Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross

Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition

Boersma, Hans

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781441206756
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ed etica sistematica

The cross is central to understanding Christian theology. But is it possible that our postmodern setting requires a new model of understanding the cross? Hans Boersma's Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross proposes an understanding of the atonement that is sensitive both to the Christian tradition and to the postmodern critiques of that tradition. His fresh approach draws on the rich resources of the Christian tradition in its portrayal of God's hospitality in Jesus Christ.

PART 1

The Divine Face of Hospitality

1

The Possibility of Hospitality

Hospitality as a Divine Virtue

God “stretched out His hands on the Cross, that He might embrace the ends of the world; for this Golgotha is the very center of the earth,” wrote Cyril of Jerusalem around A.D. 347.[1] His comment illustrates the fact that it is at the foot of the cross that we learn from God how hospitality is to function. The human practice of hospitality is, in the words of Reinhard Hütter, “both a reflection and an extension of God’s own hospitality—God’s sharing of the love of the triune life with those who are dust. At the very center of this hospitality stands both a death and a resurrection, the most fundamental enactment of truth from God’s side and precisely therefore also the threshold of God’s abundant hospitality.”[2] According to the Christian understanding of history, Christ’s death and resurrection constitute the ultimate expression of God’s hospitality and form the matrix for an understanding of all God’s actions and as such also the normative paradigm for human actions.

In Cyril and Hütter’s understanding, God has embodied his hospitality on the cross. The well-known parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) functions as an icon of this embodied hospitality. The parable, often accused of lacking in Christology, in reality presents us with our crucified Lord. It depicts God’s embracing welcome of sinners into his eternal home. Throughout the history of the Church, this parable has rightly functioned as a narrative description of God’s grace of forgiveness and renewal. The story captures for us the amazing interplay between divine grace and human freedom. Divine grace enters the picture in a number of ways: a father who unceremoniously runs up to his lost son to receive him back and who ignores his dignity as the paterfamilias must have a very special place for his son in his heart.[3] A father who restores his prodigal son’s position as a member in the community (offering him the best robe), who grants him authority (giving him a ring to wear), and who gives him freedom (putting sandals on his feet) is someone who manifestly revels in the celebration of fellowship between father and child. The parable of the prodigal son is, therefore, equally the parable of the hospitable father.

At the same time, God’s hospitality does not nullify human freedom. The father’s embrace does not force itself in tyrannical fashion on a son who has no choice but to endure the father’s imposition of his love. Hospitality rejects the violence of a totalizing imposition of oneself on the other, the violence that forces the other to be shaped into one’s own image. The father’s love, says Henri Nouwen in his commentary on Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son, “cannot force, constrain, push, or pull. It offers the freedom to reject that love or to love in return.”[4] A forced embrace would mean the loss of hospitality through the violence of the imposition of the host on the stranger.[5] Even when we have lost our way and when our lives have come to an end,[6] God’s hospitable grace requires that we enter voluntarily into his loving embrace.

With these introductory comments I am taking a distinctly Christian approach. Postmodern reflections on hospitality—those of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular—tend to focus on one’s hospitality toward the other. This turn to the ethical and the religious in postmodern philosophy is fascinating and in many ways encouraging.[7] We need to probe further, however, and look for a divine transcendent warrant of our human responsibility.[8] Hospitality is not only or even primarily a human virtue, but it is a virtue that has a divine origin; it is a divine virtue. As a divine virtue, it gives expression to the very character of God. Already in the Old Testament, Israel’s hospitable treatment of others was to function as “a reflection of the hospitable heart of Yahweh.”[9] And particularly on the cross and in the resurrection, God has shown himself to be a God of hospitality. This book is a discussion of how human hospitality is underwritten by God’s hospitality in Jesus Christ.

The backdrop for this discussion is twofold. First, there is the encouraging phenomenon of a renewed focus on human hospitality among postmodern philosophers. This book can be read as an interaction with this renewed quest for hospitality. Second, there is an increasing scrutiny among theologians of the role that the cross has played and continues to play in our society. Apprehension of the cross as a place of divine violence has led to a renewed debate about the traditional models of atonement theology. In this book I bring these two centers of contemporary discussion into contact with each other. I ask the question: With these two areas of scholarship in the background—postmodern philosophical discussions on hospitality and contemporary theological discussions on divine violence and the cross—is it possible to come to a renewed understanding of the cross as a place where God is truly hospitable and thus undermines violence and underwrites the prospects of human hospitality? Can we truly say with Cyril that on the cross God embraces the ends of the world?

The question facing Christian theology is what the divine welcome of strangers looks like. Is it a hospitality without violence? Is hospitality without violence even possible? After all, before opening the door we often glance through the peephole, and when we don’t trust the person staring us in the face, we don’t open the door. There are times that we set limits on our hospitality. There are occasions when we feel it is necessary to exclude others. What exactly is the relationship between hospitality and violence, especially as it comes to expression on the cross? And by way of extension, do we as human beings have the right, and perhaps even the duty, to protect ourselves and others against strangers who might want to abuse our hospitality? Is the violence of exclusion a necessary counterpart to the practice of hospitality?[10]

Levinas, Derrida, and the Impossibility of Pure Hospitality

These questions lead us to the postmodern reflections on hospitality to which I have already alluded. Postmodern philosophers have alerted us to the presence of violent structures in Western thought that make it difficult for hospitality to flourish. Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), in particular, has criticized Western thought for its violent tendencies and for its inability to respect others. The Western philosophical tradition, says Levinas, has had a penchant for ontological categories. The preoccupation with questions of being (ontology) has led to a tendency to understand, to grasp, and to master the exterior world. Western culture is built on attempts to analyze, scrutinize, dissect, explore, and utilize. As a result Western philosophy has encouraged a tendency toward violence. The imposition of rational categories on the exterior world has undermined all that is different or other than one’s self. The alterity (otherness) of everything in the outside world gets suppressed. Our attempts to remake the world in our own image imply an inability to accept the other as other. The philosophical tradition is focused on sameness and totality: in a totalizing fashion, we have shaped everything that we see into our own image. Sameness (le Même) rather than alterity, totality rather than infinity, being rather than ethics lies at the basis of our modern society: “The ontological event accomplished by philosophy consists in suppressing or transmuting the alterity of all that is Other, in universalizing the immanence of the Same (le Même) or of Freedom in effacing the boundaries, and in expelling the violence of Being (Être).”[11]

Looming large in the background of Levinas’s reflections is his experience with Nazism. As a Jew, Levinas was shocked to learn that the Freiburg philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) came out in support of Hitler’s regime in the 1930s. Levinas had been a great admirer of Heidegger, but the latter’s political alignment, as well as Levinas’s five-year imprisonment by the Nazi regime (1940–45), caused him to reevaluate, both on a personal and on a philosophical level. Levinas came to view fascist totalitarianism as the natural outcome of the Western metaphysical tradition. Heidegger, who structured his philosophy around the concept of Being (Dasein), worked within this Western tradition with its desire to understand, to grasp, and so to control. Levinas came to see that a politics based on Western metaphysics naturally led to oppression and violence, because it had no room for the inbreaking of the other. The philosophical tradition had not been open to the alterity of the other and had thus suppressed hospitality toward the stranger. Levinas came to see the necessity of a radical break with the Western preoccupation with being and insisted that ethics—rather than ontology—must be the “first philosophy.”

Levinas wants to upset the entire stage of Western metaphysics. In doing so, he takes his starting point in the face of the other who is knocking on the door. The alterity of the other places me immediately under the obligation of hospitality. I am no longer allowed to look through the peephole before opening the door: “[T]he other facing me makes me responsible for him/her, and this responsibility has no limits.”[12] The face of the other places me under the ethical obligation of responding with hospitable love, before I can make any sort of rational, analytic judgment about the identity of the other. “The relation between the Other and me,” says Levinas, “which dawns forth in his expression, issues neither in number nor in concept. The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that is common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence.”[13] Thus, rather than trying to impose my rationality on the other, my primary attitude should be one of absolute openness and hospitality.[14]

Several theologians have found elements in Levinas’s Jewish philosophy that are useful for Christian reflection. Hospitality is, after all, a virtue with a venerable tradition, both in the biblical witness and throughout the Christian tradition. Levinas’s ethical concerns have especially come to the fore, however, through their appropriation by Jacques Derrida (b. 1930). Scattered throughout his writings, one finds reflections on the virtue of hospitality. To a large extent Derrida builds on Levinas. Deconstruction, the term with which Derrida is often associated, is for Derrida not a matter of arbitrary, nihilistic destruction. Rather, as the title of Simon Critchley’s book The Ethics of Deconstruction indicates, deconstruction is an ethical demand. Ethics is more than just a branch of philosophy; it is a way of doing philosophy. An “ethical moment,” says Critchley, “is essential to deconstructive reading and that ethics is the goal, or horizon, towards which Derrida’s work tends.”[15]

If Derrida’s postmodern philosophy is intimately connected with ethics, we need to ask what this ethics looks like and how hospitality is tied in with Derrida’s ethics. Perhaps the best way to describe Derrida’s understanding of hospitality is by characterizing it as an eschatological concept. This is not to say that Derrida expects a Jewish messiah to arrive one day. As we will see, he is rather fearful of any particular kind of messianic figure claiming that the kingdom has arrived. Derrida rejects all particular or determinate messianisms in favor of a messianicity that we may view as a stance of absolute openness to the future. Derrida describes this eschatological vision of messianicity as “the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prefiguration.”[16] This quotation highlights three characteristics of Derrida’s eschatological vision and, by extension, of his concept of hospitality: Derrida’s hospitality is absolute in character; it requires an indeterminate future; and it can never be realized.

First, when Derrida speaks of an “opening to the future,” he means a radical, absolute kind of opening. Derrida’s messianicity, his hospitality, entails an unreserved and absolute or unconditional openness toward the future, no matter what this future may look like. We need a radical openness to the advent (invention) of the wholly other (tout autre). In line with Levinas, he insists that pure hospitality means that I forego all judging, analyzing, and classification of the other. It means that I am summoned to forego all violence that tries to shape the other into my own image. By consequence, it also entails the refusal to judge, condemn, or penalize the other. Hospitality, for Derrida, is an attitude of utter openness and a readiness to give, unconditionally, all my possessions to the stranger knocking on my door. Hospitality means self-sacrifice rather than a sacrificing of the other. Even the possibility of the stranger violating my hospitality may not pose a restriction on that hospitality. Derrida is quite aware that “the other and death—and radical evil—can come as a surprise at any moment.”[17] The result of this hospitality may be terrible, Derrida acknowledges, “because the newcomer may be a good person, or may be the devil.”[18] Hospitality is unconditional, to the point of teetering on the brink of violence and chaos.

Hospitality must therefore be absolute, pure, or unconditional.[19] Derrida criticizes Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) for the limitations that the philosopher from Königsberg places on hospitality. Kant’s “universal hospitality,” described in his essay on Perpetual Peace (1795), was a hospitality that carried conditions: the stranger must behave peaceably in another’s country, and he is only given the right to visit, not the right to stay.[20] Derrida rejects the lack of openness, the determinacy, and the horizon of expectati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Contents
• Part 1 The Divine Face of Hospitality
• Part 2 The Cruciform Face of Hospitality
• Part 3 The Public Face of Hospitality
• Epilogue: The End of Violence: Eschatology and Deification
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Scripture Index