Letters

A Jesus We Can Follow

Equipped with a mug of coffee, I sat down to hear Professor Stackhouse’s absorbing and instructive lecture on Kenotic Christology 101. To read his review “A Christ We Can Follow” [January/February 2011] is to enroll in a seminary-level course, learning from a scholar who is orthodox but not afraid to ask needful questions or challenge pious assumptions.

His clear organization permitted me—a novice in this area—to follow the problems associated with a traditional understanding of the Incarnation and how new varieties of kenotic theology can address them. He responds to the objections with such biblical perspicacity and creedal fidelity that I was fully persuaded of his modest conclusion: “kenotic Christology deserves a serious look.” I appreciate Stackhouse’s honesty about the limits of theology and his refusal to explain away paradox.

The title of the review captures my sentiment: I can only follow a Jesus who is fully human—whether in his being or in his experience—but also fully divine. For that reason, I am inclined to agree with the kenoticists: “The doctrine of divine immutability, and its correlate, divine impassability, are simply wrong in the light of the Christ event as witnessed in Scripture …. God can change and God can suffer.” Kenotic Christology, at first blush, seems to threaten orthodoxy with its accent on the humanity of Jesus. But it actually turns out to be a protector of orthodoxy by keeping us closer to the Jesus of the Gospels and rejecting the “perfect being philosophy” that diminishes his roles as an obedient example and empathetic advocate. Well done, professor.

Emigrant Nation

David Skeel’s engaging review of Mark Choate’s study of Italian emigrants [“Emigrant Nation,” January/February] raised some excellent questions for scholars of immigrant communities to pursue, particularly around issues of religious institutions, religious life, and the role of religious commitments on the lives of immigrants. At the same time, I finished the review wanting more. I realize the piece was not meant to be a bibliography, but I do think it misses too much of the work already out there on immigrants and religion, such as key edited volumes by Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner (Gatherings in Diaspora, [Temple, 1998]) and Helen Ebaugh and Janet Chafetz (Religion and the New Immigrants [Altamira, 2000]), as well as significant monographs, such as those by Margarita Mooney (on Haitians in diaspora) and Joaquin Jay Gonzalez (on Filipino Americans). Not everything can appear in a short review, but Skeel leaves the impression that little work is available on some of these topics.

What I think was more notably missing, however, was stronger follow-up to the issue of racism in discussions of immigration in the United States. I appreciated Skeel’s highlighting the complex and shifting categories of race that came with host countries’ reception of immigrant communities. How Italians became “white” when coming to the United States (and some Italians more easily than others) was an interesting component I look forward to exploring in Choate’s book.

At the same time, Skeel hints at the parallels between the treatment of Italians in the early 20th century and current immigration from Mexico, but he does not press the issue as he could. Controversies concerning so-called illegal immigration aside, the public racism that has been engendered in contemporary public discourse over immigration requires more than a few oblique references in a review such as this. I’m not sure if Choate addressed it in his work, but a question to add to Skeel’s list of follow-up scholarship would be how the majority U.S. church responded to discrimination against Italians, and how the church is (or is not) responding to racism against immigrants today. I do thank David Skeel for raising the issues he did and giving us something to pursue, but I wished for something a lot stronger by the end.

I just received my latest issue of Books & Culture, jumped to the David Skeel piece, and was disappointed by the flagrant errors in his review. First of all, Carlo Levi—not Carlo Rossi—wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli. And, more important, it was the fascist government, not the socialists, who sent him into internal exile. Also Gay Talese’s book is called Honor Thy Father, not Thy Father’s Will. My question is: who was sipping the Carlo Rossi? You or Skeel?

John Wilson replies:

Thanks much for the corrections. An editor’s job is to keep mistakes from making their way into print. Error, alas, is persistent. (One of the reasons I so much enjoy the TLS and the LRB is that they feature such lively Letters sections, in which sharp-eyed readers with well-stocked minds—readers like you, in short—point out errors in issue after issue. Of course, it’s not so much fun when the errors are one’s own.) At least we were able make these corrections for the web version.

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