Towards a comparative theology of vulnerability: heavenly voices, human faces, and dried wells

Abstract

This thesis provides a Jewish-Christian comparative theological approach to vulnerability. Throughout the last two decades, the topic of vulnerability has gained an increasing amount of attention in both public and academic discourses, including in Christian theological scholarship. However, within Christian theology, there is a persisting lacuna of interreligious approaches to this topic. In this thesis, I address this lacuna and present the first comprehensive interreligious account of vulnerability. The sources for the theological comparison include late ancient Jewish texts from the Talmud and Midrash as well as 20th and 21st century Jewish philosophical and theological scholarship. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that a close reading of the classical Talmudic tale of the Oven of Akhnai provides valuable insights on the interconnection between epistemic and social vulnerability. These insights can help to ground comparative theology in an acknowledgement of the existing power imbalances between the traditions that are involved in the comparison, which is foundational for the ultimate dismantling of those imbalances. In the second chapter I provide a thorough literary review of the existing Christian-theological scholarship on vulnerability. In this, I demonstrate that there is a significant disparity between the general interdisciplinarity of Christian theological vulnerability studies and the almost complete lack of an engagement of non-Christian religious perspectives on vulnerability. In the third chapter, I show that Christian theological scholarship in fact is often indebted to the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and that a more thorough and transparent reception of Levinas’ work is necessary to comprehend the ethical challenges that come with human vulnerability. In the final chapter, I turn to the topic of ecological vulnerability. Building on the scholarship of Jonathan Schofer and Julia Watts Belser, I show that with regard to this particular form of vulnerability, Christian theology has a lot to learn from Jewish traditional texts and the work of contemporary Jewish theologians. Finally, in the conclusion of the thesis, I elaborate the necessity of a broader reception of non-Christian religious concepts of vulnerability or related terms within Christian theological scholarship.