Dynamics of Difference

Christianity and Alterity: A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond

Ulrich Schmiedel, James Matarazzo, Ulrich Schmiedel, James Matarazzo

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780567671837
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567657268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This Festschrift in honour of Werner G. Jeanrond, currently Master of St Benet's Hall, University of Oxford, UK, investigates the challenge of alterity for Christianity, exploring and elaborating on this core concern in Jeanrond's hermeneutical theology. Blurring disciplinary boundaries, more than thirty of Jeanrond's colleagues and companions from ten countries track the dynamics of difference driven by the encounter with the self as other, the other as other, and God as the radical other.

Who is my other? What do I encounter when I encounter my other? And what responses and responsibilities does the encounter with my other evoke? Grappling with questions like these, the contributions to this compilation analyse alterity in the Bible, alterity in philosophy, alterity in theology, alterity in interreligious dialogues, and the radical alterity of God. Tying in with Jeanrond's explorations of the many faces and facets of the other, this Festschrift ultimately aims to advocate openness to the other as a necessity for both religion and reflections on religion.

Part I

BIBLICAL OTHERS AND OTHER BIBLES

1

MOSES: THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER

Brian Klug

I am a stranger on the earth; do not hide from me your commandments.

(Ps. 119.19)

Preamble

In September 1913, on a trip to Rome, Sigmund Freud visited the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. This was not his first visit to the church that houses Michelangelo’s Moses. (The first was in 1901.) But on this occasion he kept returning to the spot. He wrote about the visit to his disciple Edoardo Weiss: ‘Every day for three lonely weeks in September of 1913 I stood in the church in front of the statue, studying it, measuring it and drawing it until there dawned on me that understanding which in the essay I only dared to express anonymously’.1 The essay to which he alludes, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, appeared the following year.2 In it he says that ‘no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this’.3 I doubt that he would have felt this way were it not for the fact that he found Moses the man so mesmerizing.4

As do I. I shall discuss neither Michelangelo’s statue nor Freud’s essay (though I touch on them again in an afterword). But the way Freud situates himself in relation to his subject strikes a chord with me and gives me an opening. His essay begins with a confession: ‘I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman’.5 Similarly, I may say at the outset that I am no biblical scholar and despite my education at an Orthodox Jewish school I am far from being a talmid chochem, someone steeped in Jewish learning. Nor am I a theologian. I am ‘simply a layman’. I am writing about Moses because no figure in the Tanakh ‘ever made a stronger impression on me’. But what impression does he make exactly and why? This is the itch that, for a reason similar to the one Freud gives, I need to scratch: ‘Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me’.6 Furthermore, the textual Moses – the Moses of scripture – like the marble Moses sculpted by Michelangelo is enigmatic. What Freud says about the latter applies to the former: ‘so many different readings of it are possible’.7 And if Freud kept coming back to the statue, ‘studying it, measuring it and drawing it’, so I have returned time and again to the figure in the text, studying him, connecting the dots in the biblical narrative, trying to take his measure. There came a moment, says Freud, when understanding ‘dawned’ on him. I have had my Eureka moment too, when I saw Moses in a new light, reflected in the title of this essay: Moses as the quintessential other whose otherness is profoundly significant. What that otherness consists in and what it signifies: this is the topic of my essay.

I offer, in short, a reading of Moses. It is, to be sure, a selective reading, but in a sense this is what is called for when reading a text, certainly a complex text, especially a text that is seen as sacred, as the Torah is seen in both Judaism and Christianity. Sacred texts never tire of being read: being interpreted or elucidated so as to fathom their meaning – which by definition is inexhaustible. They are available to the reader but they are never simply there for the taking. As Werner G. Jeanrond observes, ‘there is no such thing as a neutral, innocent, a-historical reading’. He continues: ‘every reader already makes a selection – whether consciously or unconsciously – between possible reading attitudes, which he/she then applies to the text’.8 At the same time, a reading ‘must do justice to the text’.9 That is to say, it must not do injustice; for no single exegesis can do full justice to a text like the Torah. It is a matter of giving a ‘responsible interpretation’.10 My reading of Moses is a response to the biblical text. It is a reading that I find suggested by the text; and in this Festschrift for Werner Jeanrond, I harbour the hope that he will not deem it irresponsible.

The edition of the Torah to which I shall refer is the Masoretic text, mainly in English translation, primarily the 1999 translation produced by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS).11 For my purposes, historical questions about incidents, places and persons in the text are neither here nor there. Likewise, I bracket out questions about authorship raised by the so-called Higher Criticism and Documentary Hypothesis: they belong to another kind of enquiry. How the text evolved does not interest me, but how it works on the reader does. In short, I treat the Torah as given.12 What follows is my take.

The argument does not proceed by way of premises to a conclusion. It is heuristic rather than syllogistic. It is no more linear than the progress of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan. Moreover, like the wilderness terrain, it is rough and full of holes. Hence I present it under the heading ‘meanderings’. So much by way of preamble.

Meanderings

Freud refers to Moses as a ‘hero’.13 No one would dispute that Moses is the hero of the exodus saga, the story that occupies four of the five books that go by his name. Unless, of course, the hero is God. Over and again, God claims the credit for the deeds that might lead us to regard Moses as a hero. He14 introduces himself to the people of Israel at Sinai saying, ‘I the Lord15 am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage’ (Exod. 20.2), reminding them of this over and again throughout the narrative. It is God who leads them to a land of milk and honey, God who guides them by day (the pillar of cloud) and by night (the pillar of fire), God who ensures they win their battles and God who gives them their laws. Yet Moses is ubiquitous in the performance of each and every feat. So, who is the hero of the exodus saga: God or Moses? God and Moses? God through Moses? Let us not quibble over a preposition when the essential point is this: two persons and one relationship dominate the story: Moses, God and the closeness between them. They act together. This is my point of departure. In a way, the rest of the essay is an attempt to bring this point into focus – and to bring it home.

Who is Moses? The final word on him is this: ‘Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses – whom the Lord singled out, face to face (Deut. 34.10).16 He is a singular figure; and the more you look at him the more singular he becomes. A thread of otherness runs through his biography. If he is a hero then he is a hero with a difference – with the accent on difference. He barely belongs to the people he champions, but nor does he belong to some other people: he belongs nowhere. What nationality would have been stamped in his passport? Born a Hebrew, he is cast upon the waters of the Nile at the age of three months. Nursed by his birth mother, he is adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, who gives him an Egyptian name: Mosheh (Moses).17 As a young man he leaves – or rather flees – the country in which he grew up, settling in Midian, where he marries Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro, an idolatrous priest, and to all intents and purposes lives the life of a Midianite shepherd.18 Then, at the age of eighty, he returns to Egypt, not to take up residence again but to reconnect to his Hebrew roots in his old age. Would the Israelites have accepted him as one of their own if Aaron, who had stayed in Egypt and lived among them, had not accompanied his brother on his return and spoken for him and performed the ‘signs’ that convinced the people that God had not abandoned them and that they should listen to Moses (Exod. 4.27-31)?19 They listen, but they do not exactly embrace him. They leave their homes and follow him out of Egypt but repeatedly rebel against him, seeing him as the very opposite of a hero: an enemy of the people who is leading them on a wild goose chase into a desert where they will die for want of food and water (Exod. 16.3 and passim). As for Moses, he is as exasperated with them as they are discontented with him, protesting to God that they are not his problem: ‘Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, “Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant,” to the land that You have promised on oath to their fathers?’ (Num. 11.12). Whose fathers? Theirs, not ours: Moses uses the third person even though he shares the same ancestry. Even in the midst of the people he calls his kin (Exod. 4.18) he is, in his own eyes and in theirs, an outsider. The Torah ends with a parting of the ways, the people proceeding to Canaan to complete their journey, Moses at the end of his tour of duty, gazing at their destination from the summit of Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, excluded and alone. He dies there, away from the people. He is not even buried by them: God himself inters him in an unknown grave (Deut. 34.6). The text explains his exclusion from Canaan as if it were a contingent matter, a punishment for his behaviour (Num. 20.12) or perhaps theirs (Deut. 3.26). But, given who Moses is, it is the only ending that makes sense. Moses must remain outside – he cannot arrive – because he is an outsider. He is excluded by...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Preface
• Contributors
• (Instead of the) Introduction: Open to the Other – The Dynamics of Difference in Werner G. Jeanrond’s Hermeneutical Theology Ulrich Schmiedel
• Part I BIBLICAL OTHERS AND OTHER BIBLES
• 1 Moses: The Significant Other Brian Klug
• 2 Joseph in Egypt: Assimilation and Separation from the Other Andrew D. H. Mayes
• 3 Becoming ‘Another’: Nicodemus and his Relationships in the Fourth Gospel Mary Marshall
• 4 The Bible, Nostra Aetate, and the ‘Good Text-Bad Text’ Hermeneutics Jesper Svartvik
• 5 The Alterity of the Letter: Revelation in Dei Verbum Olivier Riaudel
• Part II PHILOSOPHICAL OTHERS AND OTHER PHILOSOPHIES
• 6 Ethics of Vision: Seeing the Other as Neighbour Arne Grøn
• 7 The Outer and Inner Constitution of Human Dignity in Meister Eckhart Dietmar Mieth
• 8 The Value of the Other Tage Kurtén
• 9 Love of God and Love of One Another According to Paul Jeffrey Bloechl
• 10 Paul Ricoeur as Other Bengt Kristensson Uggla
• 11 The Other of Dialectic and Dialogue David Tracy
• 12 Encountering the Other: The Concept of Encounter in Philosophy and Theology Matthias Petzoldt
• 13 In-Between Subjectivity and Alterity: Philosophy of Dialogue and Theology of Love Claudia Welz
• Part III THEOLOGICAL OTHERS AND OTHER THEOLOGIES
• 14 The Other Language: Religion in Modernity Knut Wenzel
• 15 Laughing at the Other Ola Sigurdson
• 16 Foreignness as Focal Point of Otherness Pierre Bühler
• 17 Sexual Difference in Christian Doctrine and Symbolism: Historical Impact and Feminist Critique Kari Elisabeth Børresen
• 18 The Other on the Cross Anne-Louise Eriksson
• 19 The Other Within and the Other Without George Newlands
• 20 Augustinian Love Rowan Williams
• 21 Who loves? Who is loved? The Problem of the Collective Personality Johannes Zachhuber
• 22 Gegenüber Revisited: ‘Thirding-as-Othering’ in Karl Barth’s Concept of Space Kjetil Hafstad
• Part IV RELIGIOUS OTHERS AND OTHER RELIGIONS
• 23 Empathy and Otherness in Interreligious Dialogue Catherine Cornille
• 24 In the Presence of God – Making Room for the Other: An Autobiographical Approach Karl-Josef Kuschel
• 25 Related Rivals: How Christians and Muslims Might Relate to One Another Susanne Heine
• 26 ‘Who Practices Hospitality Entertains God Himself’ Mona Siddiqui
• 27 Beyond Indifference: Religious Traditions as Resources for Interreligious Toleration Christoph Schwöbel
• Part V GOD AS OTHER AND THE OTHERNESS OF GOD
• 28 Loved by the Other: Creatio ex nihilo as an Act of Divine Love David Fergusson
• 29 The Other and the Interruption of Love Lieven Boeve
• 30 The Middle English Poem Pearl: A Study in the Unfamiliar Santha Bhattacharji
• 31 Finding the Otherness of God in Literature David Jasper
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• Copyright