growth and "success." If that utopian era existed at some time (maybe from about 1955 to 1979?), it certainly doesn't anymore, at least not in North America. Many church leaders sense that it takes Herculean efforts just to maintain. Daily ministry can feel
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