1 Introduction
In one of his church addresses, the former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, makes the following thought-provoking comment about Christianityâs presence and role in the world today: âI expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.â1 Such a statement comes from a church figure living in the twenty-first century, in the heart of this eraâs globally scaled instability, drastic changes and multi-faceted polarization situation. It is an era of polarization in which many Christian intellectuals and authors, from the earthâs four corners and from every background imaginable, relate that the Christian church lost ground in the public life of the World. The church was either pushed out of the public square completely or was declared by that square to be the main suspect that should be held accountable for almost all the dark moments and disasters that affected human existence over the past two or three centuries at least. Cardinal Georgeâs words do express in their own way the destiny that seems to be waiting for the Christian church in the near future. There seems to be a collective international conviction that the world needs a scapegoat to sacrifice on the altar of human history, and it is religious belief in general, and Christianity and Islam in particular, that is deemed the ideal candidate to be the Lamb to slaughter for such a sacrifice. Within this context, Christianity (in addition to Islam) is not seen as one of the numerable victims of the globally prevailing pluriform of polarization that disturbs our life today. Christianity is seen as one of the active perpetrators of such polarization.
2 Alterity in the New Testament: When Christâs Followers Relate to the World
In their regular reading of the New Testament, Christians tend to sideline the Biblical candid and intriguing tendency not to consider the community of Christ as the victim of the disturbance of the world, but as one of the main potential sources that ought to be held accountable for such situation. We can detect such an orientation in Jesus Christâs farewell prayer to the heavenly Father before the crucifixion in the Gospel of John, Chapter 17. A careful reading of this prayer in the historical background of this gospelâs narrative and within the framework of the Johannine authorâs highly intra-critical voice would seriously challenge the classical reading of Jesusâs beseeching of the Father to protect His disciples from the evil one, for they are âin the world, but not of the world.â
This pleading is often understood as Jesusâs concern about how the world is going to disturb and threaten the life of his disciples due to their spiritual and religious alterity: They are chosen and blessed, the world is not; they are righteous and saintly, the world is condemned and evil. To the contrary, it is my belief that Jesus might here be seen as transpiring his apprehension for the world from his disciplesâ alterity. The disciplesâ alterity is not a burden on them before the world. Their alterity might, rather, turn them into a burden on and a threat to the world. Jesusâs plea âprotect them from evilâ in John 17:15 can be Jesusâs articulation of his serious fear that his disciples might misuse their alterity to relate to the world not in caritas and koinonia, but in a self-otherizing and contrariety that will make their alterity a cause of polarization. Had Jesus been confident that his disciples were immune to falling into such a trap, he would have not begged His Father to protect them from evil without also asking the Father to take them out of the world. However, this was not Jesusâs request: âI do not ask you to take them out of the world, but to protect
In the light of this possible reading, âthey are in the world and not of itâ may not actually be a statement of praise and positive recognition of the disciplesâ righteousness, but rather Jesusâs frank expression of his preemptive disappointment regarding his disciplesâ tendency to make their alterity an excuse for exerting self-otherizing contrariety and a condescending stance toward the world. The key-hermeneutic elements in Jesusâs intriguing prayer are the phrases âin the worldâ and âof the world.â It would be against the core meaning of the incarnation and the eternal Logosâs becoming flesh like one of us if âworldâ here connoted particular living creatures. Jesusâs prayer, then, would discriminately imply that the disciples are ontologically superior above other living beings, thus in an apartheid-like status in relation to them. Against the incarnation logic would also be the term âworldâ if Jesus wanted to say by using it that his disciples do not belong to the spatio-temporal reality of the world. This would entail that the followers of Christ exist in a supra-history, or even contra-history, situation, something that contradicts the Johannine teaching that the Logos became human in the fullness of time/history. More problematic still would be the term âworldâ if Jesus meant by it a particular living context, for this would make Jesus sound like he was calling the disciples to alienate themselves from their Jewish identity and Sitz im Leben, something which the data we have on the historical Jesus contradict and defy. Each one of these potential interpretations of Jesusâs term âthe worldâ depicts him as a preacher of contrariety and otherizing and as a promoter of a twisted and alienating notion of alterity.
The above notwithstanding, Jesus here speaks about âthe worldâ as a state of being, as something similar to Martin Heideggerâs notion of âDa-Seinâ in its radically and profoundly revised and corrected version in the âbeing-with-othersâ post-Heidegger phenomenological project of Emmanuel Levinas.3 âThe worldâ
This understanding of âthe worldâ radically transforms the interpretation of the propositions Jesus uses to distinguish between being âin the worldâ and being âof the world.â To be in the world means that the Christians, like all other humans, exist in a state of self-perception that makes them be who they are vis-Ã -vis their relation to others, not only by virtue of their faith convictions. To be âin the worldâ must make relatedness to others revelatory of who the one is, not of what makes the person different in contrariety from others. The disciplesâ alterity is not supposed to become a barrier that otherizes them divisively from others. It is an alterity, which they become because they are not otherizing themselves in contrariety with others.
On the basis of this meaning of âin the world,â the expression âthey are not of the worldâ would not mean that Jesusâs followers are not those whose life in the world insists on alienating them, in the name of alterity, from others. It means that Jesusâs followers must not be those who think that life can truly be lived for God apart from the different other. It means that, without this state of âbeing-in-relation-with-others-here-and-now,â the followers of Christ do not even exist, neither in nor of any kind of a world. I do not, thus, concur with the reading of Jesusâs prayer, in John 17, for God to protect his disciples from evil as his way of indicating that, like him, the disciples are no longer part of their Jewish society but rather represent a âseparate anti-society,â which is âtruly and truthfully set apart, exclusively, without social admixture and contaminationâjust as Jesus was for their sake.â5
Reading Christâs prayer in John 17 from a Levinasian perspective of alterity will change radically our perception of Jesusâs prayer to his Father. It is a prayer in despair, in fear and trembling, to use Søren Kierkegaardâs terms, from the fact that his disciples might succumb to the fact of their existence âin the world,â but they might cause disturbance by persisting therein as if they are ânot of the worldâ; as if they are detached from it; as if they do not belong to it at all. Being in the world but not considering oneâs self of it becomes here Jesusâs expression of his unease about his disciplesâ manifestation of a mistaken perception of alterity. Jesus believes that mirroring his love to the world requires being of the world, not just being present in it: one must be willing to lay down oneâs religious alterity for the sake of the world, not to allow this alterity to place the world in polarity with God. After all, has not Jesus himself been the Son of God becoming of the world when the Logos became human (not just in a human manifestation) and dwelt amongst us? Jesus was of the world, and not just in it in that sense. Jesus did not turn his alterity into a self-otherizing contrariety. If the disciples would not do that, Jesus fears for the world from them. He manifests in his prayer a radicalized warning of potential dire consequences that might stem from not just considering the world as âother,â but, more dangerously, treating ourselves as âothersâ to the world, as totally exterior to it. Here alterity is not an expression of loyalty to Christ, but a sign of
When alterity morphs into exteriorizing contrariety and self-otherizing in the Christiansâ relation to the world, Christâs community becomes a manifestation of a state of isolation or alienation from Godâs creation, and a life of faith turns into mere passive and secluding waiting for the second coming of Christ to emancipate his elects from the world. Alterity, again, becomes the core element in a totally wrong interpretation of the meaning of âwaiting for the return of the Lord.â
An insightful lesson on this âalterity-waitingâ dialectic in the New Testament is the story of Jesusâs disciplesâ secluding and otherizing attitude of waiting for the return of the ascended risen Lord, which we read about in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts narrates that, after Jesus Christâs resurrection and ascension to heaven, the disciples lingered in Jerusalem waiting for his immediate return. Acts relates that the disciples stayed put in the city because Jesus asked them to do so (Acts 1:4). And, when the disciples asked Jesus about the time of his return in his royal, kingly glory, he said to them that they merely have to wait for it (Acts 1:6â7). Until that time, the disciples were still thinking of the Messiah and waiting for his return as they learned about its the connotations and meanings in the Hebrew scripture and Jewish religious teaching, especially the apocalyptic literature: the Messiah will come in the full glory of his victorious apocalyptic status to fully liberate his people and emancipate them from the broken, highly polarized world.
What the disciples do is perceive the task of waiting for the return of the Messiah from the perspective of their alterity status as the righteous elect community of Christ. Waiting became their means to maintain and protect this onto-theological alterity: isolating oneâs self from the evil world, consolidating the community and solely praying and meditating to acquire the purity and holiness needed to welcome the returning Messiah. Waiting is the ultimate manifestation of onto-theological otherizing. Moreover, waiting is the major instrument for protecting this alterity and enjoying its spiritual prerogatives; waiting means becoming not just not of the world, but also avoiding being in it as well.
Now, it is not a coincidence that the author of the book of Acts makes the story of the Day of the Pentecost the focal theological cornerstone of his understanding of Christâs churchâs relation to the world. The Day of Pentecost story tells us that something that day, a divine influence from the Holy Spirit (which Jesus promised to send to his disciples in the Gospel of John) changed the disciplesâ perception of waiting, but also transformed their perception of their alterity. It was Godâs revelatory agency that day that made clear to the disciples
It is no wonder, as Acts relates, that after the Pentecost experience the disciples left the attic of their hiding and passive protectionism and started to frequent the temple and engage the public worshipers there in theological debates (Acts 2:46). This did not mean, though, that their otherizing perception of alterity was fully healed. Jesusâs fear for the world regarding his disciplesâ alterity and the disturbance it could cause manifests itself frankly in the Book of Actsâ narration of the life of the earliest Christians in Jerusalem. Acts tells us that the earliest Christians started to exhibit a sharply polarizing, self-otherizing mentality and behaviors over and against each other. This happened, for instance, when the Jewish-Christians started to alienate and degrade the Greek-Gentile Christians. Such otherizing strategy led to a dispute between the leaders of both groups and eventuated the stoning of Stephen, leading to a public disturbance in the life of the Gentile Christians in Jerusalem. This story is the Acts authorâs candid relating that the mistaken emphasis on alterity by practicing it as otherizing policy generated a radically drastic polarization that damaged the Christiansâ life as well as the life of their surrounding social and religious Sitz im Leben. The Christiansâ alterity here is not the victim of worldly polarization. It is, rather, this polarizationâs perpetrator and cause. The theological lesson the Book of Acts invites us to ponder in relation to the impact of the churchâs presence in the world is that the question the Christians must ask is not âhow can I maintain my difference during my waiting for Jesusâs return?â but, instead, be âwhat should my alterity drive me to do in the world in order to truly be waiting for the return of Christ?â
One can feasibly trace the historical evolution of Christiansâ dealing with controversies and their attempts at solving clashes and healing polarizations throughout Christianityâs, far from angelic, post-Ascension and post-Pentecost history. For instance, one can see how the dialectic the Christians adopted shaped their committing of polarization, not just their attending to it. One can trace how confessions and creeds of faith were used not to heal tension
3 Alterity and Self-Otherizing in Context: The Protestants in Greater Syria
There is no life-setting today that is more traumatic, polarized and dangerous for human life in general, and the Christian churchâs existence in particular, than the context of the Middle East. There is no other location on the globe where one can trace a total reification of the tendencies of polarization that extend from the political to the economic and from the religious to the social sphere. In this part of the world, polarization is often motivated by prejudices about differences in ethnicity, race, religion, culture, gender, sexuality, economic or social background. Driven by fear about losing what is regarded as valuable, particular groups become prone to demonize other groups as the cause of imagined or real threats. Come to the Middle East, especially the land that is historically known with the name âGreater Syriaâ (including present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the State of Palestine), and you will see
In todayâs Cultural Studiesâ understanding of identity formation, identities are perceived as the outcome of construction in terms of differentiation: âit is only in relation to the other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacksâ that identity is formed.12 The Protestants of Greater Syria reflect this understanding of identity in their presence in that part of the world. They also emphasize their otherness and alterity and use them as the foundation of their difference and uniqueness as a Christian community among non-Protestant, larger and more influential, Christians in the region. However, the Protestants of Greater Syria perceive their alterity in such a radical manner that it twists their identity formation in a way which makes them end up far from Jesusâs call to his community to be in the world, if not of it as well. This appears in the nature of their self-perception, which is not exactly formed after otherness, but rather formed on the basis of otherizing oneâs self ontologically and existentially from every other. Self-otherizing, sociologists and anthropologists tell us, does not reflect distinction and particularity, but opposition and discrimination.13 It is what practically manifests an alterity that is morphed into contrariety, like the one the New Testament reflects genuine fear of. It is this
Relevant to this analysis of the Protestantsâ alterity in Greater Syria is the phenomenon of individualization via spiritual re-identification and re-generation, which asserts a kind of personality âagainst the morality of a discredited society.â16 This orientation is now one of the constituent, preconditioning conceptions of the evangelistic âregenerationâ gospel of the Protestants during the 19thâ20th centuries. It makes these Middle Eastern Protestants believe that to be yourself is to become what the social and cultural others are not, or to become what will certainly make you out of that context and alien to it, rather than in it or of it.
One wonders where these Eastern-Arab Protestants derive such an understanding of alterity from. It is my belief that we need to trace the roots of such a philosophical-theological understanding of alterity in the âborn-to-Christâ principle that the Western Protestant missionaries conveyed to the local inhabitants of the Levant. This philosophical-theological web of meaning provides a framework for the transformation of the word âevangelicalâ from an adjective of particular spiritual proclamation of the Gospel into the Arabic âInjÄ«liyâ description, which designates now a specific nomenclature of a sharply defined and starkly singled-out self-identifying alterity.17
In todayâs socio-cultural and anthropological studies, scholars often speak of the above-mentioned phenomenon of turning a belief-concept into a
My analytical and critical anatomy of the above-mentioned alterity and self-perception case traces it back to the impact of the Protestant missionariesâ attempt at the expansion of the European-American Modernist, anthropocentric imagination of alterity and self-perception beyond its historical and geographical territories.19 In this process, missionaries transmitted particular understanding of selfhood and being-ness that were shaped after Modernist spiritual-evangelistic self-awareness, which lies in a radically divisive and exclusivist otherizing strategy. âInjÄ«liyyÅ«nâ in the Middle East become the nomenclature of the âI am not them/they are not usâ stance in the mind and life of the Eastern-Arab Protestants on the Middle Eastern indigenous Sitz im Leben.
It has been already scholarly acknowledged that American Protestant missions in Syria and Lebanon positively and profoundly âimpacted on the emergence of Arabism, Arab Nationalism and the idea of Syria as an Arab national entity.â20 What is yet to be realized is that the local Middle Eastern converts to Protestantism developed yet an alternative identifying alterity to single themselves out from the other communities in that region by morphing evangelical/evangelist into a specific form of otherizing identity called
Scholars of sociology, sociology of religion and cultural studies do seriously draw our attention to the tendencies of superiority, segregating leveling and discriminative hierarchism that underpin some identity-formation processes and zeal toward emphasizing alterity.21 From the perspective of âbetter than othersâ view, âInjÄ«liyyÅ«nâ plays in the life of the Protestants of Greater Syria the role of the guardian of that Protestant-evangelical tradition of self-imaging and âself-exteriorization-in-terms-of-otherizingâ culture. This tradition made the Protestant missionaries, and today it makes the Protestant local offspring, not just claim intellectual and religious preeminence, but, more primarily, fosters a mentality of communal, personal and moral ascendancy as well.
For so many decades, for example, and from one generation to another, the indigenous Arab-Eastern âInjÄ«liyyÅ«nâ used to promote news on their moral-ethical perfection in comparison to other Christians or non-Christians in society. They have always claimed that âthe âInjÄ«liyâ never spread lies or relate false information. He or she always relates the truth. When an âInjÄ«liyâ is summoned to testify in a court of justice, he or she need not (and will not) swear an oath on the Bible that he or she âwill say the truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.â The âInjÄ«liyyÅ«n,â the reputation tenders, do not need that because their religious faith prevents them from verbalizing anything but the truth. Thus was the conventional folk propaganda, which I grew up hearing Protestants perpetually boasting about in the public domain. This is just a simple, down-to-earth example of using alterity selectively to create a state of othering that impregnates society with a sense of superiority in terms of qualitative âbetter-ness.â âClaiming the high moral ground and conflating that with cultural, religious and national identity,â as Max Weber taught us long ago, is one of the means that are used sometimes by groups that âseek to create and maintain [a privileged state of] power.â22
Julia Kristeva describes the above-displayed attitude with profound eloquence when she speaks about alterity in terms of making oneâs self âforeignerâ over-against others. Alterity as an expression of foreignness presents people ânot belonging to any place, any time, any loveâ; humans with âlost origin,â clinging to their insistence on âthe impossibility to take rootâ in their surrounding existence, rummaging avidly as far away as possible from any sober or relational remembrance as if present in a perpetually revived state of âabeyance.â24
Kristeva perceptively asks: is this form of opaque, delusional state of self-certifying alterity an expression of a âdeep-seated narcissism? Blank psychosis beneath the swirl of existential conflicts?â25 If this is the case, maybe it is not unfair, but rather required, to say that by placing themselves in this
I do fully agree with Stuart Hallâs emphasis that identity âis not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return.â27 Such an identity-perception that lies in contrasting alterity, like the one I touch upon in this chapter, not only causes historical oblivion and traps Christianity in a state of self-forfeiture, more drastically, it robs the Christians of any alterity or tangible self-awareness altogether. For the real problem in such amnesiac alterity, as medicine tells us, âis that not only does the patient forget his loved ones and friends, but he no longer remembers who he [or she] is.â28
4 Concluding Remarks
In this reflection on the Churchâs role in todayâs world and its application of Jesusâs speech on âbeing in the world, but not of the world,â I tried to show that todayâs Church might need to ponder the real nature of its involvement in, and exposition to, the present worldâs polarization situation. Far from being a victim of such polarization, todayâs Christianity might be, unintentionally and maybe unconsciously, responsible for perpetrating some polarizations in the world due to how it perceives its own alterity. In such an understanding of alterity, which I exposed biblically and contextually above, there is an
Christians today do not hesitate to study their own working strategies and assess their competency and efficiency. However, if the churchâs perception of alterity is driven by radical contrariety and exteriority, it will not actually allow any interaction with the others, or any existence in the world to challenge the Christiansâ convictions or to make the church scrutinize the private belief, in the service of which it eagerly develops its modus operandi. Todayâs worldly situation might be an invitation for the church to, rather, realize that it does not only exist in times of polarization and the church is not just inescapably part of the polarization situation because it is destined to exist in the world, though it is not of it. The church is sometimes a partner in committing polarization and its self-perception is a cause of it.
If there is still a calling for the church in todayâs world, it might be one that invites Christianity to carefully scrutinize its own perception of alterity. Before it launches a prophetic role of critiquing the political and social polarizing injustices of the world, it might need to ponder the impact on the world of its own preconceived alterity, as well as its relation to that world. Maybe Jesusâs fear for the world regarding his disciplesâ alterity is something the Church must also be afraid of when it comes to its own understanding of its existence in relation to that world: is the Church in it as if it is of it? Or, is it in the world because it insists on proving to this world that it is not of it?
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Rekha M. Chennattu, Johannine Discipleship as a Covenant Relationship (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006), 132â133. Italics are mine.
See on this Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995); Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J.A. Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Emannuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998); E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969); Glen Morrison, A Theology of Alterity: Levinas, Vin Balthasar and Trinitarian Praxis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2013); Najib G. Awad, Persons in Relation: An Essay on the Trinity and Ontology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 118â125.
Glen Morrison expresses the same idea in different terms when he says âLevinas is not rejecting the category of Being; ultimately he develops a way to transcend the totalizing ways of Beingâsuch as competitive self-interestâto return to Being (existence and reality) with a sense akin to love.â Morrison, A Theology of Alterity, 34.
See this reading in Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbauch, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 244â245. It is my belief that this reading is eisegetically inspired by, if not premeditatedly shaped after, the tendency of some contemporary Johannine scholarship to deem the Gospel of John the most conspicuously anti-Semitic text in the New Testament. On the treatment of the Gospel of John as an anti-Semitic text, see for example Robert Kysar, Voyages with John: Charting the Fourth Gospel (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005), 147â159; Craig A. Evans and Donald A. Hagner (eds.), Early Christianity: Issues of Polemic and Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); C. Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978); R. Bieringer, D. Pollefeyt and F. Vandecasteele-Vanneuville (eds.), Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel: Papers of the Leuven Colloquiuum (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2001); Cornelis Bennema, Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 87â100.
Therefore, detachment from the world is the disciplesâ potential sin, not Jesusâs own invitation to them to alienate themselves from the world, nor was this actually his own principle in his own ministry, as some scholars today like to claim. See for example Daniel B. Stevick, Jesus and His Own: A Commentary on John 13â17 (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 339â341.
Richard A. Burridge, â(Re-)Reading the New Testament in the Light of Sibling Rivalry: Some Hermeneutical Implications for Today,â in Confronting Religious Violence: A Counternarrative, eds. Richard Burridge and Jonathan Sacks (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018), 39â58, 54â56. See also James D. G. Dunn (ed.), Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways AD 70 to 135 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992).
See on this dynamic of tension, contrariety and conflict in early Christianity the very interesting studies in Gerd Lüdemann, Early Christianity According to the Traditions in Acts: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989); and G. Lüdemann, The Acts of the Apostles: What Really Happened in the Earliest Days of the Church (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2005).
John Sanford, Mystical Christianity: A Psychological Commentary on the Gospel of John (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 302.
On such perpetration in Late Antiquity, for instance, see Richard Lim, âChristian Triumph and Controversies,â in Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World, eds. G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge/ London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2001), 196â218; R. Lim, Public Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Avril Cameron, âTexts as Weapons: Polemic In the Byzantine Dark Age,â in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, eds. A. Bouman and G. Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 198â215.
On the understanding of alterity in terms of âforeignnessâ and âexteriorityâ in theology and biblical interpretation, see for example Pierre Bühler, âForeignness as Focal Point of Otherness,â in Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity. A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond, eds. Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr. (London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 153â159, 157. A similar approach is also unpacked in Paul Ricoeurâs, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Melanie E. Trexler, Evangelizing Lebanon: Baptists, Missions and the Question of Cultures (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 204, citing from Stuart Hall, âIntroduction: who Needs Identity?â in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul DuGay (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 1â17, 4. See also Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Stuart Hall, âThe Question of Cultural Identity,â in Modernity and Its Futures: Understanding Modern Societies, IV, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press/The Open University, 1992), 273â326.
Richard Rorty, âHuman Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,â in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, eds. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 111â134; André Keet, âEpistemic âOtheringâ and the Decolonisation of Knowledge,â African Insight 44:1 (2014), 23â37; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Sune Qvotrup Jensen, âPreliminary Notes on Othering and Agency,â in Sociologisk Arbejdspapir, 27, 2009, 1â36.
On this see Najib G. Awad, After-Mission, beyond Evangelicalism: The Indigenous âInjÄ«liyyÅ«nâ in the Arab-Muslim Context of Syria-Lebanon (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2020), Part. 3 in particular, where I display at length how the Protestants there got trapped in this polarization responsibility. See also my earlier studies in Najib G. Awad, âSocial Harmony in the Middle East: The Christian Contributions,â in Christian Citizenship in the Middle East: Divided Allegiance or Dual Belonging?, eds. Mohammed Girma and Cristian Romocea (London/ Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017), 63â82; Najib G. Awad, And Freedom Became a Public-Square: Political, Sociological and Religious Overviews on the Arab Christians and the Arabic Spring (Berlin/Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2012), 186â204.
Trexler, Evangelizing Lebanon, 204.
Michael Polanyi, âBeyond Nihilism,â in Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi, ed. Marjorie Grene (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 5â23, 10.
David C. Steinmetz, Taking the Long View: Christian Theology in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), VIII. Lest he is deemed one-sided in his approach, Steinmetz clarifies that his diagnosis does not aim at turning the past into something that lacks the church in traditional patterns of thought and action.
Ruth Kark and Shlomit Lanboin, âMissions and Identity Formation Among the Peoples of Palestine: The Case of the Jewish Population,â in The Social Dimensions of Christian issions in the Middle East: Historical Studies of the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Norbert Friedrich, Uwe Kaminsky and Roland Löffler (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010), 101â119; T.O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical Study of An East African Mission at the Grassroots (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Thomas J. Watson, Jr. (ed.), Identity Formation and the Missionary Enterprise in the Middle East (Providence: Brown University/Institute for International Studies, 1999).
Or the âexpansion of Europeâ, as this endeavor is described classically by Abdul-Latif Tibawi, American Interests in Syria 1800â1901: A Study of Educational, Literary and Religious Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Kark and Langboim, âMissions and Identity Formation Among the Peoples of Palestine: The Case of the Jewish Population,â 105. See also F. Zachs, âFrom the Mission to the Missionary: The Bliss Family and the Syrian Protestant College (1866â1920),â Die Welt des Islam 45 (2005), 254â291.
Abby Day, Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59. See also M. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Day, Believing in Belonging, 60; and Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1922), 56. See also on this tendency in Protestantism in its historical birthplace Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1930).
AmÄ«n Maâlouf, al-Houyat al-Qatelah (Lethal Identities) (Beirut: DÄr al-FÄrÄbÄ«, 2004).
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York & Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), 7.
Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 8.
Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 8.
Stuart Hall, âCultural Identity and Diaspora,â in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, eds. Jana Evens Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 233â246, 237.
Daniel H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 9.