Universalism vs. Exclusivism

At the outset, Daniel Boyarin’s article, “Answering the Mail: Toward a Radical Jewishness” had me quite enraged and perplexed in his assertion that Paul’s “universalism” and rabbinic Judaism’s exclusiveness represent two poles of racism. My initial reaction is created from a series of questions. How can Boyarin claim that the New and Old Testaments are vehicles of racism? How can the Apostle Paul who argues his status as a first rate Jew and who agonizes over salvation of his people in his letters possibly be labeled as a universalist? How can Jews be labeled as exclusive when it was God who did the choosing?

After my raw feelings settled, I brought the discussion into today’s racial world. After spending four years as a liason for the Black Student Association on my white-washed college campus, I found that you cannot minister to a person until you enter into all aspects of their identity. God has created us as racial people and God did not make a mistake in the uniqueness of our creation. Not only is our race part of our personal identity, but it reflects God images—images of our Creator that reflect back to God. Part of affirming others means affirming the God who purposefully created.

My previous background as a History major and as an Educator has greatly impacted the way that I see ministry. There is a saying in the Education field that “a child doesn’t care how much you know, but wants to know how much you care.” Simultaneously, my History background tells me that you can not care about someone until you know where they come from and to know their history and their social location. In hopes to put this wisdom to work, I intentionally designed my curriculum to be accessible to my non-white students.

A local Christian boarding school advertised as serving “underprivileged, inner city children,” had asked me to spend my first few weeks teaching World War II to my high school students. After a month of teaching what would easily be called “white man’s history,” I set aside a few weeks to get inside glances into the unique experiences of people of color in the U.S. and abroad. I knew I was in trouble by the middle of the day when the school’s Director asked me out for lunch to discuss some things. At lunch I was told that my insistence of teaching racial history was detrimental to the Church and the stability of raising the children because “it was divisive.” She quoted the lines that Boyarin highlighted as typifying Paul’s universalism, “that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male or female…” Her logic denied the status that the children had within our society and that had even been given to them by God—their ethnicity. Her solution was simply to turn them into Christians and throw in some eschatological hope and more than anything, “Christian discipline.”

The issue of exclusivism is also relevant. In college I realized that my encounters in worship had been exclusive as I had only worshipped in a white setting. This exclusivism I felt separated me from the body of Christ that was multinational, multiethnic and multilingual. After spending a year in a Missionary Baptist Church as the only white face aside from politicians on the voter circuit or children who had come along with their nanny, I learned the ambiguity of cross-cultural worship. I learned so much about God from my black brothers and sisters that I would not have had access to in my typically white places of worship. Yet I longed for fellowship with someone who looked like me, someone who knew what it was like to be a white person worshipping in a black church. While in Uganda I had the chance to learn African worship songs. Although I loved these songs which reminded me that the Kingdom of God houses many tongues and nations, I preferred worshipping in my own native tongue and style. Realizing this gave new power to the story of Pentecost where all believers could hear from and communicate with God in their native tongues—perhaps this power was what I was feeling in worshipping according to my own kind and type.

I see the potential problem that Boyarin has identified. However as a Christian who believes in the authority of Scripture, I cannot throw out the Scriptures that can and have been used to create a universalist mentality. Sociologically, I see the importance of creating and experiencing culture with those who look like you. Yet I cannot reject the call to step out of my comfort zone for the sake of the Gospel.