36 - In Praise of Shaky Ground: The Liminal Christ and Cultural Pluralism

In Praise of Shaky Ground:
The Liminal Christ and Cultural Pluralism
By Mark Kline Taylor

"The Christ symbol expresses and creates Christian existence lived within, but at the margins of, at the limen of, its own cultural and linguistic worlds. The Christian's liminal existence involves an affirmation of the culturally other and, ultimately, of all those who are most severely marginalized, 'made other' by the dynamics and structures of oppression. "

WE are becoming more honest in responding to the realities of religious and cultural plurality. This honesty leads to the pluralist's suspicion: "a common intellectual ground just does not seem to exist."¹ Stubborn quests for common ground are increasingly criticized by philosophers. Described under the rubric of "foundationalism," such positions are argued to have a preoccupation with a common foundation that does not take with full seriousness the culturally and linguistically relative character of one's normative foundations.² Persistent claims that some perspective must be foundational in the midst of our culturally plural world have been traced to Descartes and diagnosed as the West's "Cartesian anxiety."³ This is no mere malady of the philosopher's guild, nor one element in an intramural, academic debate. It has also been suggested as a major source of a whole civilization's struggle with nuclearism.⁴

No wonder, then, that the pluralist's suspicion has been felt and voiced by important Christian theologians-Protestant and Roman Catholic. Among Catholic scholars, the critiques of foundationalism

Mark Kline Taylor is Assistant Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. He is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and has his Ph.D. in theology from the University of Chicago. His recently published book is entitled, Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology (1985).
¹ Harold Coward, Pluralism: Challenge to World Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985), p. 103.
² Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 131-39, 315-94.
³ Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 16-20.
⁴ Gibson Winter, "Hope for the Earth: A Hermeneutic of Nuclearism in Ecumenical Perspective," Religion and Intellectual Life I (Spring 1984).

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have become an explicit problem in Francis Schüssler Fiorenza's recent reformulation of foundational theology. But his reformulation does not dodge the hard fact of cultural plurality. "No external standard, be it history or human experience," he writes, "exists independent of cultural traditions and social interpretation that can provide an independent foundation for either faith or theology."⁵

Among Protestant theologians, George Lindbeck's widely acclaimed The Nature of Doctrine provides a vision of the theological task consistent with the pluralist's suspicion. Lindbeck is suspicious of theologians who would still write as if there were some common experiential touchstone for the theologian facing cultural and religious differences. A fresh program of theology emerges from his acknowledgment that every religious experience and theological doctrine is specific to systems of language and culture. Lindbeck's book is another manifestation of our pluralistic time's disclaimer regarding "common ground," its confession of particularity, and its critique of foundationalism.

This essay proposes a way for christology to articulate its traditional concerns in relation to the fact of cultural plurality.⁶ Taking this plurality seriously does not mean that we simply have new topics to consider. Rather, cultural plurality compels careful reflection on two difficult issues in christology: (1) the very nature of our confessing Jesus as "the Christ," and (2) the relationship of this confession to experiences of cultural plurality. The first issue can be addressed by viewing Christ as symbol. Then we can turn to the second issue by comparing cultural anthropology's experiences of cultural plurality with the subject matter of christology.

The proposal arising out of these explorations is that the Christ symbol expresses and creates Christian existence lived within, but at the margins of, at the limen of, its own cultural and linguistic worlds. The Christian's liminal existence involves an affirmation of the culturally other and, ultimately, an affirmation of all those who are most severely marginalized, "made other" by the dynamics and structures of oppression. Because the Christ symbol nurtures both affirmations, a final section suggests how a Christian pluralist's affirmation of cultural differences can actually provide important orientations for responding to oppression.

I

For some, to view Christ as "symbol" is to perpetuate the foundationalism that a pluralist suspicion often laments. The concern of

⁵ Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1984), p. 289.
⁶ Consistent pluralists must acknowledge that their own reception of plurality as "fact" is itself mediated by cultural and institutional processes. For one framework by which to analyze academic subcultures for which cultural plurality is a fact, see Mary Douglas, "Cultural Bias," Occasional Paper No. 34 (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1978), pp. 6-13, 21.

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Lindbeck, for example, is that christological doctrine becomes a symbolic expression of some "common core experience." On Lindbeck's reading, this is a reduction of doctrine to "nondiscursive symbolisms."⁷ Though this is possible, I advocate no such reduction here. To the contrary, a full appreciation of theories of the symbolic function allows us to glimpse the many facets of Christians' confessing Jesus as Christ, and in a way that highlights both the particularity of that confession and also its more universal, world-engaging significance. Naming Jesus "the Christ" is symbolic in four senses.

In a first sense, the term "symbols" can be used to mean the privileged images that pervade an author's texts, or the persistent figures in which a whole group or culture recognizes itself.⁸ In this broadest sense, to take Christ as symbol is to say that Christ is in some way pervasive and constitutive for Christian faith, theology, and practice insofar as it is Christian. By reason of its very pervasiveness, precise meanings of the Christ symbol, in this sense, remain elusive. Christ functions as symbol in this broadest sense when theologians refer to "the Christ event," that happening, that "sheer fact" that is definitive for Christianity.⁹

As essential as this first mark of the symbol is, it hardly exhausts the senses of the symbolic. A second sense is its invented or constructed character. Symbols are not reflections in people of things outside them, but creations of interpreters who interact with and who are embedded in complexes of perceptions and experiences. These are not just passive images of something given, but, in an important sense, created by people themselves.¹⁰

Recent christologists have repeatedly emphasized the constructive character of the christological confession. From the very beginning, it has been a creative and interpretive one. However much Jesus may be viewed as somehow historically available, as concrete and human, confessing that this Jesus is "the Christ" makes the confession a human one that involves what Schubert Ogden has called an existential point.¹¹ The creative and interpretive nature of the confession has been evident in many ways, performed by the apostolic witnesses, the New Testament scriptures, its redactors, by the traditions of creed, worship, and doctrine through which Christians claim knowledge of Jesus and confess him as Christ.

A third mark of the symbol makes more explicit the kind of creative interpretation that the christological confession is. Symbols are also

⁷ George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 78.
⁸ Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Ft. Worth, Tx: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 53.
⁹ David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 233-35, 248-49.
¹⁰ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. I.- Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 75.
¹¹ Schubert M. Ogden, The Point of Christology (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 20-40.

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intrinsically bound up with interpreters' places in cultural and linguistic settings as these are also in interaction with other cultural and linguistic settings. Symbolic approaches to christology that do not highlight the cultural-linguistic mediation of the Christ symbol risk reducing it to individualist, existential concerns. The literature in the social sciences and philosophy of religion clearly stresses that symbols are always embodied in cultural, linguistic, social, and institutional practices of communal life.¹²

Many different Christian thinkers have offered reflections with a keen consciousness of how the christological confession is culturally and linguistically mediated. This consciousness is evident in Hans Frei's emphasis on the language of realistic narrative,¹³ in Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative (which is explicitly related to a theory of symbolic forms as cultural process),¹⁴ in Lindbeck's emphasis on the grammatical rules of the Christian story that form life in the Christian community,¹⁵ and in Edward Farley's stress on ecclesial life as the essential corporate matrix of belief in Jesus Christ.¹⁶ In one way or another, accenting culture and language in different ways, each of these writers acknowledges that the Christ symbol is not primarily an isolable image, but a cultural or linguistic system.

Each of these first three senses of the symbolic, when applied to the Christ symbol, highlight and intensify its particularity. In its most pervasive and broadest sense, as in "Christ event," it is relative to Christian faith and religious practice. Insofar as it is a creative construct, it is particular to the interpreter or set of interpreters that confesses it of Jesus. And as mediated by cultural-linguistic settings, it is particular to the specific social nexus within which the confession occurs.

A fourth sense of the symbolic, however, without denying the particularity of the Christ symbol, allows it to be viewed also as world-engaging. The Christ symbol, especially as mediated by the narratives of the New Testament, has what Ricoeur terms a "reference." It is this reference that allows us to take up the question of the relation of Christ, however diverse and particular a symbol it may be, to the world that for us is marked by cultural plurality.

For Ricoeur, the reference of a narrative text is the "possible world"

¹² See, for example, Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 1982), pp. xix-xx.
¹³ Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 13-14, and The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), pp. 96-152.
¹⁴ Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia 4(1975), pp. 37-73, and Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 52-82.
¹⁵ Lindbeck, pp. 79-84.
¹⁶ Edward Farley, Ecclesial Man: A Social Phenomenology of Faith and Reality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), pp. 172-85.

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created by the plot's narrative portrayal of agents and circumstances.¹⁷ This possible world also includes a possible way of orienting oneself' within it.¹⁸ Linguistic devices of narrative and metaphor function to open for readers a comprehensive world that includes both linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions.¹⁹ The New Testament narratives, in particular, invoke linguistic images that are "odd," provoke total commitment, and so refer to "limit-experiences" or "boundary situations" in the world. This reference, generated in the complex play of interpreter and text, is best described as occurring "in front of the text," rather than "behind" or "in" the text.

What becomes of the christological narrative's reference to the world when the world is frankly taken to be a culturally plural one? Does the Christ symbol "refer" to experiences that make sense only within its particular cultural-linguistic world? Does it refer to some other culturallinguistic setting? Or does it refer to the totality of cultural linguistic worlds that present themselves to us? I suggest it refers, primarily, to none of these. It refers, instead, to a particular kind of limit-experience in our culturally plural world, one in which we give place to the other worlds "as other." The Christ symbol's reference, then, is to a realm that is interstitial, "liminal" to the plurality of cultural-linguistic worlds. Let me lend initial cogency to this proposal by turning to our experiences of cultural plurality. What signs are there of such interstitial or liminal worlds to which the Christ symbol might refer?

II

In a time when cultural plurality is widely recognized, it is important not simply to presuppose it, but to examine it. Examining the intercultural experiences of comparative religionists, some missionaries, and cultural anthropologists generally confirms the suspicions about common ground. There is no "ground" to provide a norm for communication across cultural boundaries that is independent of that communicative encounter. There is, however, a shifting terrain for intercultural communication that is significantly more than the relativist abyss some fear to be the consequence of denying common ground.

This shifting terrain can be depicted by discussion of some cultural anthropologists' experience of cross-cultural encounter. I select cultural anthropology not because comparative religion or missionary encounter are necessarily unproductive for my purposes. Indeed, they are.²⁰ I make this selection because anthropology has a history of accenting difference by its developed theory of "culture." Shortly after the turn of this century, this theory led increasingly to stress on the plurality of

¹⁷ Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 218.
¹⁸ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, pp. 61-64.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Cf. James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1982).

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cultures,²¹ where knowledge, belief, institutional practice, and even perception of time, space, and color are each viewed as relative to their respective cultures. Though such senses of plurality and relativity led to strident defenses by some anthropologists of cultural relativism, often as critique of their own culture's ethnocentrism,²² more recent work by anthropologists questions the sufficiency of relativistic claims. ²³ It is this legacy in anthropology, of accenting difference to the point of relativism while qualifying that relativism on the basis of their own fieldwork experience of others, that makes cultural anthropology's hermeneutic so valuable for aiding theology in its concern to understand contemporary experiences of cultural plurality.

From the wealth of writings by anthropologists reflecting on their intercultural encounters, one especially rich passage from anthropologist Paul Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco stands out. These comments by Rabinow on his relationship to his informant, Ali, disclose the shifting terrain of intercultural liminality that I am proposing as reference for the Christ symbol.

Under my systematic questioning, Ali was taking realms of his own world and interpreting them for an outsider. This meant that he, too, was spending more time in this liminal, self-conscious world between cultures. This is a difficult and trying experience-one could almost say it is "unnatural "-and not everyone will tolerate its ambiguities and strains.
This was the beginning of the dialectic process of fieldwork. I say dialectic because neither the subject nor the object remain static…. With Ali there began to emerge a mutually constructed ground of experience and understanding, a realm of tenuous common sense which was constantly breaking down, being patched up, and re-examined, first here, then there.
As time wears on, anthropologist and informant share a stock of experiences upon which they hope to rely with less self-reflection in the future. The common understanding they construct is fragile and thin, but it is upon this shaky ground that anthropological inquiry proceeds."²⁴

Rabinow's description of his intercultural encounter as "liminal" may be seen as an application to his own experience of Victor Turner's notion of liminality in African ritual. For Turner, the liminal stage of African ritual is the ritual participant's transitional experience, being on the margin (between, say, childhood and adulthood). It is a time when the participant often gains sacredness and spiritual power. We need not

²¹ On the culture concept in contemporary social and cultural anthropology, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 195-233, and the older work, A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckbohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Harvard University Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnography 47 (1952).
²² See M. Herskovits, Cultural Relativism (1973).
²³ Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 38-52, and Wilhelm Dupre, "Ethnocentrism and the Challenge of Cultural Relativity," in Claude Geffre and Jesu-Pierre Jossu (eds.), True and False Universality of Christianity (New York: Seabury, 1980), pp. 3-13.
²⁴ Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 39.

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presume that the liminal world of an anthropologist's intercultural encounter is necessarily also infused with such sacredness. But in light of the frequent relation of liminality and sacredness, it should not be surprising that liminality is proposed here as referent of the Christian tradition's Christ symbol.

Four elements of Rabinow's passage can be elaborated to clarify the notion of intercultural liminality. First, the "liminal self-conscious world between cultures," which Rabinow discusses, is characterized by questioning. This questioning is not simply the raising of just any question (though the haphazard, groping, and awkward queries are often also essential to fieldwork). It is a dialectical process of systematic questioning. As dialectical, questioning in this liminal world is aimed to reveal the valuable biases of the questioner and of the questioned. Dialectical questioning in fieldwork breaks the barriers of the questioner's world by highlighting the particularity of each party in the dialogue .²⁵ Through such questioning in fieldwork, as Gadamer writes about questioning in conversation generally, the real unity that makes intercultural understanding possible emerges from a play of question and answer that focuses differences .²⁶ To the final page of his book, Rabinow is aware of the crucial role of "otherness," and yet this otherness is not completely opaque; it is the very means to unity with those who are other.²⁷

Second, the liminal world is a mutually constructed one. "Neither the subject nor the object remain static." In fact, it is no longer right to speak of subject comporting with an "object." More accurately, we see a mutually constructive activity that is a play of subjects, ultimately a play of subjects who are embedded, each in their own historical and cultural situations. Any knowledge of the other that the anthropologist is able to disclose is mutually constructed, by anthropologists and by the ones they describe.

Third, the liminal world is shared. As Rabinow puts it, through the questions and actions of both subjects seeking to accent differences, there is shared unity. There is for both a "stock of experiences upon which they hope to rely with less self-reflection in the future," Elsewhere, Rabinow writes that through the play of question and answer a "doubling of consciousness" occurs. Both anthropologist and Ali become conscious not only of their own cultural and linguistic worlds, but also of the liminal world that is born between them through encounter with each other's self-reflection.²⁸ In the active process of making crucial space between one another by highlighting their differ-

²⁵ Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke and Lawrence C. Watson, "Understanding in Anthropology: A Philosophical Reminder," Current Anthropology 16 (June 1975), p. 251.
²⁶ H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 325-33.
²⁷ Rabinow, p. 162
²⁸ Ibid., p. 119.

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ences, they are caught up in shared webs of signification spun in their dialogical encounter.²⁹

Lest we think this shared web is some "common ground," we must note, as my fourth point, how Rabinow qualifies the sense of unity with the other in the liminal world. It is a realm of only "tenuous common sense." The liminal world's common understanding is "fragile and thin." Rabinow stands, at best, on "shaky ground," which is always "breaking down, being patched up, and re-examined, first here, and then there." To make clear the qualification, Rabinow later explicitly denies as proper to this liminal consciousness any "privileged position" or "absolute perspective. ³⁰

As shifting, without privilege and absolute perspective, this shaky ground is understandably rough on those who enter upon it. It is "a difficult and trying experience-one could almost say it is 'unnatural'and not everyone will tolerate its ambiguities and strains." Anthropologists self-images are here thrown into doubt as they acknowledge themselves to be embedded in their own particular cultures and then give themselves to be reconstituted in the liminal encounter.³¹

The strains of intercultural liminality can at times lead anthropologists to interpret their quests for participant-observation of "the other" as a kind of self-loss, a sacrifice.³² Indeed, the suffering endured by anthropologists simply to present accurate depictions of others' cultural lives is striking-ranging from the normal experience of "culture shock" to years of physical suffering.³³ Such demands are not just the byproducts of anthropological adventure. They are intrinsic to anthropological knowledge of the other. They are part of the costs paid by those who seek a knowledge that can usually only be gained by entry onto the shifting terrain of a liminal world that interrupts both certainty and comfort. This liminal world of intercultural dialogue is what I am proposing as the referent of the Christ symbol when articulated in a culturally plural context.

It should also be noted that something like this liminal world is now often proposed as necessary for resolution of what philosophers and scientists traditionally take to be long-standing philosophical problems. For the sake of our science, our hermeneutics, and our praxis, the nurturing and fostering of dialogical community that has many of the traits we have elaborated from anthropological encounter is called for. We must learn to value "those experiences and struggles in which there are still the glimmerings of solidarity and the promise of dialogical

²⁹ Ibid., p. 151.
³⁰ Ibid.
³¹ Ibid., p.119.
³² Claude Levi-Strauss, "J.J. Rousseau: Founder of the Sciences of Man," Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 35-36.
³³ See P. David Price, Nambikwara Society (The University of Chicago: Ph.D. dissertation, 1972).

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communities in which there can be genuine mutual participation and where reciprocal wooing and persuasion can prevail."³⁴ It is not just fieldworkers in Morocco who are called to venture out onto the liminal terrain of dialogical community.³⁵

III

Does the Christ symbol itself, as pervasive image for Christian faith and religion, as creatively confessed and predicated of Jesus in Scripture, creed, tradition, or as mediated by its own cultural-linguistic forms--does it in any way refer to such intercultural liminality? I think it does. Certain features of the Christ symbol, as mediated in its narratives and congruent communal praxis, do give it a liminal character that is especially appropriate for formulating christology in relation to cultural plurality.

Turn first to the narrative language of the New Testament where, for the Christian community, the identity of Jesus as the Christ is formulated. Analysis of both the form and meaning of these narratives suggests the liminality of Christ.

Ricoeur and others have stressed that the form of the gospel narratives, particularly in the parables, is "qualified" by a structural trait intrinsic to the narrated action. This trait, or "qualifier," is the narrative's tendency to highlight the extravagant, the paradoxical, the hyperbolic.³⁶ The gospel narratives intensify ordinary experience to the point of the extraordinary, not to distract from the ordinary but to illumine it from within. So, for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan is not only recommendation or illustration of a virtuous life-style. It is extravagant portrayal of "compassion without limit."

The narrative form, structurally charged with extravagance of this sort, has the particular function for readers of "dislocation." Even though the plot of the narrated story of Jesus may culminate in 'Ire-orientation" for readers, our experience of this in the narrative is not without the jarring, disorienting encounter with an intensified vision of the ordinary. The narrative form "dislocates our project of making a whole of our lives." Even with later re-orientation, Ricoeur suggests that the dislocation is so radical that it occurs "without ever perhaps allowing us to remake a whole."³⁷

This dislocating function is paralleled by the subject matter of the

³⁴ Bernstein, pp. 228-3 1. Bernstein sees this as an admonition emerging in the works of thinkers as diverse as Gadamer, H. Arendt, R. Rorty, and J. Habermas.
³⁵ This "liminal terrain" could be further delineated with the aid of David Tracy's notions of "limit-to experiences" and "limit-of realities" (Tracy, pp. 164-65). That is to say, intercultural liminality for anthropologists often includes reference to diverse "limit-to experiences" (loyalty to the whole, sense of oppression, beauty) and invocation of some whole or horizon within which the intercultural encounter is given some meaning. For this kind of analysis of intercultural liminality, see Mark Kline Taylor, "Levi-Strauss: Evolving a Myth about Myths," Religious Studies Review 9 (April 1983), pp. 97-105.
³⁶ Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," pp. 115-22.
³⁷ Ibid., pp. 125-26.

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gospel narrative. The whole narrative story of Jesus moves from an announcement that leads to challenge, and then scandalous condemnation and execution, before any vindication of Jesus in the resurrection. Further, the one vindicated always remains the one who was dislocated and who experienced to the death the discomforts of that dislocation. The whole story is laden with extravagance and hyperbole as Jesus, the individual on whom the narrative focuses with ever greater intensity,³⁸ carries love to extremity, to the point of his own death. This death, viewed as consequence of his radical existence for others, especially for the oppressed others, is startlingly the occasion for confession of his being from God, of his being the Christ. "In these narratives, that reign of God is now recognized as not coercive power but as the sovereignty of agapic, other-regarding love from God to all."³⁹ The meaning of the narrative itself, as carried by the plot, is also dislocating because readers are led to expect both full humanity and God in and through the kind of dislocation that is agapic transcendence for others.

Turn next to note the communal form of life that is suggested by the narrative, that embodies that narrative, and mediates it to us. Communal existence is implied by the very narratives themselves, suggesting as they do through form and meaning that dislocation is always toward life lived for and with others, and in that way, for and with God. The narrative impels to sociality not just as obligation subsequent to experience of God, but as the way humans are led to redemptive experience of God.

Among contemporary theologians, Edward Farley's social phenomenology of Christian redemptive existence is particularly helpful in relating the gospel narrative to its congruent communal life in a way that shows the meaning of Christian existence for intercultural liminality. Farley's major claim is that Christian faith occurs in a "faith world, a social matrix" that he terms ecclesia.⁴⁰ Ecclesia is the concrete culturallinguistic form through which the reality of God is mediated.

Most pertinent to my concerns here is Farley's thesis that the distinctive trait of ecclesia's intersubjective life "derives from the strange way in which the human being who is not a participant in ecclesia is present to those who are participants."⁴¹ Repeatedly, Farley stresses that Christian intersubjective experience is one wherein members co-intend "the stranger." Ecclesia is a concrete, "determinate" community, but one that is always hard to define because its character is to have an unformulatable boundary.⁴²

In this sense, then, Christian communal existence, while always concrete and specific to some culture, nation, ethnos, and language, may be viewed as a "liminal" form of existence in those communities. By

³⁸ Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ, pp. 135-38.
³⁹ Tracy, p, 278.
⁴⁰ Farley, p. 150.
⁴¹ Ibid., p. 158.
⁴² Ibid., pp. 171, 178.

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co-intending strangers as its unifying bond, it is also always de-centering (or, to use the term in our discussion of narrative, it is a "dislocating" kind of existence). "Agape's radical character is disclosed only when it is coupled with the repudiation of all determinate social units as conditions of God's presence…. In agape the stranger is intentionally drawn into ecclesia."⁴³

Agape's creation of a liminal communal life opens out directly into our problem of relating the Christ symbol to intercultural liminality. The Christ symbol, as mediated in both gospel narrative and communal form, means and so involves Christians in a dislocating co-intending of strangers. The experience of cultural plurality is not only a challenge in our current situation to which a christologist should be relevant. It is also intrinsic and appropriate to Christian existence as Christian. The features of intercultural liminality, which were described and valued by Rabinow, can now be understood as also intrinsic to Christian faith and practice. Christian liminal existence orients one toward affirmation of the other that is necessary (1) for dialectical questioning, (2) for processes of mutual construction in intercultural communication, (3) for a shared unity that accents differences, and (4) for living in the uncertainty and discomfort that often attend the disclaiming of any privileged, imposed common ground existing outside of dialogical encounter.

The liminal Christ calls forth concrete communities that glory in differences as the way to genuine unity in a culturally plural world. Whether we focus on the differences between Moroccan Ali and American Rabinow, between representatives of some other two cultures, between cultural forms in North American life that involve gender, class, nation, ethnic heritage, it is intrinsic to Christian liminal existence to accent those differences, to highlight one's own particularity and the other's, and only then to talk about unity. Christian liminal existence for the other will often flirt with the danger of co-opting the other's concrete world into its own. As Farley notes, this is to fall back from the often more discomforting challenge of ecclesial life: to adapt the Christian's concrete social and institutional forms "to the home-world of the stranger and not vice versa."⁴⁴ Viewed anthropologically, a call to this kind of adaptation is a call to "culture shock;" viewed theologically, it may be viewed as a call to what some third world theologians refer to as Christian "transposition" or "christological discomfort. " ⁴⁵

A christology which invokes the liminal Christ and concretely accents and adapts to differences as the way to unity, though found in much of Hegel and others,⁴⁶ may be hardly understood by Western thought and

⁴³ Ibid., p. 178.
⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 50.
⁴⁵ Cf. Choan-Seng Song, The Compassionate God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982), pp. 127-41, and Kosuke Koyama, Waterbuffalo Theology: A Thailand Notebook (Singapore: S.P.C.K., 1970), pp. 228-31.
⁴⁶ Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans AN. Miller with analysis of the text and foreward by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), pp. 85-88.

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culture. A truly liminal christology that seeks unity in differences may involve writing about the Christian experience of each other and of God in a way similar to the experiential claim of William Johnston, S.J.: "When people meet at the level of personal love achieved through radical non-attachment, they do not merge, nor are they absorbed in one another; … there is at once a total unity and a total alterity."⁴⁷ It would mean writing of Christ and God, and the meaning of these for our human life, with a radical sense of difference, otherness, and plurality as intrinsic to our experience of the sacred and of unity. Eberhard Jüngel is an example of one Christian theologian who moves in this direction, writing as be does of Christian existence as the "deprivation of security," though he does not articulate this existence in relation to cultural plurality.⁴⁸ In other theological contexts, the Christ symbol's reference to the liminal co-intending of others might then also become a point of inter-religious conversation, as other traditions of the sacred articulate their own approaches to difference and otherness.⁴⁹

IV

In the experience of God and Christ in and through the other, in the embrace of difference and otherness, what preserves life on this liminal, shaky ground from indifference and repressive tolerance?

This question arises and must be broached as a part of a christological affirmation of plurality. For some, the resonance of Christian theology with pluralism is a questionable endeavor because, while addressing the quandaries of cultural plurality, it ignores human exploitation and oppression. Lee Cormie has suggested, for example, that there is a "hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed" that marks the limits of pluralism.⁵⁰ Similarly, Dorothee Soelle, while defending her own commitments to pluralism and tolerance, also calls for moves "beyond dialogue" and for the limitation of tolerance.⁵¹

In response to such questions, I would argue that Christians' liminal affirmation and co-intending of others as a form of pluralist commitment need not neglect the problems of oppression. The co-intending of strangers who are culturally other, who are outside a Christian's cultural-linguistic system, orients Chritian existence so that it is also a co-intending of those strangers who are "made other," who fall out of every cultural-linguistic system and are thereby systematically deprived of access to the flow of goods that makes human life possible. The way of the liminal Christ is a living for the culturally other and for the oppressed other.

⁴⁷ William Johnston, S.J., Silent Music (New York: Perennial Library, 1976), p. 147. Cited from Robert Magliola's Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1984), p. x.
⁴⁸ Eberhard Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 169-94.
⁴⁹ For examples of inter-religious dialogue between Christians and others about "differential mysticism," see Magliola, p. 225, n. 89.
⁵⁰ Lee Cormie, "The Hermeneutical Privilege of the Oppressed," Catholic Theological Society of American Proceedings 33 (1978), pp. 155-81.
⁵¹ Dorothee Soelle, The Strength of the Weak (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), pp. 59-70.

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A pluralist affirmation of the other as culturally specific addresses situations of human oppression by offering two important contributions. First, it provides a way of arguing for, and specifying the nature of, the "privilege of the oppressed." Second, it can help to guard the human specificity or real otherness of exploited groups, resisting tendencies to view them, stereotypically and simplistically, as "the oppressed."

Understanding both of these contributions requires an anticipatory word here on the difficult issue of what becomes of "truth" when, in a post-foundationalist, culturally plural world, dialogical communities (with their liminal dimensions) become important. What we are left with, and it is of no little significance, is a conversational approach to truth.⁵² Truth becomes a hoped-for disclosure that occurs under the dialogical conditions in which many different voices and positions play. The possibility of truth's disclosure occurs with the presence of dialogue that is inclusive (giving a hearing to all with whom we have to do) and genuine (oriented to the other in all her, his, or their particularity). These two features, constituting the dialogical conditions for truth's disclosure, also make possible the pluralist's two contributions to reflection about human oppression.

Inclusiveness in dialogue is the feature that relates the pluralist's dialogical commitment most directly to an argument for a "hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed." Here we can indicate how life lived liminally for the other in dialogue moves the pluralist also toward that more complete form of liminal existence, where life is lived especially for the oppressed other. Recognizing a privilege for the voices of the oppressed is the manner in which dialogical communities intensify the dialogical condition of inclusiveness, and thus seek their surer truths. By including the oppressed-often rendered voiceless by death, persistent hunger, or by systematic distortion of social and political forms-dialogical communities extend the margins of their conversation. This intensification of inclusiveness is not just the patently human and humane thing to do (though, for many of us this seems self-evident); it is also the widening of the conversation so that truth may be experienced. Truth need not be uncritically viewed as the sole possession of the oppressed; but the latter do have hermeneutical privilege as the ones who are necessary for intensifying the dialogical conditions within which truth may be disclosed.

Richard Bernstein suggests how important this inclusive and diverse "width" is to reasoning in dialogical community. Citing C.S. Peirce, he writes that philosophy ought "to trust to the multitude and variety of its arguments rather than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger that its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently

⁵² On the relationship between conversation and truth, see Gadamer, pp. 330-31, 446-47, and Rorty, pp. 373-79.

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numerous and intimately connected."⁵³ In linguistics, ethics, and philosophy, the intending of this inclusive play of voices, as constitutive of reasoning, has been explicitly formulated as the search for "wide reflective equilibrium" or "reductive warrants."⁵⁴

By recognizing in the dialogue the voice of the voiceless, even and perhaps especially that of the annihilated,⁵⁵ a theologian's dialogical community seeks the widest equilibrium of its conversation, which is necessary for the truth of its reasoning. For pluralists dwelling liminally in dialogical community, recognizing the privilege of oppressed voices is no mere option. It is necessary to their experience of truth. And if an inclusive, dialogical approach to truth is ultimately all we have, then the privilege of the oppressed is essential indeed.

But the dialogical approach is not only inclusive. It must also be genuine. By way of this required feature of dialogue, we can clarify the second contribution made by the Christian pluralist's co-intending of others. Recall that to insist that dialogue be "genuine" is to insist that it intend others as other, in their own cultural-linguistic and personal particularities.⁵⁶ For the pluralist, it is never sufficient to speak only of "the oppressed." The oppressed must be allowed to be bodied forth in all their cultural-linguistic specificity. Recalling earlier discussion of the dialectic of accenting otherness as a way to union, this maximizing of specificity is not a way to keep others at a distance from us; to the contrary, it is the way to real union with them.

Let me briefly highlight four significant benefits of the pluralists' approach to genuine dialogical union by their accenting the particularity of the oppressed other.

First, the pluralist's dialogue respects the other "as other" in the sense of allowing the other to make a critique of any would-be conversation partners. If we among the pluralists are male, genuine dialogue moves beyond the merely polite and "gentlemanly" inclusion that gives a hearing to often voiceless women, but without really receiving the criticisms made by them. Or, if we among the pluralists are North American theologians, genuine dialogue means not just being well-read about the latest third world, liberation theologies, proclaiming our solidarity with the oppressed. Rather, it means hearing their critiques of

⁵³ Bernstein, p. 224.
⁵⁴ This search presupposes that reasoning attains its truth not on a foundation, but in contexts in which there interact a "diversity of judgments, principles and theories, each entailing different kinds of justification that come together to support or to criticize, to reinforce or to revise ('wide reflective equilibrium')." Similarly, arguments are warranted not because they are founded on axioms from which they are deduced or on cases from which they are inductively developed, but because they occur in and through a process of mutual development and critique ('retroductively warranted'). For further discussion and bibliography on these approaches, see Fiorenza, pp. 301-321.
⁵⁵ On the importance of a hermeneutical privilege for the remembered dead, see Helmut Peukert, Science, Action and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 227-31, 243-45.
⁵⁶ For delineation of what I here term the "genuineness" of dialogue, see the discussion of "the highest type of hermeneutical experience," in Gadamer, pp. 324-25.

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us, learning from them what they see theology needing to become. Dwelling on the liminal shaky ground of dialogical encounter cart become a way toward the kind of genuine openness called for by Gadamer: "Openness to the other, then, includes the acknowledgment that I must accept some things that are against myself."⁵⁷

Second, the pluralists' accenting of particularity can be a way to join with oppressed persons and groups in resisting their loss of distinctive subjecthood into the category, "the oppressed." If, as Metz has shown, the loss of subjecthood is essential to the experience of oppression,⁵⁸ and if part of this loss of subjecthood involves being submersed in stereotyping categories and generalizations that deny individual or group specificity, then the pluralist's focusing of oppressed peoples' cultural-linguistic specificities may meet an essential need of the oppressed.

Third, by accenting the specificity of oppressed peoples, one also focuses the "cultural dimension" of oppression. This cultural dimension may take the form of the destruction by some of another people's culture, as seems to have happened to the Ik of Africa and others.⁵⁹ Or, the cultural dimension may take the form of some peoples enculturating another people into a whole new culture that is a culture of oppression, a culture that is at best a "survival culture."⁶⁰ Whether oppression takes the form of destroying a people's culture or enculturating them into a no-exit, survival culture, the cultural dimension must be focused for an understanding of oppression.

Fourth, focusing the oppressed in their cultural-linguistic specificity seems essential also for understanding the intricate and systemic relationships between the cultures of the oppressed and those of the oppressor. The oppressed-oppressor relationship is often portrayed as so closely intertwined that a liberation of the oppressed would also be a liberation of the oppressors.⁶¹ Why and how? We will rarely understand this hope if we do not unpack the nature of that relationship. Crucial for such a discernment is a culturally focused approach to the worlds in which different oppressed peoples dwell and by which they variously interact with oppressor cultures.

By raising these issues, we do indeed take up issues that demand significant further elaboration. Enough has been said here to suggest ways in which the Christian pluralist's affirmation of unity in difference does not necessarily lead to indifference concerning oppression, but in fact provides additional tools for reflection on and action in relation to it. All of the focusing of oppressed peoples' particularity, as well as the

⁵⁷ Gadamer, p. 324.
⁵⁸ Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1980), pp. 60-70.
⁵⁹ Colin M. Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).
⁶⁰ See, for examples, James P. Spradley, You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of the Urban Nomad (Boston: Little, Brown Inc., 1970), and Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
⁶¹ Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1973), pp. 275-76.

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granting of hermeneutical privilege to them in dialogical community, presumes sustained dwelling by analysts on that liminal terrain that is in a particular cultural-linguistic domain, but continually co-intending the other. We have attempted to show the significance of that liminal terrain in a culturally plural world, and how the Christ symbol, mediated in narrative and ecclesial existence, expresses and creates the experience of living liminally with and for the culturally other.