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let On the Symbolic Stractmire of

Martin S. Jaffee

The article explores some of the symbolic foundations of the monothe- istic discourses that underlie Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The focus of such discourses on the uniqueness of the Creator of the world and the exclusivity of his modes of communication with especially selected indi- viduals and communities fosters within each tradition an abiding capac- ity for intercommunal rivalry and conflict. In this view, competition and conflict among monotheistic traditions is not a failure of monotheistic ethics but an expression of the fundamental intentionality of monothe- istic discourses as symbolic systems.

The article opens with some criticisms of commonly cited encyclo- pedic treatments of monotheism and distinguishes between "metaphysi- cal" or speculative monotheism and "elective" monotheism. The bulk of the discussion probes the general symbolic structures that underlie con- crete historical discourses of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

AND OFF, for roughly fifteen years now, I have offered a mass- enrollment "service course" officially entitled "Introduction to Western

Martin S Jaffee is Professor of Comparative Religion and Professor of Jewish Studies at the Uni- versity of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.

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Religions."1 I have long ago made my peace with informing my students on the first day of class that, despite the title of the course for which they enrolled, there are really no such things as "western religions" and there never have been. It has taken me somewhat longer to wonder, if only to myself, whether the "monotheism" commonly taken to define the struc- ture of "western religions" is a similarly vacuous comparative concept. Surely there are other, more salient ways of dividing the turf of religion than counting divinities?

Nevertheless, there is, I believe, a reason to retain the idea of "mono- theism." The reason is that attention to what I below identify as the "sym- bolic structure of elective monotheism" does, in my view, yield a certain kind of insight into the genesis and logic of religious violence. I argue neither that only monotheism engenders such violence nor that mono- theists are uniquely prone to religious violence but only that a certain type of monotheism provides a remarkably fertile symbolic universe for legiti- mating violence when other historical and cultural factors are also at work.2

MONOTHEISM AND THE FETISH OF UNIQUENESS

A useful way to gain a sense of the history of an academic question is to survey its treatment in a range of encyclopedia entries over a series of decades. This is precisely what I did while trying to organize my own re- flections on monotheism as a descriptive and comparative problem for the historian of religion. My reading ranged from Robert Flint's magiste- rial survey of theism in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902 to Theodore Ludwig's 1987 synthesis of a century's scholarship on monotheism in the Encyclopedia of Religion.31 was amazed at the de-

1 The present article had its genesis in the undergraduate classroom I have heretofore presented elements of this discussion in two undergraduate textbooks, Jaffee: 93-96 and Corngan et al. 77- 81. An earlier version of this essay was presented at a conference entitled "How to Compare Reli- gions," held in January 2000 at the Ruprecht-Karl-University in Heidelberg, Germany The con- ference was sponsored by the Jacob Taubes Minerva Center for Religious Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University I owe thanks to Professor Albert Baumgarten of Bar-Ilan for convening that confer- ence and to the participants for their helpful responses.

2 Perhaps the most penetrating recent reflection on the cultural dynamics of monotheism is avail- able in Assmann, who describes what I term elective monotheism as a "counter-religion" that "re- jects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as 'paganism.' It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation, on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement Whereas polytheism, or rather 'cosmotheism,' rendered different cul- tures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion blocked intercultural trans- latabihty. False gods cannot be translated" (3).

3 Flint's discussion of theism appears in Encyclopaedia Bntanmca, vol 23 (1902) Ludwig's dis- cussion of monotheism appears in the Encyclopedia of Religion, vol 10.

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gree to which the questions and issues addressed by Flint at the dawn of the century continue to define the agenda staked out by Ludwig toward its dusk. Opinions on many matters have surely been refined, and new monographic results have been incorporated into the discussions over the course of time. But, in substance, the articles I read inhabit a strikingly similar conceptual universe.4

The same themes appear time and again: the opposing of monothe- ism and polytheism as two ends of a typological continuum that includes, among other ways of conceiving divinity, "henotheism," "monolatry," "dualism," "monism," "pantheism," and so forth; the question of whether monotheism originated early in the historical evolution of religious ideas or toward the end of that history; and, in a related matter, the drawing of distinctions within monotheism itself. But, most prevalent of all, hover- ing behind virtually all discussions as an assumed, circumambient discur- sive atmosphere, is the confidence that monotheism's own theomorphic formulations are a sufficient foundation for sketching its phenomenologi- cal outlines as a historical pattern of religion. Virtually every author I consulted seemed satisfied to identify as the primary taxonomic marker of monotheism an insistence on the numerical oneness and qualitative uniqueness of the divine Being whose activity accounts for the creation of the world and in relation to whom human beings discover and fulfill the purpose of their own creation.

There is, of course, nothing essentially "wrong" with this assumption as far as it goes. As a technical term, monotheism is designed precisely to suggest that in the history of religions there are some crucial differences among religious worldviews—namely, that a world grounded in a sense of the plurality and multilocal presence of the sacred differs radically from one in which a unified embodiment of all sacrality transcends the world.5

Certainly, monotheists and monotheism have been crucially concerned with the unique God of creation who loves his creatures and expects them to conform to his plan for them as expressed in his will.6 What troubles

* I generalize here based on the following major encyclopedic treatments: Encyclopaedia of Reli- gion and Ethics, vol. 8, s.v. "monotheism"; Encyclopaedia Bntannica, vol. 23, s.v. "religion"; New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9, s.v. "monotheism, primitive"; and Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 12, s.v. "monotheism."

5 The on-line edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "monotheism," records a usage in counterpoint to "polytheism" as early as 1660. Max Weber's 1922 discussion of the socioeconomic and political foundations of polytheism and monotheism, and the corresponding distinctions in worldview, has been very influential here. See Weber 1963: 20-25.

6 The masculine pronouns are themselves, of course, central to the monotheistic traditions' conceptualization of the unique God The gendered nature of the monotheistic divinity is gener- ally invisible to the contributors to the encyclopedic discussions. Indeed, the observation has pre- occupied Christian and Jewish feminist theologians for over a generation, but its theoretical im-

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me, however, is the suspicion that to focus on the divine unity and tran- scendence as the principle taxonomic markers of monotheism over other systems of religion—and the primary principle of its superiority as a re- ligious worldview—is at the same time to ignore much that characterizes monotheism as a system of religion.7 At least as crucial to the historical expression of monotheistic religions as the uniqueness and unity of the divine Being are the uniqueness and unity of the human community that bears testimony in the world to that Being. To insist that the essential trait of monotheism is its principle of divine unity and uniqueness over the divine pluralities of polytheistic systems is in my view to miss something crucial. Unexplained, at the very least, is the obvious historical reality of the diversity and mutual hostility of exclusivistic monotheistic commu- nities both before and after living polytheistic traditions ceased to threaten the religious hegemony of monotheism per se.8

My goal in this article, accordingly, is to move comparative discus- sion of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism a bit beyond the in- herited boundaries. I do not lump them together as a single religious worldview opposed to another hypostasized "polytheism." Rather, I am more concerned to understand monotheistic traditions by pointing out ways in which the homologous structures of monotheistic discourse bring monotheistic communities into virtually inevitable historical conflict. That

plications for the study of religion more generally have only recently begun to be explored in such exemplary studies as Eilberg-Schwartz and Gross A sustained gender-oriented analysis of mono- theistic discourses that focuses on the potential of monotheism to provide a hospitable environ- ment for religious violence has recently been offered in Schwartz See the critique in Webb. My own analysis shares much with Schwartz's conclusions, although it proceeds from a rather differ- ent conceptual starting point

7 In general it must be said that the moral superiority of monotheism over polytheism is more commonly assumed rather than argued I, for one, am prepared to accept the possibility that the ethical implications of monotheistic religions, when explored as abstract systems of thought, may yield the universalist humanistic ethical imperatives that philosophical and theological proponents claim for it. Indeed, the recent contribution of Goodman is perhaps one of the most stirring and thoroughgoing defenses of monotheism written in over a generation To be sure, Goodman ac- knowledges the reality that even the most lofty of ideals can be and have often been perverted in historical enactment "When religion becomes a therapeutic mantra, political talisman or economic wishing well, poetic toy or whipping boy, hex, curse, sexual icon, gambling fetish, permission giver, or seller of indulgences, it robs itself not only of clarity and coherence but of value as religion" (31). But by disqualifying such perversions of religion in history as counting toward the evaluation of monotheism as a historical reality, Goodman seems to construct a monotheism of the intellectual hothouse rather than a historical expression. While monotheism as a system of abstract thought may indeed be a remarkable achievement, monotheism as a system of religion in the context of historical and political conflict has achieved somewhat less than its theoretical formulations would have promised. In what follows I attempt to understand why

8 Even Max Weber, perhaps the most perceptive sociological reader of religious ideas, ignores the factor of a common and competing monotheistic vision in his discussion of the early separa- tion of Judaism and Christianity See Weber 1952 404—424.

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is to say, the very principle by which monotheistic communities distin- guish themselves from surrounding polytheisms—the uniqueness of the Creator of the world as a transcendent source of Being—is the rhetorical engine that drives the determination of monotheistic communities to remain distinct from and in competition with each other. We miss some- thing crucial about monotheism if, in our focus on its own discourse re- garding divine uniqueness, we fail to address the preoccupation with com- munal uniqueness that is no less crucial to its structure as a historical formation of religion.9

The thesis of this article, then, can be simply stated. Judaism, Chris- tianity, and Islam are equally rich, historical embodiments of a single struc- ture of discourse that underlies the historically developed symbol systems specific to each community. In what follows, I attempt to identify these key elements in the discursive structure of monotheism and to show how the symbolic systems historically associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are deployed within this discursive structure. I then take up the problem of the intensity with which monotheistic communities distin- guish themselves from other such communities. I propose that it is the profound structural similarities of these monotheisms that, after the dis- appearance of polytheism as a culturally challenging alternative model of piety, explains their persistence as discrete religious communities obses- sively defining themselves not only over against some hypostasized "poly- theism" but, more importantly, over against each other.

"ELECTIVE" AND "METAPHYSICAL" MONOTHEISM

Before moving fully into this discussion, I want to acknowledge first of all that I have no intention of disregarding every canon of comparison inherited from those who have reflected on the nature of monotheism. Virtually all informed students of the topic have noted a crucial typologi- cal distinction among monotheisms that seems worth preserving in our theoretical toolbox. This is the distinction between conceptualizations of divine unity that attempt to clarify thought in order to solve a philosophi- cal problem and those in which the divine unity is framed as a discovery

9 In this enterprise I invert the tendency of early typologists of the history of religions to see Chris- tianity and, with some reluctance, Islam as "universal" monotheisms that move beyond the "tribal" monotheism of Israelite religion and Judaism. See C Tiele's entry, "Religion," in the eleventh edi- tion of the Encyclopaedia Bntanmca (1911). Some remarkable reflections on this trend of thought have now appeared in Masuzawa: 12-13, 20-24. In my view, monotheistic universalism as a philo- sophical postulate is equally implicit in the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But in ac- tual historical-political praxis, each monotheism reproduces the conditions for an expression of an essentially exclusmst self-consciousness

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of a moral imperative to transform a historical community in a project of divine service.10 The former monotheism is commonly said to originate in the Greek philosophical tradition, although parallels are often adduced from classical Asian sources as well." The latter is virtually always linked in its origins to the Hebrew/Israelite prophetic traditions of the mid-first millennium B.C.E., with a more or less vague acknowledgment of the possibility of a Zoroastrian precedent. Postbiblical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are its historical heirs.

Thus we inherit from the nineteenth century such terms as ethical monotheism or prophetic monotheism to describe the monotheistic tradi- tions grounded in the notion that the unique God communicates his will in the form of moral norms to especially selected founders of communi- ties established in his name. Correspondingly, "philosophical" or "specu- lative" monotheism often denotes those intellectual traditions that posit the existence of a single source of all perfections and powers (beyond sen- sory experience and intuited only by the clear of mind) that alone accounts for the multiplicity of being in the empirical world.

It is commonly understood that from the time of Greco-Roman late antiquity through the European Middle Ages, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam appropriated various traditions of "philosophical" monotheism in service of articulating and buttressing the claims of "prophetic" mono- theism to constitute the total truth about God and the world. Each of these, in its own ways, created a conceptual synthesis of the two forms of mono- theism as truths of "reason" became the discursive form for articulating the content of "revelation," once the latter truths could be distilled from their parabolic scriptural languages.

The resultant synthesis has had a profound impact on subsequent religious thought in European Christendom and post-Christian reflection, even among those who sought to disentangle the two traditions. In light of the continued vitality of various versions of the medieval synthesis of monotheistic philosophy with monotheistic religion, it remains crucial

10 To confine ourselves arbitrarily to the literature of encyclopedia entries, see Encyclopaedia Brttanmca 1902. 238—239, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics: 819, and Encyclopaedia Judaica. 261 T Ludwig, in his entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion (238-239), offers a more refined taxonomy worthy of consideration: "monarchic" monotheism (roughly equivalent to the no longer fash- ionable "henotheism"), "emanational mystical" monotheism (including phenomena often de- scribed as "monism" and "panentheism"), and "historical ethical" monotheism (the mainstream traditions of Zoroastnanism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) The strength of Ludwig's dis- cussion is his acknowledgment that discrete developments within, say, "historical ethical" mono- theism such as Judaism can take on the contours of, for example, "emanational mystical" mono- theism and so on.

" See, for example, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, s v. "monotheism" (819) See also Good- man's discussion of Greek tradition (3-31)

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to distinguish them at least for descriptive and analytical purposes. In- deed, the very exercise of distinguishing them can serve as an important first step in the construction of a proper comparative model for reflec- tion on monotheism as a religious worldview refracted in distinct forms in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The crucial point of differentiation, I argue, is a simple one.

The conceptual activity that yields abstract reflections on the nature of the one Being who sustains all beings is properly regarded as philosophi- cal speculation about first principles. As such, I shall call it "metaphysi- cal" monotheism. Such monotheism requires for its expression neither ritual activity nor communal worship and entails no necessary ethical postulates. It is an activity of thought, enacted within a community or tradition of thought. As such, it is not properly part of the domain of the phenomenology of religion but, rather, the history of ideas. In other words, metaphysical monotheism, as the solution to an intellectual puzzle about the grounds of the world's coherence, may have some relevance to the study of religion if its conceptual principles are adopted within liturgical communities and woven into their ethical traditions. But metaphysical monotheism is not of itself an expression of religion as a social and his- torical form. Accordingly, I set it aside in the discussion of monotheism as a historical pattern of religious myth, ritual, and community.

I focus, rather, on what I shall call "elective" monotheism, for this is everywhere accompanied by the classical accoutrements identified by historians of religion as universal aspects of religious life. Judaism, Chris- tianity, and Islam are first and foremost liturgical communities, each constituted (within conventional patterns of variation in diverse subcom- munities) by common ritual forms, languages of prayer, canons of scrip- ture and myth, and more or less cogently formulated traditions of ethical behavior. Common to all of them is the carefully cultivated memory, func- tioning also as an identity-defining mythos, of having been constituted as a community from an antecedent condition of fragmentation and normlessness.

It is the liberation from Egyptian servitude and the call to covenantal bondedness at Sinai that define the origins of the Judaic communities. Similarly, the communication of the spirit of prophecy at Christ's ascen- sion transforms a fragmented collection of disciples into a unified church. Muhammad's flight to Medina, in the same vein, serves as the historical point of departure for Islam as a historical community distinguishable from the piety of earlier prophets and the communities they founded. In each of these traditions, the community is collectively called to serve in the historical world as the distinctive human reflection of the will and love of the unique Creator of heaven and earth. My choice of the term elective

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monotheism attempts to capture the centrality of divine and human voli- tion to these traditions. The essential marker of elective monotheism is not the uniqueness of God alone. Rather, it lies in the desire of the unique God to summon from out of the human mass a unique community estab- lished in his name and the desire of that community to serve God in love and obedience by responding to his call.

To sum up, "metaphysical" monotheism is a set of reflections on the relationship of the abiding, eternal source of Being to concrete, transient beings. It is a conceptual solution to intellectual puzzlement about the origins of things. While metaphysical monotheists have indeed formed schools, communal traditions, and ethical doctrines, they have rarely in- sisted that such collective social creations constitute the sole appropriate response to the reality of the creativity of the divine One or that only a single human community could by its nature possess knowledge of the truth. Elective monotheism, on the other hand, claims knowledge about the relationship of the Creator of the world to a specific human commu- nity in the world. It expresses the conviction of a yawning gap between the Creator's will and the obedience of the human order, and it obliges a specific community to heal this gap through the moral transformation of the human order. Surely, these two types of monotheism have had a rich historical interrelationship in the history of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic philosophical theology. But, in the end, they are phenomenologically distinct.

THE DISCURSIVE STRUCTURE OF ELECTIVE MONOTHEISM

Because the elective monotheism of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a religious, rather than a primarily philosophical, phenomenon, its structure must be distilled from the mythic narratives and liturgical life that shape these communities' historical identities. Expressed as abstractly as possible, that discursive structure can be summed up quite simply. The unique Creator of the world discloses his love and will in a unique mo- ment of self-disclosure to a unique human community. As a result of this self-disclosure, the community embarks on a collective endeavor of obe- dient response to the Creator's love and will. The purpose is to bring all of humanity into proper moral relationship with the Creator. The unfold- ing of time between the original self-disclosure and the community's suc- cessful completion of the mandate that called it into being is the histori- cal process. History is the stage of the community's struggle to be worthy of its call. First, it struggles with its own internal resistance to the Creator's call, seeking to purge itself of flaws that it shares with humanity as a whole.

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This is the struggle to embody obedience and faith both individually and collectively. Second, but no less important, it struggles against the resis- tance to its mandate of humanity beyond the community. The process of history is concluded with the community's ultimate fulfillment of its mis- sion and the reconciliation of the human order with the divine love and will.

This discursive structure, I propose, is common to all elective mono- theisms. What changes are the particular symbolic configurations within which the basic structure comes to idiomatic expression in each commu- nity. In order to clarify this point, a simple diagram will be useful (see fig- ure 1). We see in figure 1 that the discourse of elective monotheism oper- ates on both a vertical and horizontal plane. The significance of each plane is easily grasped.

The vertical plane expresses the ontological, cosmological, and moral distance between the Creator and the order of the human world. This distance, at any of its modes, is unspannable by human effort alone. It is spanned only by the spontaneous and essentially mysterious act of the Creator, his self-disclosure to a selected recipient community. In light of this self-disclosure alone does the recipient community come to know the truth of its distance from the Creator and the means of spanning that dis- tance. Ontologically, this self-disclosure brings the Creator's fullness of being into correlation with the derivative being of the human order. Human being thus recognizes that it is nourished from beyond itself. Cosmologically, the Creator's self-disclosure spans the distance between heaven, the abode of the Creator, and earth, the domain of his created beings. It unites, that is, various cosmological domains into a single order under the Creator. Morally, this self-disclosure spans the difference be- tween the source of all norms and the anomic or antinomian reality of human nature. It enables community and communality not only within the human order but between that order and its transcendent ground in the Creator himself.

God the Creator

I Self-Disclosure

I Recipient Community > Historical Drama > Resolution

Fig. 1. Elective Monotheism.

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This threefold spanning of the gaps between the Creator and the world through divine self-disclosure has consequences that are worked out through the horizontal plane, the plane of historical time. The recep- tion of the Creator's self-disclosure galvanizes the recipient community, transforming it from a collection of fragmented, powerless individuals into a focused center of unified action. Within the created order of nature it now pursues a redemptive historical career, a struggle to make manifest through- out the human world the reality of the Creator's self-disclosure and to trans- form the human order in correspondence to the Creator's love and will. The moment of the community's success inaugurates, on the one hand, the resolution of the historical process. On the other, it bridges at a new level the various gaps that the Creator's self-disclosure brings to human awareness. At the end of history, the antinomies of being and nothing- ness, heaven and earth, and good and evil are all overcome in a new syn- thesis. Cosmos and history collapse into each other, establishing an un- mediated community of Creator and creation, the unification of all reality.

What I have described here may be termed, loosely speaking, the langue of elective monotheism, its metahistorical, abstract range of discursive possibilities. Each form of elective monotheism is a distinct parole, a his- torical mobilization of the discursive structure of elective monotheism in a unique symbolic vocabulary, whose distinctive parameters and possi- bilities of expression are worked out in the context of historical tradition. The differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as expressions of elective monotheism lie primarily within these discursive acts and are identified with the traditional symbolic clusters that each tradition ar- ranges along the vertical and horizontal axes I have drawn.

Anyone familiar with these traditions will have little trouble anticipat- ing the way in which their traditionally mediated symbolic clusters will be arranged along the structural pattern that enables their several historical discourses. In figure 21 offer my own diagrammatic assessment. The body of this article will attempt to spell out the implications of these symbolic systems in greater detail. For the moment, let me only indicate briefly how I conceive the relation of these models to their historical expressions in each community.

Specialists in the study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will justly point out that the entirety of the discursive structure identified here ap- pears only rarely with full stress on each of its constituent symbolic clus- ters. That is, in diverse historical settings, each tradition may place greater or lesser emphasis on the vertical or horizontal range of symbolic clus- ters. Thus, for example, medieval philosophers meditating on the unity of the truths of reason with those of revelation devoted most of their in- tellectual energy to exploring the vertical axis of elective monotheism, in

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Judaism

God of Creation

Torah

Israel > Exile > Messianic Age

Christianity

God of Creation

Christ

Ecclesia > Evangelism > Return of Chnst

Islam

God of Creation

Umma > Struggle > Judgment

Fig. 2. Symbolic systems of elective monotheism.

particular the nature of the divine Being and the character of the revela- tion by which God disclosed his being to his community. In the diverse millenarian movements that dot the history of the monotheisms, by con- trast, the horizontal axis and its symbols emerged to prominence, as the community of election sought to decode the signs pointing to the ordained culmination of the historical process.

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I recognize as well that, under pressure of polemic or in response to innovations in intellectual climate, each of the symbolic clusters will un- dergo a variety of interpretive transformations. One need only allude to the Trinitarian and christological controversies of the early centuries of Christianity as illustration of the morphological variety that the Christian imagination has discerned in the symbols of the Creator and Christ. The radical resignification of the entire Judaic symbolic cluster evident in medieval cabalistic tradition—especially the introduction of multiple di- vine hypostases into the symbolization of the Creator—is another well- known historical example. One may point as well to the differences in eschatological symbolism, explored later in this discussion, that distin- guish the various Shi'ite conceptions of the Mahdi from the less person- alized eschatological models of the Sunnite traditions.

These points I grant in advance. I insist only that before us are struc- tures that comprehend and underlie most of the significant historically available discourses that have emerged within each tradition from the point at which each has identified itself as the bearer of a distinct religious message in contrast to those available in its cultural and historical envi- ronment. For my purposes, that point approximates the period during which a more or less uniform canon of scriptural texts and associated tra- ditions of interpretive exposition began to circulate widely in communi- ties claiming continuity with the putative original recipient community of the Creator's self-disclosure. From this perspective, I hold that my model of Judaism will serve virtually all forms of Judaic religion that have emerged from the late Second Temple Period until our own day. Simi- larly, the model of Christianity will hold from roughly the late third cen- tury C.E., while that for Islam reflects historical formations of Islam since the eighth century C.E.12

SYMBOLIC CLUSTERS AS OBJECTS OF COMPARISON

We may now begin to explore the implications of the schematic in figure 2 for comparing and contrasting Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Space permits me to reflect here only on the structural wholes I have iden-

12 I do acknowledge that the modernist challenge to religious belief in general has engendered crucial modifications of this structure in virtually all forms of Christianity and Judaism and among reformist elements in Islam as well. In all of these, the exclusmsm of elective monotheism has proved scandalous when measured against the egalitarian models of humanity that have emerged from the European Enlightenment. But surely the last half of the twentieth century, which witnessed the re- emergence of exclusivist monotheisms representing themselves precisely as antidotes to the ills of modernity, suggests that the elective monotheisms may have indeed rediscovered the source of their traditional social power.

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tified above in a rather abstract way. Serious comparative work would require isolation of specific, historically defined discursive communities within each of the three main traditions as objects of comparison and contrast. But insofar as this latter project depends on a cogent account of the symbolic clusters in their ideal discursive structures, I shall satisfy myself with a general account illustrated by broad, undeveloped allusions to particular instances.

A glance at the discursive structure of each tradition makes it impos- sible to evade a simple observation. For Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the vertical axis of divine self-disclosure culminates in—and the horizontal axis of historical process proceeds from—a single symbolic entity. This is the recipient community that receives the One God's gift of self-disclosure and, in turn, bears responsibility for witnessing to that gift among the peoples of the earth until the resolution of the historical process.

The recipient community is the object toward which the divine self- disclosure is directed and is the subject of the redemptive drama, which it enacts on behalf of both itself and the entire human order. That redemp- tive drama is enacted in the first instance within the community's liturgi- cal life of formal worship, in which the community collectively realigns itself with God. It is enacted in the second instance as the community turns outward beyond itself toward other human communities in historical, rather than liturgical, time, bearing the sign of God's presence and the word of God's love and will to those who have not seen or heard. Thus, while the symbolizations of the Creator constitute the object of adoration in these monotheisms, it is the symbolizations of the receptive commu- nity that constitute the nexus by which the Creator is brought into com- munication with his creation and through which his redemptive strategy is realized in time.

Comparison along the Vertical Axis

Let us first compare the three elective monotheisms along their verti- cal axes in order to illustrate both their participation in a single discur- sive structure and the symbolic creativity with which they make of that structure a discourse uniquely their own. We begin with Judaism, whose mythic self-understanding is canonized in the narrative tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Here Israel (recipient community) receives Torah (divine self-disclosure) from the God of Israel (the Creator) in the historical Sinaitic covenant. God's Word, in the form of commandment and prom- ise preserved in scripture, is the active agent that discloses to Israel the singular role that the community plays among the nations. As a commu- nity of birth—the family of Abraham and the descendants of Jacob— Israel is singled out from among other genealogically defined communi-

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ties (e.g., Ishmael and Esau). It is distinguished from them only by its par- ticular commission as disclosed to its ancestral patriarchs and its unique prophet, Moses. That covenantal commission is defined as "service" and "servitude"—a liturgical "service" in the form, first, of vicarious blood sacrifice and, later, of statutory prayer; and a "servitude" defined through submission to the will and rule of God as disclosed in the commandments of the Torah itself. As a servant of God in both these senses, Israel serves as well as a model to those beyond its social borders, a sign to the world of God's will for the world.

The vertical axis of the Christian discursive structure, like that of Ju- daism, insists that the Creator discloses himself, his love and his will, to a unique community in the form of his unique self-disclosure. In Chris- tianity, however, the form of the self-disclosure and, correspondingly, the community founded in response to it is the principle of distinction from Judaism. For here, the self-disclosure is not communicated in the discur- sive form of human language; rather, it is incarnate in the human form itself, represented by Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, in Christianity, it is not only a traditional canon of scripture but a historical, human life—that of Jesus—that constitute the divine self-disclosure. It is precisely because the form of this self-disclosure defies Israel's received tradition of textual reve- lation that a new community arises to respond to the radically new form of divine self-disclosure. That community is no longer an ethnos, like Israel, but a community of belief constituted by many peoples, an Ecclesia (church). Carrying within it Israel's memories (i.e., the Hebrew Scrip- tures), and at times even its name (e.g., the "New Israel"), the Ecclesia is nevertheless distinguished from Israel in its liturgical, sociological, and historical dimensions.

Liturgically, it separates itself from ethnic Israel by reproducing the sacrifice of Christ that brings an end to the efficacy of Israel's sacrificial system. That sacrifice, an act of overwhelming, self-annihilating, agapeic love for creation, elicits the communal response framed more as love than as obedience and servitude. It is the divine love that moves within the Ecclesia as the spiritual Israel that the community of the faithful seeks to share with those beyond the fleshly Israel. Its task is to incorporate all human communities within the circle of divine love, to transform the world beyond the Ecclesia into the Ecclesia itself as the New Israel. But there will be more on this latter point when we move to the horizontal axis of Christian symbolic discourse.

Islam, for its part, enters history long after the symbolic repertoires of Judaism and Christianity assigned Israel and the Ecclesia the role of the Creator's historical agent. It is, then, well poised to appropriate with great flexibility the antecedent discursive structure of Christian and Judaic

Jaffee- One God, One Revelation, One People 767

monotheism in light of its own native symbolic vocabulary. It will, as needed, invoke rhetorical strategies of both Judaism and Christianity to preserve its claim to constitute the unique recipient community of the unique Creator's unique self-disclosure.

Like Judaism, which schematizes the content of divine self-disclosure within the symbol of Torah, Islam insists that the mediating self-disclo- sure that links the will and love of God to the historical faithfulness of a distinctive recipient community takes the form of human language rather than a historical human being. But, in Islam, the Torah given to Israel is relativized, the extant versions regarded as muddled human estimations of the original, pure self-disclosure. It is precisely Israel's mishandling of Torah, and Christianity's mishandling of a later divine self-disclosure in the Gospel, that makes necessary a new and final self-disclosive initiative on the part of the Creator.

Now, of course, it is the Quran—a supernal, eternal Book but a text all the same—that discloses to the Umma, the community of those who submit to the Creator in faith and deed, the meaning of its service and servitude to God. At the same moment, the reception of the Quran as disclosed through its historical Prophet distinguishes the community of Islam from all others. Employing a supercessionist rhetoric refined in Christian theological polemic against Judaism, Islam knows the Umma is distinct from the historically older communities of Israel and the Ecdesia. This is because its Prophet emerges most recently in the succession of divine self-disclosures that now reach their intended perfection in the record committed to Muhammad as the Quran.

Islam's deployment of supercessionist rhetoric to stress its uniqueness from its historical predecessors is evident in its model of the recipient community. Although it is possible that, in the early career of the Prophet, the Umma might have been conceived along familial or clan models fa- miliar from Judaism, the rapid expansion of Islam quickly foreclosed the possibility that the Umma would imagine itself as a distinctly Arab com- munity. Like Christianity, Islam sets its social horizon beyond a commu- nity of birth, even though the Quran is given in the first instance in the Arabic language as a gift to the Arab nations. As the final act of divine self- disclosure in human history, the giving of the Quran through the Prophet Muhammad inaugurates a new community of faith rather than blood, the Umma.

Islamic liturgical life, whether enacted in the spare motions of the daily prayers or in the grand spectacle of universal pilgrimage to Mecca, is a reenactment at the personal and collective levels of the act of submission by which the Prophet of Islam established the community in God's name. In it, as in the Christian Ecclesia, the biological peoplehood of those who

768 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

submit to the name and will of God is rendered irrelevant. Nativity is overcome (at least in principle) by inclusion into a broader community of all those who submit regardless of ethnic origins.

These schematized readings of the symbolic clusters along the verti- cal axes of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam already suggest important patterns of overlap and distinction. Clearly, the distinction between Christ, on the one hand, and Torah and Quran, on the other, as symbolizations of the divine self-disclosure has had crucial theoretical and rhetorical re- verberations in the historical disputes among these communities. Here Judaism and Islam have tended to read the complexity of Christian Trinitarian formulations as compromising the unity and uniqueness of the Creator. In the same measure, Christianity and Islam have tended to celebrate their own universality of vision at the expense of Israel's ethnic model of the recipient community, finding Judaism insufficiently ecu- menical in its self-understanding as a microcosm of humanity.

We should conclude our discussion of the vertical axis of monotheis- tic discourse, however, by reminding ourselves of what is shared. This axis is not fundamentally concerned with the unique Creator, although, of course, he plays a crucial role in the structure as the initiator of the world process that sets the stage for his own self-disclosure and the redemptive history over which he presides. Rather, of primary importance in the ver- tical structure of symbols is the claim that the Creator enters into rela- tionship with a selected and representative human community to which he delivers knowledge of his love and will. Ultimately—that is, eschatol- ogically—the entire human community is, of course, imagined as being absorbed into the community of the faithful. But within historical time, the redemptive drama is enacted within the social borders of the recipi- ent community.

The vertical axis of elective monotheism, I conclude, is about a con- versation, whose partners are the unique Creator and the unique com- munity to which the Creator chooses to speak and through which he ex- pects his will to be manifested. Judaism and Islam may indeed reject Christian Trinitarianism as a deviation from the purity of monotheism; and Christianity and Islam may agree that, in Judaism, the recipient com- munity has been too narrowly defined as a community of birth. But each tradition insists that God, however he may be imagined and however his self-disclosure gains material expression, enters into commerce with only one human group, defined by a mixture of blood and faith (Judaism) or faith alone (Christianity and Islam). To be in communication with God, ultimately, is to be in community with God's unique People, the recipi- ents of his unique self-disclosive Word. To participate in the life of the recipient community is to define oneself over against some human Other

Jaffee: One God, One Revelation, One People 769

who stands—either temporarily or eternally—beyond the divine-human conversation that transpires in the community of love and obedience.

Comparison along the Horizontal Axis

The crucial role of the communal Other in elective monotheism is only suggested in its vertical axis of divine self-disclosure. However, as soon as we turn to the horizontal axis of the historical drama and its resolution, the Other becomes intrinsic to the system of symbolization. I have already pointed out that, in Judaic, Christian, or Islamic terms, history is the do- main in which the Creator's special community works out a historical mission that must necessarily culminate in an eschatological victory. In the classical eschatologies transmitted in these traditions, a crucial element in this ultimate victory is the judgment and punishment of the com- munity's (that is, the Creator's) historical opponents and the incorpora- tion of all remaining humanity into a unified polity under divine do- minion. At the end of history, the recipient community of the unique self-disclosure of the unique Creator stands vindicated in its historical struggle to dominate the forces of evil arrayed against it and, by exten- sion, against the Creator. History is the realm of struggle with the Other, and the eschaton is the moment of the Other's obliteration, either through incorporation into the eschatological community or through the Other's explicit physical and spiritual annihilation.

The idea of a community in struggle, and the nature of the struggle, is symbolized variously in each elective monotheism. Much, it seems, de- pends on the specific relationship of the recipient community to worldly power in the course of its struggle. In the case of Judaism, as is well known, the recipient community has been for most of its history subject to, rather than dominant over, the political-religious Other. Traces of a triumphant imperial theory of Israel's worldly success remain a minor chord in bib- lical traditions, the residue of nearly forgotten Jerusalemite traditions from the first millennium B.C.E. In historical Judaism they are dominated en- tirely—both in the final version of the Hebrew Bible and in later rabbinic traditions—by the overarching metaphor of Exile as the normative his- torical condition of Israel.

Israel, that is, experiences itself as captive in the territory of—and subject to domination by—the Other. Drawing on biblical personalities that were even in ancient Israel personifications of polytheistic peoples, Judaism has normally conceived the monotheistic Other as Esau (Chris- tianity) or Ishmael (Islam). Removed from its own promised territory as punishment for evading its mission of covenantal obedience, Israel en- gages in a historical struggle, under the worldly dominion of Esau or Ishmael, to purify itself of rebelliousness through penitential rededicat-

770 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

ion to covenant norms as disclosed in Torah (written and oral, as the rab- binic sages would say). It thereby demonstrates to Esau and Ishmael the abiding attention of the Creator to his creation, as proven in his preser- vation of his unique People.

Political subjection to the Other never disconfirms Israel's sense of mission on behalf of God. Rather, it only heightens anticipation of the ultimate transformation in power relations at the foreordained end, when a descendant of the royal Davidic line that once ruled the Land of Israel will be restored to his throne to preside over the Creator's victory, the restoration of Israel to the land that is the Creator's special possession, and the elevation of Israel to its former worldly glory and a transformed eschatological kingdom of God.

Thus, Judaic messianism in the horizontal sphere of history is explic- itly framed as a drama enacted for the instruction of the historical Other. The Other now dominates in historical time. But in the end, the domina- tor will either find destruction as the Creator's enemy or, recognizing the miracle of Israel's elevation, will follow Israel itself into the unhindered, perfect communication of the Creator and humanity as a whole.

Christianity and Islam are, no less than Judaism, committed in the horizontal axes of their symbolic systems to the notion of a historical drama in which the community of God is pitted in the world against forces that reject the divine dominion. The Ecclesia, in the time between its recep- tion of the Spirit and the ultimate return of Christ in his role as eschato- logical redeemer, is commissioned to bring the good news of the Creator's self-sacrifice as Christ to every corner of the world so as to incorporate all humanity into the community of the redeemed in readiness for his do- minion. Similarly, the Islamic Umma, emerging from Muhammad's own unification of the political and religious spheres of Medinan society, seeks in its expansion over the territories of conquered nations to dominate the political order so as to create a space for the inner conquest of the rebel- lious human spirit for God.

For significant stretches of their history, both Christianity and Islam enjoyed the kind of worldly political success that Judaism could only re- call from its distant past or long for in the eschatological future. Accord- ingly, each of these recipient communities had ample opportunity to in- terpret its political dominance as proof of the validity, in the Creator's sight, of its redemptive mission. Success within the world of history was proof of the Creator's continued guidance and protection that afforded the Ecclesia or the Umma the opportunity to embody the truth and spread it to the farthest corners of the world.

Characteristically, as we see in our discussion of Israel, territoriality plays a crucial role in these symbolizations of communal mission. The

Jaffee: One God, One Revelation, One People 771

emergence of the idea of Christendom expresses a perception of political dominance as the means of purifying the world for faith. Thus, as Chris- tian late antiquity merged into the Christian Middle Ages, it became in- creasingly clear that Christian lands—administered by secular princes on behalf of the church—were sanctified for the Creator and his Word and reserved for the Christian faithful. Heretics within the orbit of Christen- dom and unbelievers from without—particularly, Muslims—were pol- luting presences in the domain of Christ and, thus, were annihilated or banished. The only tolerable non-Christian presence was the Jews, point- ing by their very subjection under Christendom to the victory of the Ecclesia in the world. They would be preserved until the foreordained return of Christ to power and judgment. Then, finally, the spiritual blind- ness and messianic stubbornness of the Jews would be confirmed as folly, and the faith of the church would be made manifest even to the Jew in Christ's universal kingdom.

Islamic territoriality, the mirror of Christendom and Christendom's most challenging historical Other, is expressed in the conception of the Domain of Islam, the territory pacified and unified in obedient service to the Creator under Islamic political hegemony. Within it, other religious communities—particularly those harboring a monotheistic revelation prior to the final Islamic dispensation (the ahl al-kitab or "people of the book," extending at the least to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians)— exist only as "protected minorities," contingent on their acceptance of Islamic social and economic domination. At the borders of the Domain of Islam there stretches the Domain of War; at that border, the Umma engages in its worldly struggle to defend and expand the Domain of Islam. Territory once sanctified for the Creator by Islam cannot be surrendered, and its loss to Christendom is experienced, as in the nostalgia for al- Andaluz, as tragedy and divine judgment.

Christian and Islamic interpretations of communal dominance as confirmation of the community's privileged relationship to the Creator are not undermined by historical junctures in which the Ecclesia or the Umma are politically disenfranchised or otherwise dominated by a com- munal Other. At such moments, these monotheistic communities make use of what must be called a "Judaic" rhetoric for interpreting the com- munity's historical experience. Instead of the dislocative symbol of Exile, however, these communities develop other symbolic means for grasping political domination by the polytheistic or monotheistic Other as a time of trial and witnessing for the truth of God's love and special care for his recipient community.

Indeed, in the history of Christianity, this mode of historical interpre- tation precedes the emergence of Christendom as a hegemonic political-

772 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

religious culture with a territorial domain to defend. Grounded in the images of Christ's own self-sacrifice that stand so centrally in the New Testament scriptural canon, it provided an apt interpretive frame for mak- ing intelligible the "witnessing-unto-death" of Christian martyrs subjected to a series of persecutions between the second and early fourth centuries. Prior to the creation of a uniquely Christian geographical space, concep- tions of "exile" could have no meaning in Christian self-consciousness. But the willingness to endure physical pain and violent, terrifying death in public spectacles of martyrdom was transformed symbolically as the collective experience of the Ecclesia, in preparation for its exaltation in the rapidly approaching Parousia. In the time prior to Christ's return to the world, the Ecclesia became the community of Christlike suffering in the world and proclaimed faith that the model of Christ's own resurrection anticipated its own. Thus, suffering in testimony to the Creator and his Word (as Son) became the symbolic center for interpreting the Ecclesia's historical expe- rience. This formulation of the Ecclesia's mission as victory over the Other through domination by the Other remained an ever present rhetorical op- tion in Christian communities that, even during the age of Christendom's existence, either fell victim as "heretics" to persecution by the official Ecclesia itself or found themselves captive in Islamic lands. It is retrievable, of course, in any historical circumstance in which a Christian community is domi- nated by a worldly power and the price of Christian faith may be social marginalization, suffering, or even death.

A similar symbolization of the historical powerlessness of the recipi- ent community emerges in Islamic history in conjunction with the po- litical division within the Umma that ultimately came to distinguish Sunnite and Shi'ite communities. Rejecting the legitimacy of a caliphate that had passed beyond the grasp of the family of the Prophet, the Party of Ali interpreted its own disenfranchisement within the Domain of Islam as a sign of its historic faithfulness to the Creator. Exiled not from territory but from the worldly power rightfully its own as the authentic Umma, the Shi'a chose symbolizations of martyrdom of the Alide line in order to grasp its own historical situation and redemptive mission. De- spite the fraudulent worldly power of the Sunni caliphate, the Shi'a culti- vated confidence that a series of occulted imams continued to guide the true recipient community in the loyal service of the Creator.

It is precisely in Shi'ite Islam, moreover, that Islamic eschatological thought comes closest to the messianic symbolizations more characteris- tic of Judaism and Christianity than of the Sunni tradition. In both Twelver and Sevener Shi'ite traditions, the last in the series of occulted imams— the Mahdi—awaits, like Judaism's messiah or Christianity's Christ, the foreordained moment of his historical return to preside over the eschatological victory of the Creator's recipient community and the

Jaffee. One God, One Revelation, One People 773

punishment of the Other who had once dominated in defiance of the Creator.

The pattern we have discerned in the horizontal axis of each of the elective monotheisms is so clear as to require no further elaboration. Elec- tive monotheism's preoccupation with the historical drama of the recipi- ent community is explicitly built upon an assumption of necessary con- flict and embattlement between those who serve the unique Creator and those who either do not know him or reject him. Within historical time, the Creator's presence and love are coterminous with the borders of the recipient community, nurturing it in its battle against the Other, the ne- gation of the recipient community, and the enemy of the Creator. The resolution of that conflict, achieved eschatologically, entails either the ultimate annihilation of the historical Other (damnation or excision from communication with God) or the Other's incorporation into the final community of humanity, imagined as the recipient community univer- salized, that acknowledges the Creator's lordship and sovereignty.

SOME CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

It is not uncommon among theological interpreters of elective mono- theism—whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—to celebrate the "univer- salism" of monotheism and to identify this universalism as the principle that ultimately distinguishes monotheism as a form of religion "higher" than polytheism. That is to say, the compression of divine reality from diverse centers of the sacred in creation into a single God who transcends creation is more than simply a rational advance over polytheism (as a metaphysical monotheist might argue). More crucially, we are told, it is a moral advance. Elective monotheism makes it possible as well to imagine a single human community, all equally beloved of the Creator as his crea- tures. This entails the moral imperative of universal love throughout the wide range of humanity, the unification of all humanity into a single moral community, bound both to the Creator of the world and to each other.13

As a historian of religion, I would respond that the universalism im- plicit in elective monotheism's conception of the Creator as the unique source of transcendent holiness is consistently negated by a powerful and

13 For example, Goodman writes: "In a culture where right is proportioned to power it might seem absurd to claim that the standing of an orphan, a widow, or a stranger before the law must be no less than that of the most powerful and prosperous. From the vantage point of the Absolute Source of all values, it can be no less. The God of monotheism universalizes mutuality, extending concern not only to the helpless or oppressed but to all persons. The Torah marks out the dignity of personhood even as it lays down the command to love one another as we love ourselves No syllogism is needed, and none would be of value here. Rather, the Law spins human dignity out of sympathy, at the spindle of God's universality" (102)

174 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

immensely attractive countervailing element of elective monotheism. This is, as I have argued, the mythos of the recipient community whose narra- tive of self-definition moves ineluctably along the vertical and horizontal axes of elective monotheism's historical discourse. The universalist moral implications of elective monotheism, which emerge in the calm interior of the theologian's study, have not much to do with the way in which monotheism is embodied in living sociohistorical systems of religion. As I have tried to show, the reason is that elective monotheism's universal- ism is predominantly enacted eschatologically rather than historically. History, that is, is the realm of struggle against the communal Other; the eschaton is the moment at which, if at all, that Other is identified with the Self and bound up in a universalist moral community.

Elective monotheism, as opposed to its metaphysical counterpart, is not primarily about God as he is in himself or in relationship to the created order of nature. It is much more about God as he is in relationship to historical human communities—a relationship characterized by the opposition of love and hate. Elective monotheism is driven by the assumption that the God who loves does not do so indiscriminately; rather, the divine love is a scarce commodity. Knowledge that it exists is disclosed only to a segment of the human community. The means of obtaining it are carefully preserved for those within the communal boundary. The mandate to celebrate it neces- sarily entails conflict with those who insist on their own traditions for gain- ing entry into the circle of divine love. The possession of divine love, at least at the level of the historical testimony to its presence within the commu- nity, is itself the warrant for ontological hatred of the very existence of the Other. It is perhaps some comfort that such hatred can be overcome eschatologically. But the eschatological ethic of inclusiveness in redemp- tion makes only rare appearances on the historical stage on which the vari- ous elected communities struggle for domination. On the plane of history, the capacity of God to love intensely and exclusively is translated, as often as not, into the human capacity to hate intensely.

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Webb, Eugene "The Case against God." The Review of Politics 10: 1998 199-201.

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