ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the nature of God as pure hospitality, unconditional love. Only God, we may reflect, can provide ultimate hospitality, and this may be only eschatological people still die in colossal numbers. We must also face squarely the fact that Christian communities have themselves repeatedly proved deeply inhospitable, both to their own members and to strangers. In incarnation God overcomes the 'size gap' between divine and human in a 'metaphysical straddling' of the spiritual and the physical: 'divine identification makes the victim's experience of horrors so meaningful that one would not retrospectively wish it away'. To explore the response of religion to inhospitality we shall have to look more closely at the faith traditions in their histories. A theology of hospitality will also face the fundamental objection that there is no evidence for God at all, and that religion simply serves to magnify tensions between people and cause harm.