Empowering Memory and Movement: Thinking and Working across Borders

19. Re-Visioning Christian Origins: In Memory of Her Revisited

19 Re-Visioning Christian Origins In Memory of Her Revisited This chapter1 looks at and to Christian origins for answers to the question “Where have we come from?” By explicitly affirming this search, its queries openly engage discourses of identity and therefore must face the Foucaultian critique of origins. If the quest for origins is always also a search for identity, then history/historiography, in contrast to the prevailing view, is not simply an objective science but a critical social practice. This practice is done in the interest of an identity formation embedded in power relations, and it can contribute either to the maintenance of domination and subordination, or it can function as a radical critique of domination. Hence, the problematization of origins in contemporary scholarship is simultaneously a challenge to the understanding of history writing in general and to the conceptualization of early Christian history in particular. In the following I will address this problem by first sketching the Foucaultian critique of origins and its reception in N*T2 studies. Next, I will sketch the feminist theoretical contributions to this debate. Then, I will draw out the implications of this discussion for the reconceptualization of Christian origins studies. Finally, I will elucidate such a reconceptualization by elaborating the objections to my book In Memory of Her, and explaining its underlying reconstructive model and critical principle. 1. First published as “Re-Visioning Christian Origins: In Memory of Her Revisited.” Pages 225-250 in Christian Beginnings: Worship, Belief and Society. Edited by Kieran O’Mahony. London: Continuum International, 2003. I want to thank Kieran J. O’Mahony, O.S.A., and the Irish Biblical Association for giving me the opportunity to elaborate once more my feminist historical approach. 2. Rather than speaking of the Old and the New Testaments, which continues the language of Christian superiority, I speak of the N*T and the Jewish or Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. 315 The Problematization of Origins The critique of the search for origins has gained considerable persuasive power in feminist theory and early Christian scholarship. First, Michel Foucault and his students have raised serious objections to the reconstruction of “Origins,” which cannot be taken lightly. Discursive formations such as historiography or biblical studies that determine the production of knowledge are intimately bound up with non-discursive factors defined as the institutional field, set of events, practices, political decisions, and economic processes. Hence, discursive analysis seeks to examine the ways power/knowledge complexes operate at a micro-social level in order to produce regimes of truth. In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault attacks the traditional forms of history, which he sees as dominated by certain metaphysical concepts and totalizing assumptions derived from a philosophy of the subject. He argues the following points: 1. In traditional history, events are inserted in universal explanatory schemas or models and linear structures and thereby given false unity. The interpretation of events according to a unifying totality deprives them of their singular impact and pluriformity. 2. Traditional history celebrates great moments and privileges the individual actor. Historical development is interpreted as the unfolding and affirmation of essential human characteristics and macro-consciousness. History operates around a logic of identity, which is to say that the past is interpreted in a way that confirms rather than disrupts the beliefs and convictions of the present. 3. Hence, traditional historiography seeks to document a point of origins as the source of a specific historical process and development. The pursuit of origins is thus a problematic quest for a-historical and a-social essences. “The search for the origin of a particular historical phenomenon implicitly posits some form of original identity prior to the flux and movement of history. In turn this original identity is interpreted as an indication of a primordial truth which precedes and remains unchanged by history or ‘the external world of accident and succession.”3 316 | Empowering Memory and Movement Over and against the traditional understanding of history, Foucault argues that history is not a continuous development and working through of an ideal schema but rather it is based on a constant struggle between different power blocks, which attempt to impose their own systems of domination. History is a series of discontinuous structures; it is progress from combat to combat. Foucault notes, “Humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.”4 In short, Foucault replaces...