The 2005–2006 Paul Tillich Lecture, The Memorial Church, Harvard University
Paul Tillich and I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 1955. It is the 50th anniversary of Tillich's inaugural year (1955–1956) as University Professor at Harvard University and my 50th anniversary as one of the first women students to attend the Harvard Divinity School. It is no accident that we came at the same time, for I chose to come to Harvard for my ministerial studies just so I could be part of its renewal, and study with professors such as Paul Tillich.
I had been working in the group ministry of the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City. In 1948 some graduates of Union Theological Seminary who began that interracial, interdenominational ministry were very much influenced by Paul Tillich's lectures and by his first book published in English in that same year, The Protestant Era.1
Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (trans. James Luther Adams; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; abridged ed., Phoenix Books, 1957).
According to George W. Webber, one of the founders of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, three majorideas shaped the newinner city ministry: creating new forms of church in local store fronts, or places where people lived and work; working as a group ministry team where people shared their lives, income, and talents together in working for social justice against the problems of poverty, racism, classism and so much more that confronted people living in East Harlem.2
George W. Webber, God's Colony in Man's World (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960) 19–21.
How did The Protestant Era, a collection oftheologicalarticles written by a German theologian reflecting on the chaos of the period before and during the second World War, relate to this American inner city context? In East Harlem the end of the Protestant Era as Tillich described it had already happened. Established Protestant churches had abandoned the area and followed their middle class congregations elsewhere. A gospel message that connected God's love to the concern for social justice and change was needed in the face of so many urban problems.
Coming from white, middle class backgrounds many of us in the group ministry were encountering “the other” in a world of difference and danger for the first time. We saw the need for new ways of living out the gospel if it were to come alive for those who had been abandoned by the church and by the city around them. We found ourselves with new questions from the perspective of the “other.” We were no longer looking for a gracious God as in the time of the Reformation, or a gracious neighbor as in the era of capitalist expansion and industrialization, but for a gracious stranger in a world of alienation.3
Horst Symanowski, The Christian Witness in an Industrial Society (trans. George H. Kehm;Westminster Press, 1964) 50. “Luther's question when he was in, and even after he had left, the monastery [was]: ‘How can I find a gracious God?’… But another question does drive us around, unsettles us, agitates whole peoples, and forces us into anxiety and despair: “How can I find a gracious neighbor?” Quoted in Christian Education in Mission, Letty M. Russell (Westminster Press, 1967) 158 n. 11.
In the last fifty years this reality of encounter with the “other” has become a universal problem as globalization and pluralism create a world that is “other.” In facing this predicament I want to join Tillich and that group of women and men in East Harlem by continuing the search for new ways of understanding difference as a gift, and practicing hospitality as an act of justice.
A World That Is “Other”
A few years ago at a conference in Basel I was asked to lecture on the “other” in postcolonial perspective. I resisted the use of the term, “other,” and instead spoke about postcolonial subjects.4
Letty M. Russell, “Postkoloniale Subjekte und eine feministische hermeneutik der Gastfreundschaft,”in Als Hatten Sie Uns Neu Erfunden. Beobachtungen zu Fremdheit und Geschlecht (ed. Heike Walz, Christine Lienemann-Perrin, and Dordis Strahm; Luzern: Edition Exodus, 2003) 99–112.
Process of othering
Paul Tillich is not the only one to have pointed this out. Nevertheless his book The Protestant Era, documents the results ofthe combination of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment in helping create the subject/object split in which those with the power to dominate—principally white, Euro-American males— name both nature and some human beings as “other.” In combination with the industrial revolution and the development of capitalism this led to the treatment of workers, as well as people in colonized nations, as “other”: disposable objects whose labor and resources are to be exploited.
Referring to what he calls the “bourgeois principle,” Tillich describes the effects of technology and capitalism in the modern world. The goal of this bourgeois principal or paradigm of social, religious and political society is what Tillich calls the “radical dissolution of the bonds of original, organic community life, the dissolution of the powers of origin into elements to be conquered rationally.”5
James Luther Adams, “Tillich's Concept of the Protestant Era,” in The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 273–316, at 281.
According to James Luther Adams, Tillich's translator, editor, and Harvard colleague: “Science, religion, politics, art, the relations between classes—all have been drawn into the crucible of the [self-centered autonomy of the] bourgeois principle.”6
Ibid., 281–82.
This othering works through the internalization of fear: fear of being other, or being seen as other; fear for one's own identity and the need to conform to the dominant paradigm of those who fit in a culture.7
Kristen Leslie, “The Experience of Otherness from a Pastoral Counselling Perspective,” Yale Divinity School, 12 April 2006, unpublished lecture.
Misuse of difference
The actions of othering are very much tied up with the misuse of difference. As Audre Lorde has pointed out, differences in themselves are not the problem.
[I]t is not those differences between us that are separating us [she says]. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.8
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984) 114–23, at 115.
There are a lot of reasons to be afraid of those who are different from ourselves; to fear the stranger knocking at our door, the person with a different religion, the worker taking our job in Mexico or Mozambique, or the terrorist waiting to destroy our city. Some of these fears are real and cautionary tales. But, at the same time, our fears combine with our own insecurity and resentment, and hatred grows between different races, classes, genders, and sexual orientations. Right now, there is even no love lost between different political parties … even after George Lakoff's book has explained us to each other!9
George Lakoff, Don't Think of the Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.
Audre Lorde has given us a clue for dealing with differences by reminding us that the problem is that they are often distorted by social structures as a means of division and control. Difference becomes a tool of domination: a master's tool.10
Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” in Sister Outsider, 110–13.
Often it is the political structures of domination in a society that use divisions among groups to play them off against each other. Those with the political, economic and educational power use that power to create the norms for who should be included or excluded. Things they do not like about themselves they project onto those whom they have marginalized. Marginalized people in our cities and around the world, who are then called “lazy,” “ignorant,” “ugly” by the standards of the white dominant culture, begin to think of themselves this way.11
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) 168–73.
People in our churches are caught up in the way social structures divide and conquer them. Sometimes this leads to emulation of the oppressor in order to follow the models of success presented on TV or by churches using middle class white models of church life. This can be a way of developing a new identity rooted in one's own culture but able to cope with the dominant culture. However, it can also encourage people to believe that “living and acting like the master” and using the “masters’ tools” to push others down is the best way out of their status as “different” or “other.”
At other times resistance to dominant white norms has led to affirmation of people's own dignity and heritage in communities moving together for change as happened with the Civil Rights movement. Even here, however, the social, political, and economic pressures push people to create their own power through forms of identity politics which reinforce difference within and beyond their group by requiring conformity to one pattern of identity. Many of you know much better than I how the process of divide and conquer makes difference a permanent divide that justifies all manner of “bars that still keep us apart.”
There is a process at work among usin our nation and around the world, however, that may assist us in resisting this dualistic divide and conquer pattern. Slowly but surely, whether we like it or not, globalization is affecting everyone, oppressor, collaborator and oppressed alike so that none of us hasjust one unchanging identity. Mixtures of culture, race, religion, language, and just about everything are becoming a norm in a globalized society. This mixing or hybridity has been going on around the world for a long time so that some religious groups have had the possibility of struggling to create new forms of life where people recreate themselves and cultures out of the nationalities, languages, cultures, and gifts of those around them.
I experienced this hybridity at work while I was giving lectures in Sulawesi, Indonesiain 2004.12
See “Report of the ATESEA [Association for Theological Education in South East Asia] lectures, “Indonesia, 4–20 March 2004, by Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson. Minutes of the Trustees of the Foundation of Theological Education in South East Asia, 9 December, 2004.
The term postcolonial refers not only to a temporal period after colonization or a political transfer of power, but also to a strategy for analysis, resistance, and reconstruction as scholars examine the contradictions between the colonial and neo-colonial rhetoric and the continuing cultural, political, economic, and religious oppression experienced by colonized peoples.
This challenge to recognize the religious and cultural pluralism of our societies and search for ways of living together in the midst of difference is also highlighted in Diana Eck's work on the Pluralism Project. Describing the task ahead she has said:
Whether in India or America, whether on New Hampshire Avenue or at Harvard University, the challenge for all of us today is how to shape societies, nations, neighborhoods, and universities that now replicate and potentially may reconfigure the differences that have long divided humankind.14
Http://www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/so96/faith.4.html. See Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).
Difference as a Gift
One way to “reconfigure difference” is to shift our understanding of its meaning and use. Why should difference be used as a tool for othering and domination? If, as Audre Lorde says, its miss use is the problem, then difference can be a gift to our pluralistic world. In theological perspective difference is a gift, a gift of God. In our struggles to find a gracious neighbor in a world of danger and alienation we may have forgotten that the One who is our Ground of Being15
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) 186.
A world of riotous difference
The writers of the biblical story of creation in Genesis describe a world full of riotous difference. Each time as God creates life of every kind, there is the refrain: “And God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:25).16
Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.
The story of the Tower of Babel in Gen 11:1–9 is part of the prologue to the call of Sarah and Abraham in chapter 12. This prologue describes the way in which the authors experience alienation and sin in their world.17
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 77.
The Protestant Principle, in name derived from the protest of the “protestants” against decisions of the Catholic majority, contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, even if this claim is made by a Protestant church.18
Tillich, Protestant Era, 163.
In the Babel story the scattering and the confusion of language are God's response to those who seek to triumph through domination. By building the tower to heaven they try to consolidate their power and to become like God, controlling all the people through a unified language and political structure. “Babel” means confuse in Hebrew. The name, Babel, evokes in the hearers' minds the dominating power of the Babylonian empire and the intention of unity through uniformity.
Today, ancient Babylon lies near Bagdad, once again the site of fierce fighting and destruction, the site of empire building. It would seem that the towers are being rebuilt everywhere, neo-colonial towers of uniformity and control. Ivone Gebara adds to this picture of globalization as a refusal of God's gifts of difference by pointing out that today in all parts of the world people now find themselves inside the towers of Babel! Whether in Porto Alegre, Tokyo, Nairobi, or Chicago, people find themselves allowed to be different, but only if they eat, talk, dress, or dance alike. Within those towers the language of profit is always the same.19
Ivone Gebara, “Difference in a Divided World: A Feminist Perspective from Latin America,” Yale Divinity School, 12 April, 2005, unpublished lecture.
In Genesis God's response to the tower builders's pride and poweris, once more, to create the gift of difference! According to the theologian, José Míguez-Bonino, God's action is twofold: “the thwarting of the project of the false unity of domination and the liberation of the nations that possess their own races, languages, and families.”20
José Míguez Bonino, “Genesis 11:1–9: A Latin American Perspective,” in Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible (ed. Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1999) 13–16, at 15.
Differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, language or culture are not problems to be solved and controlled by a dominant group, rather they are important ways of assuring that God's gift of riotous diversity in all creation will continue. Because of God's gift, new voices are able to be heard and languages and cultures are able to flourish. Such a message is doubly important for us today as we watch the growing domination of the world by American imperialism and one economic system, and by a growing requirement that people learn English in order to be included in its global economic outreach.
Gift of understanding
The story of Pentecost in Acts 2:1–21 has often been understood as a sign of the reversal of Babel as nations are brought together and united in the outpouring of Christ's Spirit and the birth of the church. But we need to look again at its message of unity in the light of an interpretation of the confusion of tongues at Babel as God's gift of difference (Gen 11:1–9). If difference is a gift which helps to prevent domination, surely it is not something to be overcome.
One way to look at this would be to use a clue from Peter Gomes that Pentecost is about the gift of understanding. He says:
That was the thing that the Spirit did, and that was how the people could say that they each heard in their own language the wonderful works of God. The work of the Spirit is designed to foster understanding and ultimate reconciliation.21
Peter Gomes, “Beyond the Human Point of View.” Available at http://www.covenantnetwork.org/gomes.html or from the Covenant Network Administrative Office, c/o Calvary Presbyterian Church, 2515 Fillmore St., San Francisco, CA 94115.
God makes unity in difference possible by the gift of the Spirit enabling people of all nations to understand one another, no matter what language is spoken. Acts 2:6 says that “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” It does not say that they no longer had their own languages and customs but that they could understand one another. This is a different kind of world than the one envisioned by the builders at Babel. Here the unity comes, not through building a tower of domination or uniformity, but through communication.
God's gift of understanding across difference is expressed in the outpouring of the Spirit which transforms the lives of people and their communities. According to Justo Gonzalez, the Spirit does not so much create the structures and procedures, but rather it breaks open structures that confine and separate people so that they can welcome difference and the challenges and opportunity for new understanding that they bring.22
Justo L. González, “Reading from My Bicultural Place: Acts 6:1–7,” in Reading from This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States (ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 1:139–47, at 146.
Creative impulse for community
So far we have seen that difference is a gift God has had to offer to us over and over because it gets turned into domination and division through our personal and social sin. Yet the gifts of difference abound in our world, and we have an opportunity to respond to this mixture of cultures. Through the gift of the Spirit, difference can be a creative impulse for community. Community happens out of difference not sameness. Community brings people together across difference. If everyone is already alike as in a social club, a gang, or a family gathering, there is no need for a community in which different people contribute their different gifts to make up the whole.
It is participation together in some task or commitment that provides a bond to one another in the struggle to create community. One way of describing community is to speak of it as a close encounter with a third thing. It is the commitment and common task that holds a community together, not sameness. As Paul reminds us in I Cor 12:4–11 the Christian community is built up of “varieties of gifts.” It is the koinonia or community in Christ that provides unity, across the differing gifts; a community in which the Spirit inspires understanding across differences.23
Letty M. Russell, Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993) 161.
The ever changing mixture of persons in our communities is clearly a source of great creativity if churches and institutions can learn to accept the gifts and not try to collect them in one uniform pattern. In this context, resistance to the mixture of gifts and ideas in communities affected by mixture or hybridity often comes from those who retreat into fundamentalism because they fear change and loss of control. They call for strict moral values and forget that such values include social justice along with personal choices. On the other hand, those who risk openness to the process of hybridity will have the advantage of moving beyond the old dualistic stereotypes of oppressor and oppressed. Because everyone is affected by the change, oppressed and oppressors alike need to join in creative ways to redistribute power and create communities, whether of shorter or longer duration. Who knows, in such a configuration Tillich's hope for new forms of religious and cultural life beyond the Protestant Era could come true.
Hospitality with Justice
The gift of difference does nor end here, however, for it is also a creative impulse for hospitality with justice. An important aspect of Jewish, Muslim and Christian spirituality is the practice of hospitality or welcoming of the stranger. When we welcome those who come from different contexts and life experiences we learn from them, and we learn that there are many ways to understand and live out our unity in community. We become partners with those who are different by sharing together with them in service of others.
Solidarity with the stranger
In a world so full of danger and fear it becomes apparent that our search for a gracious God and a gracious neighbor needs to be expanded to a search for a gracious stranger. Indeed this is one of the deep commitments of Paul Tillich in his work with the religious socialists in Germany and his lifting up of what James Luther Adams calls the religious-socialist principle.24
Adams, “Tillich's Concept,” 312.
Most certainly this need to search for forms of hospitality that could transcend traditional forms of unity through domination or limited diversity is rooted in the biblical message. In fact, Barbara Brown Taylor quotes Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain, saying that “the Hebrew Bible contains only one commandment to love the neighbor but no less than 36 commands to love the stranger.”25
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Guest Appearance,” Christian Century 122:19 (20 September 2005) 37.
The basis of this practice of hospitality is that we were once strangers, exiles, nobodies and are now welcomed by God so that we might welcome others. At the same time hospitality is a gift in which we discover the presence of God in our mutual interaction with the stranger, as did Abraham and Sarah at the Oaks of Mamre (Gen 18:1–15).
The Greek New Testament abounds in exhortations to hospitality as well. Matthew 25 tells us that Christ promises to be present to us through our actions of solidarity with the stranger (Matt 25:31–46). In his book New Testament Hospitality John Koenig says that:
philoxenia the term for hospitality used in the New Testament, refers literally not to a love of strangers per se but to a delight in the whole guest-host relationship, in the mysterious reversals and gains for all parties which may take place. For believers, this delight is fueled by the expectation that God or Christ or the Holy Spirit will play a role in every hospitable transaction. (Heb. 13:2; Rom. 1:11–12)26
John Koenig, New Testament Hospitality: Partnership with Strangers as Promise and Mission (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) 8.
Koenig describes hospitality as “partnership with strangers” and understands hospitality as “the catalyst for creating and sustaining partnerships in the gospel.”27
Ibid., 10. Russell, Church in the Round, 173.
This call for hospitality provides a clue to the possibility of welcoming difference, rather than creating a “cheap unity” built on compliance to one interpretation of faith in Christ. When we welcome those who come from different contexts and life experiences we do learn from them, and we learn that there are many ways to understand and live out our unity in Christ. These different ways can also open up our institutions as we seek to become partners with those who are different by sharing together in service with others. In this way we refrain from building our institutional “towers” and begin to focus on mutual understanding and our calling to serve in the world.
My Yale colleague, Margaret Farley, and I have had the opportunity to try this as members of the YDS Women's Initiative on HIV/AIDS in Africa. We are joined in a partnership with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians and the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS to support African women theologians in post doctoral studies. In this partnership the theologians can design projects on gender injustice and HIV/AIDS in African religious institutions. In these projects and beyond they support one another in organizing, teaching, and writing to promote change in their own religious contexts.28
Margaret A. Farley, Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics and Other Questions (New York: Paulist Press, 2002) 3–20.
Just Hospitality
Our struggles to overcome fear of difference and to “break all the bars that still keep us apart” challenge our local, national, and global institutions to practice hospitality with justice. Christian hospitality is more than “terminal niceness.” It includes providing food, clothing and shelter to the homeless and welcoming strangers in our sanctuaries. But it also includes actions of genuine solidarity with those who are different from ourselves. Often the kind of hospitality that persons want is not to be cared for, or even to be given a job. What they want is to be able to find their own jobs, and to care for themselves and others.
The sort of hospitality that makes this possible would be one that sees the struggle for justice as part and parcel of welcoming the stranger. According to Robert McAfee Brown, if you read your Bible you will discover that justice appears to be God's middle name!29
Robert McAfee Brown, “The ‘Preferential Option for the Poor’ and the Renewal of Faith,” in Churches in Struggle: Liberation Theologies and Social Change in North America (ed. William K. Tabb; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986) 7–17, at 10. For an example of God's just actions see Psalm 82.
Young, Justice and Politics of Difference, 39.
Margaret Farley has just published her book, Just Love: A Frameworkfor Christian Sexual Ethics.31
Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2006) 208.
Our world is full of structures of domination that cannot be moved without attention to many different social, political, economic, and religious factors. For instance, the AIDS pandemic in Africa is a combination of many factors such as colonial and neo-colonial exploitation, gender inequality, ecological destruction, poverty, harmful cultural practices, political instability, lack of health care, and more.32
Musa W. Dube, “Grant Me Justice: Towards Gender Sensitive Multi-Sectoral HIV/AIDS Readings of the Bible,” in Grant Me Justice! HIV/AIDS and Gender Readings of the Bible (ed. Musa W. Dube and Musimbi Kanyoro; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2004) 3–24, at 7.
Hospitality is the practice of God's welcome by reaching out across difference to participate in God's actions bringing justice and healing in our world of crisis and our fear of the ones we call “other.” As strangers to ourselves and to so many other people we have this possibility of learning to trust ourselves and others as a sign of God's concern for us all, and for all creation.
Hospitality is not the answer to difference, but it is a challenge to us, pointing us to a future that God intends where riotous difference is welcomed! Hospitality will not make us safe, but it will lead us to risk joining in the work of mending the creation without requiring those who are different to become like us. I do not pretend that hospitality is a word Tillich would have chosen in confronting the chaos of his time, but I will claim that this search for a theonomous future of social justice is furthered by those of us who still take some of our clues from books like The Protestant Era.
One of my last memories of Paul Tillich in 1957 was as a man who was not afraid of the future, but rather eager to participate in the “more to come.” Looking ahead, Tillich sent our entire theology class out of the Semitic Museum into the cool October air so that we could watch the future space age happening overhead as the Soviet satellite, Sputnik I, swept by. He did not see it all, and neither do we, but we know that the future that awaits is one that is surely as chaotic as the past; a future open to the work of those who choose to join in God's intention to restore creation's rainbow of difference!
