ABSTRACT
This book is about three significant issues in human social relationships – identity, difference and solidarity. I argue that an alternative vision of Jesus Christ, understood in community with ‘others’, is needed to help us address them constructively. They are significant, for churches and the world, because of anxieties about who ‘we’ are, as constituents of a particular social group or tradition, in relation to ‘the others’, and the related ethical question: with whom should we be in solidarity? In fact, as I hope to demonstrate throughout, we are really all ‘other’ to one another, including Jesus; thus we ought to aim to be a ‘solidarity of others’,1 yet we tend instead to think in terms of being in solidarity with others, implying a ‘privileged vantage point from which I or we look at others as other’.2 Whilst we find ourselves seeing, and objectifying, ‘them’ as ‘the other’, the challenge is for us to recognize ourselves also as ‘other’ and that we are actively part of the othering processes. Jesus, his community and our vision of him are also subject to these processes, yet I argue that the Christian tradition can enable us to see these realities in such a way that we might reshape the world in terms of God’s basileia.3
