Biblische Spuren des Gastes

This text argues that the figure of the guest is rarely recognized in theology although the guest is one of the most important categories in the Bible. It claims that the category of the guest can serve as an implicit critique of the concept of the person as a strong ego and a critique of searches for fixed identities that always proceed on the basis of the exclusion of others. An important characteristic of the guest is that she/he can never be entirely be identified or defined. Hospitality shows itself when one neither intentifies the guest as belonging within one’s own familial territory and meeting one’s expectations nor when one identifies the guest as a complete foreigner. By referring to different pericopes in the Bible, the text aims to show that there is a subtle connection between JHWH and the guest. Abraham and Sara meet their guests with hospitality and an affective openness and subsequently learn that JHWH reveals himself in the guest and foreigner who responds to their hospitality with the promise of life, a child. The text shows that this implies that the fundament which underlies our being is not self-identity but instead, like the guest, revokes any final identification and needs to be conceived of as an openness and fracture. The final part of the text tries to follow the traces of the guest in the modern occidental philosophical tradition, in Leibniz’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy which all take up the thought that the self cannot be thought of as underlayed by a delimitable and controllable fundament.