This methodologically sophisticated book is a welcome contribution to the study of early Christian self-definition. Dunning ventures beyond the scope of many of his colleagues by engaging in contemporary Christian theological questions and the ethical implications of his research. The book also contributes to scholarship on the particular early Christian texts that are at the heart of this work: namely, Hebrews, the Epistle to Diognetus, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocryphon of James. The book's thesis is two-pronged, contributing on the one hand to scholarship on early Christian self-definition and the language of Christians as resident aliens, and on the other hand to American theological conversations that draw on these early Christian traditions. Although specialists on these early Christian texts will find much that is familiar in the early chapters, reading these texts together on the topic of self-definition, and the conclusions that Dunning reaches in his final chapter, make the book well worth reading and a significant contribution to scholarship in a variety of fields.
Dunning's book opens with a lengthy introduction to a host of theorists who have shaped recent scholarship. Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Elizabeth Clark, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Gabrielle Spiegel are only some of the scholars whose work appears here. Nevertheless, Dunning uses these scholars' work effectively to ask productive questions of the early Christian texts, and to nuance our understanding of the early Christian texts' rhetoric and the diverse purposes to which they worked.
Chapter 1 surveys Greek and Latin forerunners, pagan and Jewish, of the Christian rhetoric of aliens and sojourners, asking, “What might a designation of ‘alien,’ ‘sojourner,’ or ‘foreigner’ have meant to various audiences or readers” of the early Roman Empire (25)? Although some readers may pause at the category of “ethnoracial” that Dunning uses to describe some of the cultural differences implied by these Roman designations of otherness, Dunning offers a sophisticated survey of the material, discussing Roman citizenship, narrations of encounters with “others,” and the “discursive possibilities” in perceptions of “exile” (37). Dunning demonstrates his familiarity with an impressive breadth of scholarship, from Benjamin Isaac and Denise Buell to Judith Butler and Michel de Certeau, though some readers might wish for a stronger authorial voice amid the pastiche of other scholars. Nevertheless, Dunning's concluding remarks are insightful and provide the foundation for the following chapters: “The alien topos functioned in the early Roman Empire as part of a rich discursive field. . . . As Christians thought through what was to count as particularly Christian practice . . ., they found themselves well placed to take advantage of the rhetorical resources that the alien topos offered” (44–45).
In chapters 2–5, Dunning focuses on four texts to investigate the questions, “why did the first Christians speak about themselves [as resident aliens] and to what ends?” (3). Chapter 2 demonstrates the ways in which the Epistle to the Hebrews used “the alien topos” to carve out “a place for conceptualizing and maintaining a distinctive Christian insider status” (63). By appealing to biblical examples such as Abraham, Hebrews encouraged early Christians to accept an “alien status,” even (or, especially) if the Christians looked much like their non-Christian neighbors in practice (63). Chapter 3 provides a brief examination of the Epistle to Diognetus, revealing that like Hebrews this text valorized the status of “alien” and constructed Christian identity in relation to this marginal status, though still affirming “traditional cultural standards” (76). Diognetus critiqued non-Christians more sharply than Hebrews, however, by describing Christians as surpassing other Romans “in their capacity to live up to Roman ideals” (77). Thus, Diognetus's metaphor of the Christian in the world as the soul is in the body allowed the text to perpetuate the alien status of Christians, while maintaining that they were outstanding representatives of worldly Roman citizenship. Dunning's investigation of the Shepherd of Hermas in chapter 4 reveals another purpose for which Christians deployed the same topos. Dunning argues that this text “retains the valorization of Christian alien identity, while simultaneously bringing the negative connotations of the rhetoric of foreignness to the fore in order to demonize one way of life in the hopes that Christians will pursue another” (78). Although this chapter offers a glimpse of early Christians' diverse uses of the alien topos that becomes critical in Dunning's contemporary theological argument, it is the study in chapter 5 of the Apocryphon of James that proves most useful in this regard. The Apocryphon, usually excluded from similar studies because of its association with Gnosticism, offers a sharp counter-example to the other texts by rejecting the alien topos as productive for Christian identity. Although Dunning declines to venture too far into the murky questions about the significance of the counter-example coming from a text that is traditionally categorized as “Gnostic,” he does conclude that it likely responded to other Christians' valorization of the status of alien (102). Most important for Dunning, though, is the Apocryphon's witness to the wide variety of approaches that early Christians took to this concept.
Beyond the contribution that this book makes to the study of these early Christian texts and early Christian identity formation, the concluding chapter reveals that Dunning's research has much wider implications. Jumping forward to an American context, Dunning exposes the theological and ethical fallout of American Christians adopting the status of resident alien from the vocabulary of early Christian texts. Dunning challenges American narratives that do not take into account the diversity of early Christian approaches that his research has uncovered, and warns of the potential dangers of such rhetoric, observing, that the “paradoxical genius of a rhetoric of marginality is that it allows” Christians to “challenge a hegemonic discourse” and “polemicize against people, beliefs, and ways of life,” all while simultaneously “serving to reinscribe group identity in powerfully cohesive terms” (112). Dunning advocates a “theological responsibility” regarding the contextualized use of such rhetoric that would prevent the danger of “rendering a community's practices and attitudes relatively immune from critique—since any critique or questioning (particularly from an outsider) only fuels the general plausibility of the narrative that positions the group at the cultural margins” (115).
The endnotes and transliterated Greek may cause momentary frustrations; the author's contributions to the scholarship on the early Christian texts could sometimes have been clearer; and some lengthy quotations of well-known and easily accessible primary sources might have been relegated to an appendix. Nevertheless, this book represents a significant contribution to an impressive variety of possible audiences, and is a welcome and timely addition to these conversations.
