Shades of Theology: A Response to Rabbi Artson

It is an honor to be asked to respond to Rabbi Artson's deep, and delightful, development of a Jewish Process Theology. It not only proposes such a theology but performs it in nuce. I will leave to those better situated an estimation of the promise of this delicate, but developing, process potentiality within contemporary Judaism. Instead, I want to stress its importance for the larger (and largely Christian) public already involved with process theological issues—itself a slender, but lively, fringe of the U.S. Christian majority.

I realize as I read Artson's reflection how crucial it is for that public to witness such an engagement of Whiteheadian ideas in profoundly rabbinic and midrashic Jewish terms and styles. To bring their attention to this engagement is not to promote Jewish-Christian dialogue (which presupposes Artson's essay). It is not about assuaging Christian guilt, which is not the job of Jews. And it is not about presenting some abstractly blended Judeochristianity, which is not the pluralist approach to religious difference. Rather, I just don't think any Christians can be honest Christians absent a hearty engagement with Judaism as both living wisdom and ancient source. This pertains to our ethics, of course, but every bit as much to the depth and width of our (Christian) theologies. I pursue a certain re-Judaizing of Christian theology and practice in much of what I teach and write. But—don't worry—I won't talk about Jesus and his utter Jewishness here. Instead, I want to hew close to Artson's own purpose, which is, as I read him, to develop a process theology within and for the life of Judaism.

What startles me, in Artson's essay, is the power of the resonances he unleashes between so many Jewish sources, on the one hand, and White-headian theology, on the other. Thinkers have long made the argument, following especially in John Cobb's footsteps, that the God of Process Thought bears uncanny resemblances to the God of Hebrew and Christian scriptures—uncanny only because that biblical God has been hidden in plain view. Thus, for example, of particular concern to me: the manifest content of the second verse of Scripture—the complex chaos of creation—is eclipsed by the Christian doctrine of a unilateral creation from nothing.¹ The doctrinal masks that conceal/reveal this God are many and major, and Artson has deftly exposed the key cluster: creatio ex nihilo, divine omnipotence and omniscience, and the eternal changelessness of God. This tendency to recognize only what we expect is reminiscent of a recent experiment in a D.C. subway station. Researchers wondered how many people would stop to listen to a panhandling violinist playing Bach's "Chaconne" on a Stradivarius during rush hour—even if he was a world-renowned virtuoso. Answer: only one person did, and it was a child.²

Our received interpretive traditions naturally, for good and for ill, shape our expectations of the text, the Torah. That is why the work of interpretation continues. To stay with the example of creation, Rashi writes of Genesis 1:2, "This verse cries out, 'Interpret me!'" Scripture, writes Daniel Boyarin, is "gapped and dialogical. . . . The role of midrash is to fill in the gaps."³ Process Theology has, from the start, developed a sophisticated dialogue with a variety of exegetical and hermeneutical traditions. But our (Christian) process theological unmaskings of certain doctrinal overlays are rarely made with reference to post-biblical Jewish teachings. I am realizing that, without this background, something shadows our own teachings. These uncanny resemblances between Whitehead's cosmology and dogmatically unexpected biblical teachings could remain obscure, abstract, shadowed by the routines of liberal Christian apologetics. It is as though, just where a creative insight might have broken through, a certain confidence falters. Given the secularism of the educated public (hardly a problem unknown to Conservative Judaism), the reasons for this hesitation among dialogically minded Process thinkers are legion. But I think it has something to do with a nagging concern that our Process paradigm (which is, after all, so...