Writings

Abrahamic Theo-politics: A Jewish View

Peter Ochs
University of Virginia

[An edited version appears as "Abrahamic Theo-politics: A Jewish View," in eds. William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott, the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology  (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004): 519-534.]

A. Abraham's Tent

Hashem ("The Name," the Holy One) appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.  Looking up, he saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them, and, bowing to the ground, he said, "My lord, if it please you, do not pass by your servant.  Let a little water be brought, wash your feet, and rest under the tree.  Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves and after that you may pass on-since you have come your servant's way." They replied, "Do as you have said." Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, "Quick, three selah's of choice flour! Knead them and make cakes!"  Then Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to the servant-boy, who hastened to prepare it.  He took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared and set these before them; and he waited on them under the tree while they ate. (Gen. 18: 1-8).[1]

This Tent of Abraham is not the usual model for Jewish political theory, but we live in an age that should prompt reconsideration of the usual.  We have completed an epoch of several hundred years that imposed, on both secular and religious policy makers, a series of dichotomous choices: argue either on behalf of a given nation-state or against it; argue either for identifying or separating church and state; and if you argue for religion, argue only for one denomination or another (Reform or Orthodox; Jewish or Christian or Muslim). Over the past century, we have, however, received enough signs that the epoch of the "great dyads" has passed.  Colonialism, World Wars and Holocaust should have been sufficient warning that the great "isms" of modernity had exhausted their positive contributions to human betterment; and Sept. 11 is only a more recent sign. It was the epoch of great "isms," after all, that made the dyad a civilizational flag: the law of excluded middle, true vs. false, universal vs. particular, individual vs. tribe, reason vs. unreason, white vs. black, progressive vs. old, autonomous vs. law-bound, the public realm of politics vs. the private realm of religion.

Abraham's tent is a meeting place for religious thinkers of the age after dyads.

B. Abraham's Call Restated

Hashem said to Abraham, "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you" (Gen. 12:1).

My assumption is that even recent discussion of theo-politics tends to reflect two of the dichotomous features of the modern epoch.  These are the assumptions that political theory is either secular or religious; and, if religious, it is either liberal (accomodationist and universalist in the manner of secular thought) or orthodox (anti-modernist and strictly particularist or uni-denominational in its traditionalism).

My unsurprising thesis is that September 11 is an index of our already having, for some time now, entered into an epoch other than the modern one, for which these dichotomies are now obsolete.  The current epoch offers a time for a theo-politics that is at once secular and religious, at once tradition-bound (alias orthodox) and attentive to immediate social conditions (alias liberal, in this sense).

My more unconventional thesis is that there is a non-liberal, Abrahamic theo-politics, yet to be articulated but already practiced, that subverts the dichotomous logics of modernity.  Certain Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars/religious leaders will proclaim this theo-politics as the tripartite work of God in response to the dominant political crisis of the contemporary West.

The main features of this crisis are: 1) the inadequacy of the nation-state as a privileged context for theo-political inquiry and work; 2) the inadequacy of late modern alternatives to the nation-state, which alternatives are still dominated by the universalist economic contraries of anti-capitalist socialism or global capitalism; 3) the inadequacy of value-neutral models of nation-state democracy; 4) the inadequacy of late modern alternatives to these models, which alternatives are still dominated by the primarily secular contraries of societal communitarianism and individual-rights liberalism; 5) the inadequacy of both anti-modern religious orthodoxies and anti-religious secular universalisms as sources of norms for responding to this crisis.

While no single response is adequate to this crisis, I will, with limited space, focus on the one serious response that has received the least attention: a call for Abrahamic theo-politics.  This is a call for Muslim/Jewish/Christian leaders and scholars to draw aspects of our three scriptural traditions into shared theo-political work. Appropriate to a new epoch in Western religious history, this work should provide an alternative to the sharp dichotomies that defined the previous epoch:  secularity vs. religiosity, and each form of religiosity vs. the other.  Abrahamic theo-politics is a call to articulate the axioms of a new epoch:

  • that all three of us are Abrahamic traditions that have, appropriately and sufficiently, already devoted more than an epoch to defining our irreducibly different missions in the world;
  • that, since each of our missions represents a living covenant with the living God of Abraham, we now recognize that, not only our separate missions, but also our overlapping areas of work belong to God's plan for the redemption of this world;
  • that all aspects of our lives should be devoted to this work: from personal and familial conduct, to local communal life ( including our participation in local schools and civic government), to regions of inter-communal, national, and inter-national relations;
  • that there is therefore no "value neutral" space of social life for us, but that the different aspects and geographic regions of our social lives should be guided by different degrees of cooperative interaction among our separate and our overlapping covenants with God. We may envision three prototypical degrees of covenantal interaction, appropriate to three degrees of social interaction:

i) nearly homogeneous spheres of religious practice. Our personal prayer and public worship spaces, for example, tend to be guided by single covenantal traditions and, typically, by single denominations within each tradition. The sphere of worship is only "nearly" separate, however, because we can no longer ignore the inter-communal consequences of even private prayers that treat the other covenants or human life outside the covenants with malevolence. Family life tends to be guided by separate covenants, but, again, it is only nearly separate for the reason just given and also because ur sphere of inter-communal social engagement cannot be wholly independent of our intra-familial practices. Within each western democracy, and across various nations outside of Europe and the Americas, Muslims, Jews, and Christians sometimes live in small regions or entire states guided by religious laws or traditions. We must also begin, however, to consider such regions and states as only "nearly" separate for the reasons just given and also because members of other denominations or traditions may also find themselves living in them;

ii) purportedly "religion-neutral" spheres. This is the most innovative dimension of Abrahamic theo-politics, inserting inter-covenantal religiosity into regions of public policy and public life that Western democracies tend to define as value-neutral or, at least, religiously naked. Among these regions are public school boards; non-sectarian universities and colleges; all areas of policy and decision-making that serve local, regional (state, in the USA), and national governments; and all areas of policy and decision-making that serve regional and global economic, societal, and political institutions - from businesses to the World Bank to United Nations programs and bodies. According to this new Call of Abraham, all regions of public life should now be defined as regions affected by Abrahamic theo-politics.  This does not mean that all these regions should be governed by Abrahamic bodies, but that Abrahamic (Muslim/Jewish/Christian) bodies should lobby for influence in all these regions, asserting both their right to offer shared guidelines for decision-making in these regions and the wisdom of whatever specific judgments they recommend. To illustrate concretely: an Abrahamic group should lobby the Albemarle County, VA school board to ensure that history classes no longer avoid teaching about the major religious groups and religious events in each period of world history; an Abrahamic group should lobby the US Congress on every policy decision it makes, from stem-cell research to US plans for a war against Iraq; Abrahamic groups of shareholders should attend and offer briefs at shareholders' meetings of every international corporation.

iii) religiously heterogeneous spheres. A less radical dimension of Abrahamic theo-politics is to re-enter areas of inter-religious dialogue that have already been opened in the late modern period, but now from the perspective of this new epoch.  Until recently, inter-religious dialogue has been an activity of liberal religionists: defined, that is, by concepts deemed to be universal to the three Abrahamic religions, or to all religions, rather than by covenantal, scriptural, and doctrinal directives that are made visible only within each tradition in its particularity. Liberal inter-religious dialogue has therefore been driven by claims that could also be made outside the traditions: for example, about the importance of dialogue, peace, human rights, love, justice or even of God, but understood as the referent of faith rather than as the source of unexpected disclosures and demands. Proper to this epoch, however, Abrahamic dialogue begins with the unpredictable phenomenon that some groups of observant Muslims, Jews, and Christians have been called, at once, to gather separately to serve the God of Israel or Allah or Christ in their distinct ways and to gather on occasion together to declare their overlapping loves of the one God of Abraham.  To declare love of God is also to act on that declaration, so that this overlapping declaration also accompanies overlapping forms of religious behavior.  This behavior begins with acts of speaking the love of God, of studying Scripture as the most intimate access to God's word, of discussing together each tradition's readings and interpretations of Scripture, and of uncovering through that discussion a sense of how God's spirit can sweep at times from one reading to the next, from one Abrahamic discourse to the next, and from a time of shared reading to a time of shared action. To act in this sense means nothing other than to have read out of God's word a shared directive to act.

C. One Illustration of Abrahamic Theo-Political Action

"Everything that Hashem has said we will do and we will comprehend (naaseh v'nishmah)" (Ex. 24:7). "naaseh v'nishmah": The Israelites committed to doing before hearing [practice precedes theory] (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 88a).

Abrahamic theo-politics should count as both an academic and a practical discipline, but, to theorize about it, one must come to terms with its irreducibly existential - or, we should say, pneumatological - features.  This theo-politics is possible only if, in fact, there are learned and observant Muslim-Jewish-Christian scholar-leaders who sit down together to ponder their scriptures and receive from them overlapping directives to act.  The spirit that moves such study groups will, alone, be the direct source of Abrahamic theo-political action.  Any argument for the possibility of an Abrahamic theo-politics, therefore follow from, rather than precede, the action. For this brief paper, I hope that one illustration of the action will suffice to open readers' minds to the possibility of more.

For the past four years, a group of twenty Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars of Scripture, philosophy, and religious politics have met together for periods of intensive study of each other's scriptural traditions. Their work has been inspired by the primary hypothesis that, contrary to the persistent assumptions of most researchers and leaders in international policy, the Abrahamic Scriptural traditions are untapped resources for conflict resolution.  Confirming their first hypothesis, these initial meetings have been surprisingly successful, generating joyous camaraderie and deep friendship as well as intellectual productivity. Participants have discovered that the three traditions share as many interpretive rules and strategies as they do not share and that the closer their readings come to intimate belief in God, the more closely they seem to understand each other and the more deeply they are moved by similar passions and hopes.  These discoveries have led the group to a second hypothesis: that Jewish, Muslim, and Christian clergy could also join together for successful meetings of this kind, and that such clergy could come from any part of the world.  A year's successes in bringing clergy into the group's meetings has led to a third hypothesis, which defines the group's current work agenda.  The hypothesis is that clerical leaders of this kind could also engage at least some of their congregants in successful sessions of Abrahamic study. A concluding, speculative hypothesis is that such sessions may generate innovative models for efforts of peacemaking that emerge from out of the indigenous religious traditions of Muslim, Jewish and Christian peoples who are currently, or potentially, engaged in various forms of political conflict.

Now self-named The Children of Abraham Institute ("CHAI"), the group is currently setting up a variety of study groups -in South Africa, Singapore, the UK, and in several cities in the USA - that may test out corollaries of these hypotheses.[2]  They want to ask, for example, if diplomatic efforts are more lasting when they emerge from out of, or at least reinforce, practices of inquiry and of interpersonal relations that are warranted by the combatants' (or disputants') own sacred traditions.  They will ask, furthermore, if, despite their differences, various Abrahamic orthodoxies display overlapping patterns of conflict resolution that are visible only when the discussants are enacting aspects of their orthodoxies rather than when, as is more typical in diplomatic efforts, they are asked to "leave their more intimate practices at the door." Assuming that significant political and social leaders are, in fact, congregants in traditional houses of worship, they will ask, finally, if, when brought by clerical leaders into extended sessions of Abrahamic study, such political and social leaders may be moved to levels of shared understanding that they could not achieve outside such sessions.

D.  Arguing for Abrahamic Theo-Politics: From Practice to Scriptural Reading

A theory for Abrahamic theo-politics moves from the fact of some practice to scriptural readings and interpretation that might give light to that practice. More conceptual work would follow, generating plans for more practice. The brevity of this essay leaves space only to illustrate the move from practice to scriptural reading. In this case, the readings are to provide some basis for assuming that Muslims, Jews, and Christians have overlapping as well as separate, political missions:  

Sabbath as the Telos of Human Creation. "And God created Adam/Humanity in His image.... On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing... God blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy" (Gen 1:27, 2:1).

We are finite creatures on this earth, dependent on our creator and yet touched by and in ways sharing in the Creator's image. Eschewing Maimonidean intellectualism, shall we gloss "image" as the capacity to act beyond the bounds and limits of our given, creaturely, finitude, but only in direct relation to God? And shall we locate the telos of this action in the holiness of Shabbat?

Human failing. "Cursed be the ground because of you; by toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.... The Lord God... drove Adam out" (Gen 3:17, 24).

We fail to enact the divine image in ways appropriate to its infinity and holiness. Our actions therefore go off the mark, embodying our illusions about who were are and upsetting the finite/infinite order in which we find ourselves. Failing in this way to win life in Shabbat, we must lead lives of work, that is, lives devoted to repairing, l'taken, what our errors have made wrong in this world.

Our temptation is jealousy.  " Hashem paid heed to Abel and his offering. Cain was much distressed and his face fell. And Hashem said to Cain, ' Why are you distressed...Surely if you do right, there is uplift; But if you do not do right, Sin crouches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master" (Gen. 4.4-7)

Our sins of action follow from jealousy, rather than from any error of judgment or action, and it is jealousy of another's religion: that is, of another's apparently greater success in seeking God's favor. Seeking God's favor directly, we might imagine, is one way to cut short a lifetime of work. If so, to be jealous is to wish the other did not receive such favor: perhaps so as not to be reminded that our own work is not yet done? If so, to be jealous also means failing to recognize that both our work and the other's is infinite, which means that it cannot be completed without God's direct involvement and that we cannot predict the time and manner of that involvement. We cannot learn from one offering, cannot predict the future by induction. Just like our parents, we act out of our illusions, misunderstanding both our finitude and infinitude: as if the other's absence would guarantee God's favor in the future. As if the Church could do away with the Jews and thereby curry God's favor? As if the Mosque could do away with the Church and the Jews and win this favor? As if the Jews could re-win God's favor by boasting of their privileged relation? As if offerings of the past guarantee those of the future? As if there were any such short cut out of work? But we need not act on our jealousy. We do have the power to overcome it - if not the jealousy, then at least the impulse to act on it.

Our ultimate failing is violence. "Cain said to his brother Abel..." (Gen. 4.8)

We do not overcome the consequences of jealousy.... To act out those consequences is to bring violence into the world: violence understood as our confused effort to re-remove the other and thereby, magically, without work and merit, to become God's only, and thus God's favorite, and thus the one whom God would free from the toil of redemptive labor. Christian, Muslim, and Jew: who is God's favorite? It seems we cannot resist the tendency to act out our jealousies of one another.

And violence becomes second-nature to us. "The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence" (Gen. 6.11)

Although not inborn in us like our tendency to err, the tendency to act out the consequences of jealousy becomes so strong a habit that it appears as if part of our nature, second-nature. The Creator considers: shall I do away with this tendency by doing away with all creatures who have acquired it as second-nature? What age of violence prompts the divine Flood? The Expulsion of 135-6? The Crusades? Europe's Religious Wars? The World Wars and Shoah? Mideast Conflicts? The conflicts symbolized by Sept.11? The salvation history of Israel should no longer be ignored by the Church and the Mosque: enslavement in Egypt, Destruction of the First Temple (586bce), Destruction of the Second Temple (70ce), Expulsion from Jerusalem (135-6 ce), Expulsion from Spain (1492 ce), Chmielnicki pogroms, Russian pogroms, Soviet pogroms, Shoa.... Do you suppose Floods are only Old Testament stories? Do you suppose Floods are merely "universal," and not also universal to particular covenants at particular times?  Do you suppose these pertain only to the "old" dispensation, or, otherwise put, do you suppose you have necessarily left that dispensation? Does your doctrine say one thing and the material history of your covenants reveal another? Are there no cycles to your salvation histories as well? If you no longer belong to the Land that can spew you out, is the whole earth not your Land? Do you have an account to offer of the violence and destruction that visits you, too, periodically? Are you not also the child of the Mosaic covenant? Does the Deuteronomic theodicy truly, never apply to your people: "Hear, O heavens, and give ear O earth, For Hashem has spoken: I reared children and brought them up - And they have rebelled against Me!" (Is. 1:2)? Or the theodicy of the Suffering Servant (Is. 41ff)? Is the Servant only an Other, or also you, O Israel,[3] and do you not suffer for their violence, and theirs and theirs...? Have you truly escaped the throes of earthly salvation history, the birth pangs still of messiah even if of another coming?

But we cannot escape it in this world. "Never again will I doom the earth because of Adam/humanity, since the devisings of Adam's/humanity's mind are evil from youth" (Gen. 8:21).

If that second-nature is indeed our earthly nature, there is nothing to be gained from punishing the earth for what we have become. But the experiment of Flood was not fruitless: the covenant of Noah is no longer the covenant of Adam, since humanity's redemptive work will no longer succeed unless it is led by God's redemptive word.  The imago is not enough; God must send His spoken Word, without which humanity cannot redeem its sins. The spoken-Word begins with the worded covenant of Noah, articulated in rabbinic tradition as the Noahide laws disclosed in Gen. 9: set up courts of justice, no idolatry, no blasphemy, no sexual immorality, no murder, no robbery, no tearing flesh from living animals (Tosefta Avodah Zarah 8.4).  Humanity and God are thereby partners in the work of redemption: the divine word and the human work (avodah). This work is divine service as well as service to the world, what we tend to call "religion."

Recognizing that we remain jealous of another's divine service, we seek to resolve the jealousy on our own, through our own construction. "Let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we be scattered all over the world" (Gen 11: 4).

Shall we all be Christians, or all Muslims?  If by God's hand, then, indeed, for in the End of Days, in the Garden of Eden, in the World to Come, in Shabbat, we shall all be Christians, all be Muslims, all be Jews, all be Children of Abraham. Indeed, we are one, already, in Shabbat, in the Divine Presence, which is the world to come now.  But we are also many, in this world, these six days of work, which are not yet redeemed, and who are we to choose of our own will, according to our creaturely nature, when and how we shall all be one in this world? Is it for us to say when this world is the world to come? Or is this not what we mean by violence in the world after Noah: the willful effort to do away with the difference between one another?  Is this not, indeed, the mark of political violence after Noah: the effort to do away with Abel by incorporating him into our own construction, which is our own religious construction, since it is the means through which we seek to complete our labor of redemption, once and for all?

But have we not already inherited two epochs of failed attempts to resolve matters this way: the epoch of religious empire and the epoch of secular empire? Have these not brought on the Flood? 

Children of Abraham. "Go forth from your father's house to a land I will show you" (Gen 12:1).

For Abrahamic theo-politics, the broken Tower of Babel serves as a mark of two failed epochs of efforts to force unity on the world through human will, alone.  One marks efforts to force a single Abrahamic religion on the world.  The other marks efforts to force a single political regime or single socio-economic system or single philosophic system on the world. These are two epochs of political violence, because they are defined by efforts to do away with the otherness of Abel and, thereby, to evade the hard, slow labor of transforming one's second-nature into divine service and, then, undertaking that service as the very long work of redeeming the world from the effects of human sin. Neo-orthodox practitioners may protest that this is precisely the work of converting the world to Abraham's covenant. Our response is to read such Abraham's covenant as the point of departure from such neo-orthodoxy as well as from its secularizing doppelganger.

 Go forth from your father's house. If Noah's covenant represents a point of departure from Adam's covenant-of-creation toward the Noahide covenant-of-spoken-Word, then Abraham's covenant departs from a Word spoken to all humanity toward a Word spoken to a particular language-family. This spoken-Word emerges neither within Abraham's creature-heart nor without that heart, in the structures of his creature-communities and creature-polities. The Word is "nigh unto him" (Deut. 30:14), neither in the heavens nor in his flesh, but alongside him, with-him, in the name of the God ehyeh imach, "who will be-with you" (Ex. 3).  This is a third place, neither here nor there, not of this world, but with it, which is of the other world that knows neither place, here nor there, but only relation with.  It is in this sense a Word of language, but not of the natural language we often suppose. Noah already had that; even in his drunkenness, he soaked up the language of creaturely socialization. This Word is with natural language, not of it. With Hebrew, not of it, even if the Word is introduced alongside it; it is therefore also with Arabic and with Greek.   

Separated from his father's house, Abraham is separated from the house that became a Tower. Christian Towers and Muslim Towers are still Towers, as for that matter are the Towers of a nation-state, even a Jewish one, or even a Muslim-Palestinian or a Christian-Palestinian one. Small nation-state Towers are more modest Towers, indeed, but within their scale they are still built in the memory of Babel's nation-state. And Towers do not belong to the epoch of Abrahamic theo-politics.

Tents are another matter.

Hashem appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.  He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground.  He said, "... Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on-since you have come to your servant (Gen 18).

Scholars and religious leaders of the Children of Abraham Institute meet together under a tent they call both the "Tent of Meeting" and "Abraham's Tent." It is an imaginary tent, built of images, at once, of Jacob's ladder (Genesis 18:10-22), of Peter's sleep (Luke 9:28-36), of Abraham's "House of Worship" (Qur'an, Sura Bakarah 2.125-134), of Abraham's Tent (Gen. 18), of the place where Moses meets the divine presence (Ex. 40).  All participants in CHAI are also members of what they call "Houses"- that is, denomination-specific houses of worship, or synagogues, mosques and churches. Like ancient Israel's Jerusalem, set up outside the precinct of any single tribe, the Tent is raised outside any particular House.  In this, literal sense, CHAI participants leave their Houses in order to enter the Tent, but, unlike Abraham, they in no way leave the religion of their Houses: they retain full allegiance to their Houses, within which they worship and acquire their primary relations to God and congregation. CHAI offers its participants a source of secondary relations.  Under their imagined Tent, Muslim-Jewish-Christian participants teach their Scriptures to one another, inviting one other to ponder and discuss their traditions' readings, both singly and in relation to readings from the other traditions. In this way, each participant and each tradition offers hospitality to the others, which includes the hospitality of both listening and active response. All of them are Children of Abraham, the participants recognize one another as servants of the same God of Abraham, and they encounter one another as one would a messenger of that God.

"The men set out from there and looked down toward Sodom....  Now Hashem had said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?" (Gen 18:16-17).

CHAI participants recognize, however, that they are not brought together merely to enjoy each other's hospitality. There is the matter of Sodom: not Sodom, per se, but the fact that violence remains one of the most conspicuous features of inter-Abrahamic relations. CHAI participants remember that they children also of Adam, whose labor in this world is to redeem the consequences of Adam's failings; and that they are children of Cain, of the Generation of the Flood, and of the Generation of the Tower. They acknowledge that, both singly and together, they are Children of Abraham, whose task it is to help redeem the world, now, according to specific missions disclosed through their several scriptural traditions. They acknowledge that their missions are different and that, in some significant ways, they remain competing missions.  But, "looking down toward Sodom," they also say now to one another, "come, let us not now hide from one another what we think we are now called to do; there are, indeed, members of all our Houses in the valley of Sodom, some sinners, some innocent; their social spaces and their lives are mostly intermingled, so that there is no way we can now take action toward one group without affecting all the others; without losing our three separate missions, let us now, in this moment, also adopt a fourth, additional mission: to work, together, to redeem the social space that our fellow congregants share."

All CHAI participants offer allegiance to this shared mission, in addition to (and within the laws of) their traditions' separate missions. Their shared mission is theo-political by definition, since it is to work, from out of shared study of the Abrahamic scriptural traditions, to remove violence as a condition of relationship among Abrahamic peoples. It is therefore a mission to remove inter-Abrahamic jealousy as a motive of action among Abrahamic communities. It is thus a mission to undo these communities' efforts to curry God's favor by removing one another as objects of God's favor.  This means it is, furthermore, a mission to undo these communities' efforts to shorten the labor of world-repair (tikkun olam) through mere, religious self-expansion or self-aggrandizement.  It is a mission of Muslims, Christians, and Jews to help each other redirect their separate, tradition-specific missions to the aboriginal goal of laboring for the redemption of Cain and for repair of the earth he has polluted.

There are many ways that Muslim-Jewish-Christian communities could work together under the "Tent of Abraham."  The efforts of CHAI's scholars and religious leaders represent one modest example. In their case, the first stage of work has been to gather religious-and-academic scholars to share a practice of scriptural study and, from out their experience of this practice, to compose models of an inter-Abrahamic "hermeneutics of peace."  A second stage has been to invite religious leaders into this Tent and to ask these leaders how they would extend CHAI's hermeneutic to members of their congregations. According to CHAI's plans, the next stage is to help groups of Abrahamic religious leaders, in various regions of the world, to draw select members of their congregations into CHAI study groups: in particular, members who also hold positions of social/political/economic leadership in their regions.  A goal of this stage of work is to nurture such groups into non-governmental (NGO) bodies that could offer an Abrahamic voice, or serve as a source of Abrahamic policy-statements, in response to social/political/economic crises in their specific regions of the world.

E.Christian theological arguments supportive of an Abrahamic theo-politics

There is insufficient space here to show how these scriptural readings may underwrite a broader, Jewish theological argument on behalf of Abrahamic theo-politics.  In the context of this Companion to Political Theology, however, it seems fitting to close by sampling the contributions some of the book's previous chapters could make to Christian theological arguments on behalf of this theo-politics.[4] While these chapters are all devoted to Christian-specific theo-politics, and to theo-politics articulated once-and-for-all-times, I will suggest that some of their claims may, nonetheless, also contribute to an Abrahamic theo-politics within the specific context of this third epoch of salvation history. In order to offer this suggestion, I adopt the axiom that a Christian-specific eschatology does not necessarily contradict Jewish- and Muslim-specific eschatologies, nor a more generally Abrahamic eschatology. To be sure, within the logic of the first two epochs of Muslim-Jewish-Christian theological history, I could assume, to the contrary, that all these eschatologies contradict and compete and that this competition supersedes any over-lapping, Abrahamic vision.  But, since this vision is situated only in this third epoch, and since there is no reason to assume that eschatologies are leveled by some universal law of excluded middle, I see no compelling reason to adopt the latter axiom, and I will stick with the former. In these terms, Abrahamic theo-politics shares these (among other) features of Christian theo-politics:

A Bible-based and, in this sense, a story-based, narrative theology.

In Robert Jenson's words, Christian theo-politics belongs to "a dramatic story [that] can truly be told about reality as a whole" (Jenson, p. 1). For Stanley Hauerwas, Christian reality is thus "narratively constructed" (Reno, p. 7).

Life led according to this story is always theological and always political. Theo-politics is labor offered to redeem humanity.

In Jenson's words, "the Scriptures' eschatology... are directly and almost exclusively a discourse about politics" (p.1). For Bonhoeffer, in Hauerwas' reading, Christian theology is always political: "sanctification .... is the church's politics" (p. 5), since "it is essential to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that it occupies space within the world" (p. 8).  We have already noted that, for Abrahamic theo-politics, religion becomes the theo-political labor of redeeming Cain and repairing the world he has polluted. In Hauerwas' terms, the scriptural story nurtures Christian virtue, and virtue, as I understand Reno and Hauerwas, is our capacity to engage in this labor (Reno, 5ff.) In Walter Bruggemann's terms, "Israel is attentive to social pain as a datum of the politics that is evoked in the public process of power" (p. 6).  This means, as I read it, that Israel's prophetic religion is to remove the source of this pain, which is ultimately the violence of Cain.

This redemptive labor is always eschatological. And the Kingdom of God for which we labor is also always already present among us as the immediate motive, end, and guide for our labors.

In Jenson's words, "Christians and Jews are working for the end, or eschaton of all history (p. 1).  The "Kingdom of Heaven" is the end of Abrahamic as well as of Christian theo-politics. Abrahamic theo-politics is, indeed, an eschatological vision of the unified Kingdom of Heaven operating here and now as the rule and condition of our redemptive labor. This Kingdom is here in Shabbat, in prayer, in blessing, in communion, in the life of Church and synagogue and mosque and, only because it is here, can we be led by it to perform our reparative work. God pushes us by way of the present Kingdom and pulls by way of the future Kingdom.  The Tent of Abraham is erected to serve as one meantime instrument of the Kingdom.  In Brueggemann's words, the eschaton was (and is) present here and now in the political imagination through which Israel creates and labors for "an alternative world of justice, mercy, peace, hope, and fidelity" (p. 13).

Abraham's call is for all time and on behalf of redeeming the entire world.

For Jenson, the call to Abraham "was not to found a new cult ..., but to perform an historical act with political significance...: the creation of a new nation with a specific relation to other nations, that she would be their 'blessing'" (p. 2). In terms we used earlier, Abrahamic religion is no longer an effort to perfect Cain's offerings, but to redeem his being on earth. In Brueggemann's words, it is illustrated in Israel's efforts, under Nehemiah, to "stop this taking of interest, [to] restore ... their fields, their vineyards" (11).

Augustine's distinction of a city of God and city of the world does not reflect a dyadic theo-politics; it responds to a dyadic secular politics. In these terms, his distinction serves the eschatology and practice of Abrahamic as well as Christian theo-politics.

As interpreted by Jenson and by Jean Elshtain, Augustine's doctrine of the two cities is surprisingly pertinent to Abrahamic theo-politics. The division of the two cities appears dyadic only from the perspective of worldly politics, for which both the earthly and heavenly cities are crafted by humans: political leaders on the one hand, priests on the other. From the perspective of the City of God, however, which is the present Kingdom of Heaven, no law of excluded middle can separate earth and heaven, but only the recalcitrant human will. The earthly city is not contrary to the heavenly city by definition, but only if its citizens refuse to give God a place in their hearts and institutions. In Jenson's words, "God intends a res publica..., with sovereignty and citizenship and mutual duties: ... [one that] must co-exist with creation." It is only Rome's choice to pursue a politics that is as much at odds with creation as with the divine legislator and that is therefore "destabilized" by its own "inner contradiction" (5,6). In Elshtain's words, Augustine's city "creates barriers to the absolutizing and sacralizing of any political arrangement" (11), condemning the "lust for dominion that distorts the human personality" (p. 13). Like "God's City," Abrahamic theo-politics also comes to resist and subvert the violence of Rome's politics: that is, of the totalizing politics of any Tower-nation or Tower-empire.

Hauerwas notes that, for Bonhoeffer, "the Creator does not turn from the fallen world but rather God deals with humankind in a distinctive way: 'He made them cloaks.' For Abrahamic theo-politics, these cloaks become the words of the Noahide covenant, through which humanity is repair its own troubled creatureliness.  Bonhoeffer has a term for the distinction: the words represent the "orders of preservation" (or, later, "the mandates"), through which humanity is to be led away from the "distorted passions" and violent politics of the "orders of creation" (9).

The point, I take it, for both Augustine and Bonhoeffer, is that God alone redeems humanity from its errant creatureliness: "I and not an angel" (as God speaks in the Passover Haggadah; and Brueggemann, p. 8). That is why God's presence must itself join CHAI participants together under Abraham's Tent.

In their empirical life in this world, both Israel and the Church display inner tensions and divisions that reflect the dyadic divisions of the secular city. Both Abrahamic and Christian theo-politics labor against tendencies of any of the Houses of God to succumb to the temptations of Cain.

In Brueggemann's words, ancient Israel's theo-politics was marked by deep tensions between "centralized political authority" and "local authority," between "haves' and "have nots," between autonomous polities and imperial regimes, and generally between "covenantalism" and "totalism" or accommodation to it (1,2, 9). This, he suggests, is not a creative tension, but an inner battle between the direct influence of God's word - displayed through Israel's redemptive imagination - and submission to the temptations of Cain. For Hauerwas, this tension is reflected within the church, in the opposition of Jesus' story to the power of Constantinianism (Reno, p. 8). For Abrahamic theo-politics, this is the tension between the twin temptations of totalizing secularism/totalizing orthodoxy and the redeeming work of Abraham's covenant, what Bonhoeffer calls sanctified politics.  Provided, that is, that this "covenant" or this "sanctified politics" refers to the divine presence in our theo-politics, and not to our own conceptualizations of it or desires for it, no matter how well intentioned these may be.

Yes, indeed, I say to fellow Jews, look what they have done to us. But we have suffered more than a loss of flesh and place.  It was a loss of time, an end of a time.  And such a loss brings us, sadly but with eyes forward now, to another time, if we are prepared to enter it. If not, I fear that the terms of a previous drama can only be replayed, one way or another. That very time is dead; I, at least, will not ask my daughters to re-enter it. Will there be another time? Such questions are answered in the doing, which means with faith, and ours has always been a faith born of corporate call, Hear O Israel, the "hearing" of which has always entailed "knowing" as well. Doing, Trusting, Hearing, Belonging, Knowing: these activities have never passed away from us. To the contrary, we have always rediscovered their power just after we have died, I mean just after our time itself passed away, and in the rediscovery we felt the light of another time coming to us, the light in which we see light and a new day. No final day (we know darkness is still with us), just another day, another renewal, with its own newness.  This time, the newness - always strange in first appearance - appears this way: that the call to Israel is also a call to Abraham: Hear, O Abraham! Some of us hear it this way. We do not yet know what it means, except that, without limiting or interrupting the call to Israel, it suggests an additional, expanded belonging as well. More are called: not in place of, but with Israel. If so, I suspect they will not be the same, in this time, nor will we.

Notes

[1]  Throughout the essay, the biblical translations are my own, with some inspiration from TANAKH, The Holy Scriptures, (Philadelphia, Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

[2] A website for CHAI is available at www.childrenofabrahaminstitute.org. CHAI's sponsoring organization is the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, whose website and journals are available at http://jsr.lib.virginia.edu/  and  http://www.depts.drew.edu/ssr/nationalssr/. Among the founders of these groups are David Ford, Daniel Hardy, and Peter Ochs. 

[3] See George Lindbeck's non-supersessionist theology of the Church as Israel: illustrated, for example, in "The Church," in The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James Buckley (London: SCM, 2002): 145-165; and "What of the Future? A Christian Response," in Christianity in Jewish Terms, eds. Frymer-Kensky, et. al. (Boulder, Co: Westview, 2000: 357-366).

[4] This is a mere sampling from chapters I have been had the opportunity to read prior to publication; it is not intended to be necessarily representative of the collection as a whole, nor to carry the endorsement of the authors of these chapters.  I offer the sampling only to suggest how Christian theologians could conceivable endorse Abrahamic theo-politics within the bounds of a specifically Christian theological mission.