Abstract
Givens opens with, and frames the thrust of his project as, a sympathetic critique of Yoder. The first chapter presents Yoder’s account of Christian peoplehood, ‘that the Christian life is most basically the ongoing political life of a people and that its peoplehood comprises a particular set of open-ended practices faithful to Jesus’ (p. 35), and a critical exposition of The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (Herald Press, 2009), especially its implication that ‘the people of Israel progressively embodied the ethos whereby God brings peace to the world, and faithful Christianity has never ceased to be Israel’ (p. 70).
Chapter 2 critiques Yoder’s ‘revisionist historiography’, arguing that, in seeking to overcome both Constantinianism and supersessionism, Yoder falls prey to standard ‘modern seizures of “Israel,” namely, the common weapon of claiming to know or be the true embodiment of the reputable identity of Israel over against false pretenders’ (p. 99). By identifying characteristics of ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ Israel, arguing that this is the same peoplehood which Jesus embodied and to which he called his followers (all of which looks tantalizingly like Anabaptism), Yoder has constructed yet another ‘account of Christian peoplehood’ which is ‘locked inside the logic … of pure political identity and voluntarist self-constitution’ (p. 99). Against this account of the people as the self-constituting, faithful ones whom God nourishes, over against unfaithful others, Givens proposes that only God constitutes the people, and that ‘to be chosen by the God of Israel is not to be chosen to thrive at others’ expense but to die a life-giving death’ (p. 102). Jesus ‘refused to disown the unfaithful among his people’, and Givens calls ‘this solidarity with the sin of the people of the God of Israel the catholicity of Jesus’ (p. 103).
Chapter 3 considers the ‘modern discourse of peoplehood’, with roots in supersessionism and tendrils stretching through colonialism, nationalism and racism. Givens draws from Étienne Balibar to expose how both ‘the Jew’ is the ethnic foil against which, and ‘fictive ethnicity’ is the conceptual glue through which, modern peoplehood is defined as national identity and ‘whiteness’. Ultimately, this imaginary of peoplehood is ‘about who is killable, who can and must be sacrificed’ (p. 148). Here Givens highlights Sacvan Bercovitch’s work on the construction of America as the new Israel.
Thus, to the critique of peoplehood as self-constituting, Givens adds the ‘correlative political discipline’ (p. 117) or ‘policing’ through which those who claim to be the elect people determine who does and does not ‘count’ as the elect. Givens argues that ‘Christian attempts to resist national peoplehood by naming and developing an alternative, pure political community such as “the people of God”’, insofar as they ‘imply a claim to a pure and circumscribable identity’, must be said also to ‘trade in the imagined purity that empowers the violence of modern peoplehood’ (p. 149).
Chapter 4 moves from diagnosis to proposed remedy, through Barth’s account of election: the people of God are one as God is one; human subjectivity is secondary to divine election; and being the people of God means being particularly judged by God, not exceptionally preferred. Unsurprisingly, this is Christological for Barth: the oneness of God’s election is embodied in ‘the elect one’, Jesus, who also uniquely bears the wrath of God’s judgement. For Givens, Barth’s account of election overcomes the supersessionism, subjective self-constitution and violent, policing exclusion of modern peoplehood.
Chapter 5 highlights a liability of Barth’s account: he construes Israel and the church in tension as two representative forms, analogous to Christ’s two natures. Despite insistence upon the oneness of the people of God, Barth creates a revised supersessionism: although ‘Israel and the church are ineffaceably distinct forms of the one people of God in Christ, present throughout its history’, that history ‘nevertheless somehow moves inexorably from Israel to the church’ (p. 236).
Finally, Givens turns to scripture to deploy his argument exegetically. The remainder of chapter 5 argues that instead of understanding ‘Israel’ either formally or ethnically—‘Israelite or Jewish ethnicity is a myth’ (p. 250)—Hebrew scripture does not ‘define’ election but rather ‘tells the election of Israel’ as ‘the unfolding presence of God’ which ‘continuously creates and forms Israel’ (p. 269, emphasis original). Chapters 6 and 7 give extensive exegetical analyses of two texts often read in terms of a ‘new’ people of God, over against Israel, Matthew and Romans 9–11, read here as narrations of peoplehood constituted by God’s election of one people, not rejected or replaced but dynamically elected and shaped in history through divine judgement and reconciliation. In conclusion, Givens calls his readers to ‘repent of pretending to decide who is “truly” the people of God and who is not’ and ‘of a politics of constructing and policing mythological borders of peoplehood between ourselves and others who remember the God of Israel as their own’ (p. 417).
Givens has produced an unrelentingly serious piece of scholarship, manifestly the product of years of intense research and writing. It is painstakingly thorough. It is impressively ambitious both in its wide-reaching critique of imaginaries of peoplehood and in the close, detailed readings of Barth, Matthew and Romans. I am entirely in sympathy with the overall force of the argument: to retain Yoder’s vision of Jesus gathering a peaceable people in direct continuity with Israel, while replacing Yoder’s narrow self-constitution of the people by faithfulness with an insistence on God’s constitution of the people by gracious election that persists in solidarity with the unfaithful—and along the way deconstructing the violent history of supersessionist imaginaries of peoplehood which haunt modern constructs of empire, nation and race. I and all his readers will be indebted to Givens for the ways in which he helps us see the complicity in modern, violent constructs of peoplehood hidden within certain ways of refusing supersessionism and violence. His critique is trenchant.
I do, however, have questions about the structure of the book, its intended audience, and perhaps most pointedly, the violence which remains as necessity within its vision of election.
Not all readers will share my question about structure. I found the expositions of source texts overly lengthy and overly dependent on extensive quotation. Sixty pages are spent tracing Yoder’s argument in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. The better part of thirty pages on modern peoplehood is exposition of Balibar. The fifteen pages devoted to Bercovitch are at least half consumed by long quotations and footnotes. Some readers will appreciate these close, detailed readings containing so much of the texts themselves. Others may feel there could have been some significant editing.
Next there is a question of intended audience. In the first half, Givens seems to address all Christians, helping us unpack our unwitting complicity in supersessionism and violent imaginaries of peoplehood. In the second half, the conversation seems more specifically Protestant, Reformed and evangelical. Givens seeks to help readers out of the problems he has identified through the framework of election, assuming theological constructs related to election which are somewhat peculiar to that strand of Christian tradition. This is not necessarily a criticism; it may allow the constructive argument to carry a particularly forceful weight for that audience. Others, however, may feel that they are being talked out of problems which are not their own, or perhaps that, if the peculiarities of the framing problem exist most acutely within Reformed evangelicalism, Karl Barth may not be the theologian most able to point the way out.
A different question about intended audience arose in the conclusion, where Givens seems to take more direct aim at a certain school of thought, saying, ‘if Christians respond to the oppressive power of modern peoplehood by claiming to be an independent political entity as the people of God, we will not be able to offer substantive resistance to the racialized, voluntarist, friend-enemy difference that underlies modern political orders of peoplehood’, and will ‘remain internally divisive in the service of a false internal purity of identity’ (p. 417). Is the real target for Givens the church-as-true-community/polis lines of reasoning in Yoder, Hauerwas, Cavanaugh et al.? If so, it would be fruitful for this line of critique to be argued directly.
Finally, I question the thread of violent divine judgement which is central to the book’s argument. Givens rightly seeks to overcome exceptionalism of the elect, and the assumption that judgement is casting away—exclusion. To do this, he argues along with Barth that, for Israel, being chosen by God meant being judged, rejected and punished within God’s unrelenting election, and that Jesus was thus incarnate election in his death: ‘In the genuine fulfilment of genuine election it is His life which is truly the life of the man who must suffer the destructive hostility of God’ (quoting Barth, p. 223). For Givens, via Barth, ‘judgment, rejection, and wrath can be understood, in Christ, only as expressions of God’s love’ (p. 223). Departing from Barth, Givens argues that Israel’s exile was also this kind of death: ‘Through the death of Israel by which God reveals and determines God’s self, God forms the people of Israel not out of scratch but out of Israel’s death’ (p. 277). In his biblical exegesis Givens repeatedly highlights language of ‘cutting’ which draws together circumcision, judgement, punishment and pruning to describe how God acts in the history that is Israel’s election. Givens believes this understanding of God’s ‘discipline’ leads us to nonviolence, as the ‘people is freed from the presumption that its life depends on its own striving or policing, and so it can be a community of both discipline and unconditional love’ (p. 280). I would argue, however, that this understanding of God’s judgement is centred on violent punishment, with its focus and fulcrum in a substitutionary and satisfying atonement—and this leaves Givens just as entrenched in violent imaginaries as he has adeptly shown Yoder to be.
Two realities come to mind in this regard. One is the long and pervasive history of God-as-loving-punisher fuelling and justifying violent abuse of children, women, slaves, and untold masses of the oppressed. Just as God the Father punishes Israel and Jesus out of love, as the story is told, the violence meted out by those (men) in authority is neither arbitrary nor unloving—in it they act as God acts. There may be a way for Givens to make his argument without being entangled in this history, but this would bear the same careful treatment he has given to the violent history of peoplehood.
The other reality that springs to mind is the dispensationalist American Christian Zionism which I spent several years studying ethnographically. While the key contours of dispensationalist theology would have no resonance with either Barth or Givens, the Christian Zionists I came to know would immediately resonate with this thread of the argument. For them, supersessionism is the darkest sin of Christian history, and they are adamant that God has not abandoned Israel. However, they are keen to narrate God’s judgement and punishment of the chosen people, and for some—I would stress, not all—the Shoah is nothing other than the ultimate instance of God’s pruning, refining judgement of the elect. This is a chilling view which I do not ascribe to Givens, but I wonder what mechanism in his narration of God’s ‘cutting’ of the people would prevent it as a reasonable next step.
In the light of all we now know about Yoder’s abusive history, I am less and less inclined to use his work constructively—but we cannot hold Givens accountable for this consideration, as the clearest revelations were likely published after Givens had finished writing this book. However, if we were to return to Yoder constructively after deconstructing his entanglement in modern peoplehood, perhaps it would best be to his understandings of cross and resurrection. These, I would argue, offer a far better remedy to the problems Givens so astutely identifies than does Barth, at least insofar as Barth is employed in ways that perpetuate the need for a wrathful God to be satisfied through violent punishment.