“Dual Citizenship”

I wrote a review of Kayko Driedger Hesslein’s book Dual Citizens: Two‐Natures Christologies and the Jewish Jesus (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015) for Reviews and Religion and Theology.

[This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article, which has been published at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rirt.13465]

The relationship between the universal and the particular has remained a perennial question for philosophers and theologians, and just a glance at the shape of this problem in areas as diverse as jurisprudence, linguistics, and political theory reveals numerous ways in which it has come to structure our thinking. In an insightful, if idiosyncratic, move, Kayko Driedger Hesslein – in a book developed from her Graduate Theological union PhD thesis – has mined the depths of multicultural studies for resources to address the relationship between universality and particularity and applied those insights to the doctrine of Christ. With the specific aim of incorporat- ing Jesus’ Jewishness more fully into the doctrine of the incarnation, Driedger Hesslein has adapted these political categories in order to interrogate the processes used to negotiate difference and similarity – and to account for the interplay of power and agency – between Jesus’ humanity and divinity.

Following the political theorist Rita Dhamoon, Driedger Hesslein argues that all differences are related, and she highlights three mutually informative differences in Christology: Jesus’ general humanity and individual (Jewish) human existence, Jesus’ human and divine natures, and Jesus’ past and ongoing existence (p. 10). She maintains that if we relativize the particular to the universal, then we will relativize the particular to other particulars. If we want to safeguard Jesus’ Jewishness, we must reconsider how we negotiate the union of his two natures. Following a variety of multicultural theorists who suggest that ‘difference does not destroy wholeness but constructs it’, Driedger Hesslein argues that a true union of natures in Christ requires that both natures relate in ‘mutual formativity’ such that Jesus’ Jewish humanity ‘must formatively influence his divine nature and the one person’ (pp. 11–12).

Part One begins with a discussion of the theological necessity of Jesus’ Jewishness and the shortcomings of the non-supersessionist Christologies that have appeared thus far. Then, in Chapter 2, Driedger Hesslein introduces her theological audience to the field of multicultural studies. She outlines four different processes by which societies typically negotiate difference – assimilationism, fragmented pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and interactive pluralism – and then discusses how each can be applied to Christology. For example, she defines assimilationism as ‘the process wherein difference is put aside in order for an individual or group to be acceptable to the normative group’ (p. 22). Assimilationism shows up in Christology when specific characteristics of one nature are rejected to eliminate tension with the other. Because of the tendency of fragmented pluralism and cosmopolitanism to devolve into assimilationism, only the fourth process shows promise for Christology. The majority of the monograph is taken up with critiquing a wide range of Christological approaches – patristic, medieval, modern, and contemporary – in light of these political theories outlined at the beginning.

Part Two concerns the contextualization of Jesus’ human nature (Chapter 3) and the universality of his divinity (Chapter 4). In Chapter 3, Driedger Hesslein suggests that Christ’s role as a representative of humanity raises the problems of homogenizing reductionism and decontextualizing universality. She proposes that the universal characteristic Jesus must share with all humanity is the possession of an individual human experience constituted through unique webs of contextual relationality as the basis for an array of overlapping memberships. In Chapter 4, the author critiques both ‘Logos Christologies’ (e.g. Cyril of Al- exandria and Karl Rahner) and ‘Spirit Christologies’ for assimilating the particularity of Jesus by excluding this human agency. She also critiques various twentieth-century approaches to divine transcendence and offers an alternative conception of transcendence as ‘transparticularity’: ‘[the capability] of full membership in an infinite number of overlapping communities and subjectivities’ without assimilation (p. 100).

In Part Three, the author turns to the relationship between the two natures of Christ, which she maintains should be characterized by equality, full participation, and mutually formative and interactive unity (p. 108). After defending the aims of the Chalcedonian definition – while remaining critical of what it managed to achieve – the author examines Christologies that emphasize the unity of the two natures (Chapter 5). She suggests that we negotiate the relationship between the particular and the universal by conceiving of the universal as particularity: ‘everybody has particulars’ (p. 128). This is the basis for what she calls ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ in which values (or identities) are constituted by, but not bounded within, particular ties and associations. In Chapter 6, she critiques Christologies that preserve the difference of the natures at the cost of their unity – Nestorius, Paul Van Buren, and even Radical Orthodoxy – and postcolonial theologians who make use of the theory of a ‘third space’ populated by those on the margins.

In Part Four, Driedger Hesslein offers her constructive proposal that is built upon the concept of ‘contextual universals’ (p. 161). Upholding the full agency and integrity of Jesus’ two natures as they are united in person involves an understanding of both the contextual relationalities and the expansive, limitless relatedness that makes up every action of Christ. Thus, Jesus’ relationship to the Jews was integral to his human identity and remains so even in his present relationship to gentiles. In addition, through its shared reality with the human nature, the divine nature ‘takes up membership in a relationality that is contextualized, in part, by suffering’ (p. 173) while remaining rooted in its own original context of impassibility.

Concepts drawn from multicultural theory essentially function as analogies throughout this book with almost no indication of the vast metaphysical claims they are supporting. How do ‘relationality’ and ‘contextualization’ relate to classical Christological terms like subsis- tence, assumption, and habitus? Is ‘transparticularity’ something like a participatory ontology or is it being conceived of univocally (as it some- times comes across)? Does ‘mutual formativity’ uphold the mixed rela- tion between the natures or is it making the relation an accident of the divine nature, thereby denying divine simplicity? Driedger Hesslein never addresses these questions. Further, these analogies are acting as arguments and not just illustrations, with the result that the author has transformed the criteria by which we are asked to make Christological judgments. When approached in these terms, politics becomes the determining factor for answering profound theological and metaphysical questions. That is not to say that her claims are necessarily wrong. In fact, this reviewer is inclined to agree with many of the critiques offered by Driedger Hesslein, but for reasons quite removed from the logic that supports them in this context.

This book is striking for its creativity, and it is a model of how to approach difficult topics with care. Although she does an admirable job of defining her terms throughout, Driedger Hesslein’s prose is packed with terminology that will be foreign to those not trained in multicultural theory. The book follows a coherent structure and is impressively wide-ranging in its choice of dialogue partners. However, the details of her positive Christological proposal, which receive little attention relative to her critiques of others, remain elusive, largely because they are never trans- lated back into ontological terms. Despite her insistence to the contrary, it is difficult to see how her concluding proposal that Jesus is both normative and not normative for Christians today (see esp. comments on p. 185) can amount to anything besides practical relativism.