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An Introduction to Race

I began this text with an autobiographical narrative that demonstrated my difficulty in articulating how race functions within the modern imagination. It was in this difficulty that I encountered the works of Carter and Jennings. I will interact with each in turn, beginning with Carter’s description of Enlightenment as architecture of whiteness. His theory purposes to explain why race is simultaneously a grid for interpersonal interactions in modernity and is invisible to those confined by it. In Carter’s reading, modernity is not so much anti–religious as pseudotheological. The deformity of modernity is not that it is a secular alternative to the religious underpinnings of Western society, but that it is a maturation of the distortions of the theological problem of whiteness that were sown during the colonial period. Jennings delves more deeply into the planting of these seeds, and chapters 3 and 4 will engage his narrative of this earlier period. I will treat each author in the same sequence: First I will delineate the relationship of each theologian to the modern religious academy by way of the disciplines of religious and cultural studies. I will then articulate the radical nature of both theologians’ critiques as I position them against a popular contemporary theological way of imagining identity. This first chapter will explicate Carter’s relationship to the African American religious academy.

In Race: A Theological Account, Carter offers a theological analysis of the modern formation of the human as a racial being. In the contemporary academic landscape, he suggests, there have been a wide range of discourses about race in the social sciences and the humanities, but not in theology.54 The few studies of race which do exist within the discipline of theology tend to reconfirm essentialized views of race by ontologizing it (e.g. “blackness”) or being bound within some other version of identity politics. Such treatments tend to collapse under a hermeneutic of suspicion, and as a result are limited in their ability to offer a way forward out of the maladies and insular identity silos which whiteness has created. Carter maintains that in order to be resurrected into the new life offered to the world by the Incarnate God–man Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the pseudotheology of whiteness must be exposed in order to be resisted. Carter’s work therefore aims to unmask whiteness, to identify what Michel Foucault has called the “order of things,”55 thereby offering a more satisfactory account of the kind of emancipative discourse theology can be.

Given his contention that theology created ‘man’ as a racial being, Carter sets out to offer a genealogy of how this process took place. Additionally, he is interested in how theology itself as a descriptive method was transformed during the process.56 His thesis is that “modernity’s racial imagination has its genesis in the theological problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots.”57 In order to render itself a distinct religious construct, Christianity had to describe the Jewish people as a religion and as a race, in the process rendering them inferior to Europeans. The locus of theological authority was shifted from “Oriental” Judaism to Occidental power structures. Carter suggests that language of “Constantinianism” inadequately describes this process and offers “supersessionism” as a better descriptor.58 Carter identifies two deeply interconnected steps in the development of supersessionism.

Hence, the racial imagination (the first step) proved as well to be a racist imagination of white supremacy (the second step). Within the gulf enacted between Christianity and the Jews, the racial, which proves to be a racist, imagination was formed.59

Acknowledging that, in a post-civil-rights era, public discursive ethics both do and should hold racism to be improper, Carter believes that this limited diagnosis falls short of recognizing the more critical problem. By and large, ethics, the social sciences, the humanities, and theology still operate within a racial imagination while often explicitly denouncing racism, which Carter reads as the outgrowth of “man” being rendered a racial being. Carter contends that racism is an inevitable development of the racial imagination, which reflects the key theological deformity of the West: supersessionism.

Carter’s analysis of supersessionism and its dual offspring of racialization and racism (which he refers to together by the shorthand “the theological problem of whiteness”60) is presented in three distinct stages. First, he describes the Enlightenment as the maturation of the racial vision, interpreting the oft-identified philosophical distortions of modernity (Cartesian epistemology, decontextualized universalizing rationalism, secularism, the myth of human progress, among others) as the apex of whiteness as a substitute for the Christian doctrine of creation.61 For Carter, many analyses of modernity’s deformities leave intact its aberrant theological underpinnings. While many treatments of contemporary Christian identity or race may make important claims, most focus on symptoms alone. The core engine of modernity’s “civilizing” project is the racial imagination.

Diverging from the common theological habit of describing modernity as “secular,” Carter demonstrates why it is preferable to think of Enlightenment as inherently religious, or “pseudotheological,” in nature. Carter’s analysis suggests that the organizing motif (metanarrative) of modernity is whiteness as ground and telos, whiteness as beginning and end, whiteness as proton and eschaton. Many “postmodern” religious critiques of Enlightenment focus on the rationalistic tip of the iceberg while leaving the subaquatic theological body of whiteness intact. Carter buttresses this contention by utilizing Foucault’s genealogy of race to identify how the formation of “man” as homo sexualis contributed to the conception of the human as the bearer of biological race as homo racialis. While Foucault’s analysis is an important introductory move for Carter, the meat of his diagnosis is to be found in his presentation of Kant, which I will analyze in more detail in the next chapter. Engaging Foucault allows Carter to expose the racial character of the modern project while engaging Kant allows Carter to demonstrate the religious foundation of modern anthropology in the hope of whiteness as telos. The human as homo racialis is that which undergirds Enlightened humanity as homo religiosis and homo politicus.62

Second, Carter turns to reading the black religious academy’s attempts at dislodging the racial imagination. He identifies important advances made by Raboteau and Cone while also demonstrating the ways in which they are beholden to, and in some sense trapped within, modernity’s methodological, and thereby racialized, schemas. While Carter is sympathetic with both scholars and acknowledges that his work would not be possible without theological pioneers such as Cone, he must ultimately disavow significant portions of their theses in order to more precisely aim at the racial imaginary that remains to influence their work. Specifically, Carter maintains that neither Raboteau nor Cone sufficiently theorize Gentile identity and its theological place within the Judaic salvation narrative. While Carter reads both scholars as making important steps in this direction (in Raboteau’s iconic and thereby incarnational focus and in the early Cone’s Barthian and thereby particularist Christology and theological anthropology), he interprets them both as collapsing into universalizing motifs characteristic of modernity qua whiteness. Raboteau’s historiographic method tends to skip over the particular on its way to the universal, interpreting “faith” as an ahistorical primordium that must find particular historical “expression,” while the later Cone’s Tillichian insistence on a decontextualized “ground of Being” invites slippage into the universalizing abstraction of white theology. A third scholar with whom Carter interacts in this second section is Long, from whose program of “ontologizing blackness” he evinces the widest possible divergence. Carter reads Long’s work as being inextricably bound to the presuppositions of modern religious studies, and thereby sharing little common ground with his own overtly theological (and primarily Christological) focus. While he identifies himself as an heir to the work of the black religious academy, Carter finds it insufficient to address the racial problematic.

Third, Carter moves to his constructive work. In so doing, he discerns a similarity between the “theological sensibilities” of New World Afro-Christian faith, as embodied in several writers of antebellum America, and that of certain pre-medieval Eastern patristic voices.63 Carter excavates the writings of Briton Hammon, Frederick Douglass, and Jarena Lee in the third part of his book. By literarily positioning Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor respectively as prelude, interlude, and postlude to the entire work, he points to an implicit connection between early Eastern Christian voices and early African American Christian voices. This methodology is wonderfully iconoclastic as Carter discerns in Hammon, Douglass, and Lee (voices whose theological sophistication is characteristically underemphasized by the contemporary religious academy) an embryonic intuition about the contrast between the Judaic nature of the Christian faith and the white supersessionist creation of the modern racial imaginary.

One final word must be said about how Carter uses terms such as white and black that are commonly associated with essentialized views of race. For Carter, “white” and “black” are not primarily designations of skin color. While whiteness certainly originated as the sociopolitical order of lighter, European peoples, and while blackness, as the photo negative for this order of whiteness, was a designation given to peoples of non-European ancestry on a hierarchical scale of civilizing potential evidenced by skin color, Carter defines the existence of whiteness and blackness as evidence of “a political economy, an ordo or a social arrangement . . . an oikonomia.”64 Restated, this means for Carter that the ordos of whiteness and blackness are anthropological distinctions that are distortions of the doctrine of creation. In contrast to this essentialization of identity, Carter contends that humanity was created with an intrinsic relationality as particular creatures in the Divine image.65

In redeploying the Christian faith to subvert the regnant religious and social order, Carter utilizes the voices of those on the “underside of modernity”66 to criticize these modern anthropological tendencies while not dispensing with what he sees as the confessional center of Christian faith: the incarnation of Jesus Christ as a continuation of YHWH’s covenants with Israel. Unlike the general methodological trajectory of modern religious studies, Carter does not throw the theological baby out with the racialized bathwater. In other words, while embarking on what is admittedly a sort of anti–theology, Carter is asking what he identifies as his “fundamental question”: “What kind of discourse should Christian theology be?”67 Carter does not position himself as a disinterested critic of theology, as would be the tendency of comparative religious studies. Rather, he intends to be only a faithful Christian theologian, acknowledging the missteps of modern racialized theology.

Carter and African American Religious Studies

In explicating Carter’s relationship to the African American religious academy, no attempt is being made to present the “black” academy as monolithic. There are several influential and “canonical” scholars who represent various trends within the fields of African American cultural studies, theology, religion, and church history with whom Carter is well versed and with whose work he explicitly places his own in conversation. This is in large part due to his recognition that his own inquiry into a theology of race “proceeds with the acknowledgement that black theology sees beyond its predecessors only by standing on their broad intellectual shoulders.”68 He clarifies that, in choosing several key figures (such as Cone) as paradigmatic of larger trends within black theological thought, he is not attempting to “be reductive” but rather is acknowledging the role of such luminaries in defining a discipline. Carter will draw from his interlocutors while not being locked within the philosophical infrastructure undergirding the religious academy. Carter demonstrates the most convergence with Raboteau, from whose work he draws a theology of history that provides him with a proton and eschaton that will lead him to his Maximian view of dynamic identity. Carter progresses through Cone, the theologian of black liberation theology whose importance cannot be overstated, even as Carter takes issue with his “static” ontology. Finally, Carter ends with Long, the scholar of religious studies whose work is most congruent with the evaluatory stance of the modern (white) descriptive gaze and from whose work Carter most fully distances himself.

I read the structure of Carter’s text as mirroring his relative level of convergence with, or divergence from, his interlocutors. Section One of Carter’s text lays the groundwork for his inquiry by demonstrating the racialized religious underpinnings of modernity. Section Two begins in convergence with Raboteau and progresses through Cone to a quite stark divergence with Long. In contrapuntal fashion, Section Three of Carter’s text is moving toward his constructive thesis of the genius of early Afro-Christian spirituality and its similarity to Eastern patristic theological anthropology. Therefore, Section Three demonstrates increasing convergence with antebellum African American authors, from Hammon, through Douglass, to Jarena Lee, with whom Carter is in closest agreement. Read in this way, Carter establishes the problem in Part I (the supersessionist Christology of Kant), before proceeding to trace a centripetal trajectory that begins with convergence (Raboteau), moves outward to divergence (Long), prepares to move inward again (Hammon and spiritual autobiography), and ends in convergence (Lee and Maximus). By structuring his text in this manner, the narrative construction of his text (centripetal convergence) mirrors his thesis (a retrieval of the centripetal narrative structure of a theological history centered on the scandalous particularity of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth).

One can sense a marked resistance in the works of Carter and Jennings to being classified as “black theology” (or, as Jonathan Tran has named it, “the new black theology.”69) This is no doubt in large part due to the reality that being named can render one an object to be classified and can reaffirm the distortion of creation that is whiteness as identity signifier.70 Titles such as “black theology” are ironic given the stated intent of Carter to explode the false category of “the blackness that whiteness created,” which he reads as little more than a settlement with whiteness.71 Carter does not intend his resistance to “blackness” to be a cession to the neo-Gnosticizing claim of “colorblindness” prevalent in contemporary Western public discourse. Rather, Carter’s particularist approach is geared toward maintaining the cultural integrity of various peoples without an accompanying essentializing or reductive impulse. Tran’s title appears to be a subtle query about how effective Jennings’ and Carter’s theological race theory actually is in dislodging essentialized identity. I will examine Carter’s relationship with the black academy so as to investigate this concern.

Albert J. Raboteau: Historicizing Race

Raboteau and an Iconography of Race

I now turn to investigating the connection between Carter’s theology of race and the historiographic research of Albert Raboteau. In this section we will see how Carter borrows an iconographic focus from Raboteau while distancing himself from Raboteau’s historiographic method. Raboteau, whose scholarly focus is religious history, including the history of American Catholicism, African and African American religious history, and Eastern Christian spirituality, is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Raboteau’s landmark study Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South72 was published early in his career and became a benchmark in the discipline. One of his later works, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History73, is a collection of essays that trace the scope of his career. It is with this latter text that Carter devotes the majority of his interaction as he maintains that it is in this work that Raboteau “makes a signal contribution in showing how black religion generally and Afro-Christianity particularly disrupt the logic of modern racial reasoning.”74

Carter arrives at this conclusion by elucidating the relationship of Raboteau to the cultural anthropology of the Boasian anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. Herskovits explored what he called the “genius” of a people: that which is unique or distinctive about a particular people.75 Herskovits’ innovation was that he began to speak of “cultures” as opposed to a single monolithic “culture” toward which humanity was progressing. Through interaction with thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, Herskovits had come to appreciate the specificities of a people’s cultural memory and therefore his thinking morphed into delighting in the particularities of “cultures,” as opposed to the overcoming of “cultures” by human “culture” as such. Carter maintains that this innovation by Herskovits and his teacher, Frank Boas, was the birth of “a new method and practice of historical inquiry . . . ethnography, which through the analysis of language, aesthetic and literary productions, folk artifacts, and religion in many ways does the work of history.”76 Carter notes that it is this ethnographic analysis of cultural traits that so easily essentializes the concept of race, reifying identity into a myriad of opaque, hard, static givens.

Carter reads Raboteau the historian as avoiding this essentialization of race by pushing beyond a strict historical ethnography into a theology of history. Carter does not maintain that this glimmer of hope amounts to a complete disavowal, on Raboteau’s part, of the modern understanding of the racialized being. As Carter contends, Raboteau is ultimately a dialectical thinker who “remains within the gravitational pull of a racialized understanding of identity.”77 Yet the glimmer of hope is Raboteau’s serious consideration of “the Christian element in antebellum slave religion,”78 identified through his insistence on the significance of narrative and plot.79 For Raboteau, history and religion are both faith practices. While the historian, through the priority she gives to various events, characters, and sequences, necessarily imbues history with a meaning and a structure, religious faith contends that “salvation history,” as understood within the “will and providence of God,” grants a continuity to the events of history.80 Raboteau identifies the historiographic method as “[reminding] Christian believers of the scandal of the Incarnation, the historical specificity and contingency of Jesus.”81 By reminding theology of the historical nature of salvation’s narrative, history as such does the important theological work of preserving the notions of the particular and the unique. As signposts of the Incarnation, the particular and the unique are iconographic in nature. It is through the various particularities of being itself that divine being is seen; being is therefore ekstasis. Carter finds hope in the realization that, for Raboteau, history is not simply a causal sequence of seemingly random events but is itself a window into the life of the Triune God. In this sense, Raboteau’s theology of history may more appropriately be termed an “iconography of history.”82 It is this iconographic view of the historical salvation narrative, and the plot structure that it bequeaths to all history, that Carter finds best represented in the work of Maximus the Confessor and best intuited in the work of Jarena Lee.

For Carter, Raboteau’s “signal contribution” may also be identified in his insistence on the importance of the narrative scope of history, specifically his recognition of the theological significance of the story of Israel for understanding African American religious experience. It is the significance of plot that allows Carter to maintain that “whiteness is the ‘political unconscious’ of false emplotment.”83 Because it is A Fire in the Bones that prompts this important observation and because Carter finds it the most promising of Raboteau’s major works, I take it as the key text in analyzing Carter’s methodological relationship to Raboteau.

Raboteau was raised an American Catholic, but has since converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. I take this journey to be archetypical of what I will read as Carter’s progression from the Anglo-Catholic retrieval narrative of Radical Orthodoxy into an aesthetic sensibility akin to Eastern iconography. Carter’s use of Eastern patristic theologians (e.g. the Cappadocians, Maximus) is implicitly subversive of the tendency of traditions of virtue to utilize classically Western theologians (e.g. Augustine, Aquinas). Carter finds Eastern theological anthropology to suggest a more dynamic conception of being than that of the Latin West. Carter proposes to “inhabit” the “aesthetic theory of iconic beauty” which Raboteau offers.84 While he will offer black flesh as an icon of the divine, Carter will not be content with static identity but will construct an ecstatic aesthetic akin to that of Raboteau, who ends A Fire in the Bones by positing the “hidden wholeness” of the shared contemplative action of Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr.85

Raboteau’s Historiographic Method

Raboteau opens his text by relating a story of his childhood travels to Europe as part of a parish boys’ choir. While his presence as a black chorister elicited all sorts of responses, including that of curiosity, the episode that most poignantly remains in his memory is that of being asked by a French monsignor to sing for them a “Negro spiritual” which, it was claimed, “we love.”86 This moment encapsulates for Raboteau the bewildering mix of thoughts and feelings he has experienced over the ensuing years surrounding the “complex relationship of race, religion, and national identity.” He recognizes the somewhat paradoxical nature of his task as he offers his text as a “response to that French priest’s invitation to sing ‘one of your people’s spirituals’.”87 Raboteau implies a similarity between offering a scholarly work on race and singing for a European church leader. As he relates, “I also felt a vague unease about exhibiting something of my people for the enjoyment of white folks.”88 While the implication is that his work may be received in this fashion, Raboteau finds the experience of aesthetic mutuality worth the risk of misrepresentation. This position of vulnerability and its overture toward human connection moves beyond mere prosopopoeia and is methodologically akin to Carter’s thesis. While Carter’s posture is a bit more guarded, he nonetheless makes clear this dimension of his work by envisioning a scandalous miscegenation between peoples in which each learns the tongue of another and receives her own being back from another in a process of mutual renaming.

Like Raboteau, Carter recognizes what he terms the “veritable conundrum of the black intellectual in modernity.”89 The postures of both Carter and Raboteau suggest that scholars of all people groups should experience humble awe at the complexity of the task of reflecting upon identity. This complexity is that which whiteness has attempted to iron out through colonial reorderings and the modern descriptive method. While religious studies has posited a relativist objectivity, Raboteau’s posture demonstrates the possibility of an inter-human mutuality. While Carter is cautious as to the deployment of said mutuality given what he identifies as the racial legacy of coloniality-modernity, he nonetheless shares the same hope. We will see that this possibility is available only to lesser degrees in the works of Cone and Long.

The first two essays in A Fire in the Bones render apparent the ways in which Raboteau’s iconography of history will be important for Carter. Raboteau overtly offers more than a simple historiographic enumeration of causal relationships.

History, simply put, consists in telling stories about the ways that people lived in the past. Historians, as distinct from chroniclers, construct narratives that try to reveal the meaning of past events. Narration is of course already an act of interpretation. Events do not speak for themselves. In this very fundamental sense, history is based upon an act of faith, the faith that events are susceptible of meanings that can be described in narration.90

By recognizing that “Christian faith also asserts that the events of human experience have meaning, a coherent pattern, a telos,” and by finding “the source of that meaning . . . in the will and providence of God,” Raboteau holds in tension what he identifies as “the dialectical relationship” between “faith and the academic life.”91 Carter suggests the Incarnation as the cohesive structure in which Raboteau’s dialectic could find synthesis. Raboteau maintains that “[t]he historian as historian” must remain “agnostic about such claims [of narrative meanings in history],” while as a “believer” he “cannot but hope that our history is touched by the providence of God.”92 The quest for “objectivity” in the historiographic enterprise discourages Raboteau from more fully developing his iconographic theology of history.

Yet it is clear that Raboteau is moving in the latter direction. He utilizes a picture of former slave children “praying their ABCs” at a funeral as an “emblem” of the religious struggle for freedom through education.93 It is Raboteau’s use of “emblem” that Carter takes to be a vision of a material world imbued with iconographic Christian meaning. Because Carter finds the dialecticism of Raboteau’s discipline to limit the analytical power of his history, Carter extends Raboteau’s analysis into his own theology of race. Carter maintains that Raboteau is heading toward “an incarnational understanding of faith and history” while still “continu[uing] to hold onto” a “dialecticism of faith and history.”94 Carter eschews dialectical tension through a Maximian account of the Incarnation, in which the world is inhabited as an “ensouled” reality by means of the hypostasis of “Jesus in his Jewish humanity.”95 As Carter explains,

when Maximus says that “through the mutual exchange of what is related . . . the names and properties of those that have been united through love [are fitted] to each other,” he is indicating that the same gesture of incarnation that fits divinity to humanity and humanity to divinity so that they can take on each other’s names, also refits human beings to one another so that they, too, can be named from one another. The latter intrarenaming of the human (and the history it opens) occurs inside of the interrenaming of the human that has taken place in Christ and that Maximus speaks about with recourse to the communicatio idiomatum of Chalcedon.96

For Carter, the theology of history that is opened in the Incarnation signals the death of dialectic. This is important for Carter because he contends that race functions precisely within the sort of Hegelian dialectic that is the posture of the modern academy. If thesis and antithesis must be had for synthesis to be achieved, then both whiteness and blackness as such are necessary for mutuality to occur. However, if, as Carter describes, being itself is not static but is translucent in an iconographic sense, then racial essentialization is not a necessary component of a proper relationality. Whiteness can no longer unilaterally name the other but must receive its own being in a mutual interrenaming of humanity within the space of the Incarnation. It is in this non-reified, ecstatic sense that Carter offers black identity as an icon of the divine.

What is most promising in Raboteau’s work is that which Carter deems most properly theological. Carter fills out this theological framework with his thesis of the necessity of living into the salvific story of YHWH through his people Israel and her Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, whose flesh is the particular ground of a new body politic. This is perhaps why, as Carter relates, religious scholar Donald H. Matthews accuses Raboteau of being a clandestine theologian and not confining himself to the historically “verifiable” ethnographic gaze.97 It is this ethnographic gaze that Carter holds in suspicion.

Raboteau’s Incipient Theological Trajectory

In the first two essays of A Fire in the Bones, Raboteau’s theological trajectory comes to the foreground as he utilizes the story of Israel to locate the histories of various peoples. He relates that the key interpretative distinction between the myth of European America and the stories told by African American slaves is the manner in which they related to the story of Israel. Both groups recognized that meaning in history is to be found with reference to a particular center. In the American myth, America was the New Israel who had journeyed across the sea out of tyranny to inherit a land of promise, a land manifestly destined by God to be a light to the nations. For African slaves who had been brutally forced to journey across the sea, America was not a land of promise but a land of subjugation, violence, and forced servitude: “For African-Americans, however, the myth is inverted. For us, the Middle Passage was a voyage from freedom in Africa to perpetual bondage in an America that in biblical terms did not resemble Israel but Egypt.”98 In the next chapter, I will utilize a similar methodology as I invert common interpretations of the work of Milbank.

The centrality of Israel for a theology of history will be an important insight for Carter as he identifies supersessionism as the mechanism which generated modern race. In his subversion of Milbank’s Anglo-Catholic counter-narrative, Carter will use Raboteau to suggest that early Afro-Christians “got the story right” in ways that the Anglo-Catholic tradition has not. While implicitly privileging theological history in his Judeo-centric narrative of the history of race in America, Raboteau tends to frame the matter in purely historiographic terms. He relates that history is necessarily perspectival and is imbued with meaning depending on the point of observation of the subject. He names historical research a relativizing pursuit that “offers us a salutary reminder that part of faith is doubt.”99 Yet Raboteau recognizes that such an understanding need not necessitate a pluralistic “crisis of faith,” but rather a maturity consonant with “owning” a “set of values” and a “religious culture.”100 The historiographic enterprise can round off the contours of religious particularity in relativizing fashion or it can offer a humble maturity consonant with a theology of history. It is the tension between Raboteau’s historiographic dialectic and his theology of history that Carter discerns. After Raboteau frames the manner as historical relativity, he moves into what he calls “a theology of history” or the study of “salvation history.”101 This transition within the first two essays of A Fire in the Bones is a microcosm of the development of his thought.

Carter, while distancing his project from the disciplinary confines of a history of religions, nonetheless finds Raboteau’s historical research to be helpful in demonstrating the racial foundations of modernity. There are several places where Raboteau’s research specifically points to the ways in which the philosophical presuppositions of Enlightenment were resultant from the reality of the slave trade and the related intellectual complexities surrounding the issue of race. Raboteau relates that from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slavery was in large part justified in European nations by the conversion of slaves to Christianity.102 This posed an immediate problem: How would the baptism of slaves, with its requisite elevation to status of “brother,” affect the economics of enslavement? Would a slave cease to be property? If a slave was catechized in the Faith, how would education affect his “contentedness” with a subservient station? Both colonial legislation and church dogma performed calisthenics to ensure that “baptism did not alter slave status.”103 Raboteau relates that the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701 “to support missionaries to the colonies,” had as its primary purpose guiding slave masters in their gospel instruction of slaves. A pedagogical mission could proceed without fear of the possibility of emancipation:

In tract after tract, widely distributed in the colonies, officers of the society stressed the compatibility of Christianity with slavery. Masters need not fear that religion would ruin their slaves. On the contrary, Christianity would make them better slaves by convincing them to obey their owners out of a sense of moral duty . . . After all, society pamphlets explained, Christianity does not upset the social order, but supports it . . . The missionaries thus denied that spiritual equality implied worldly equality; they restricted the egalitarian impulse of Christianity to the realm of the spirit.104

Raboteau’s research implies a causal relationship between the need to justify slavery and the neo-Gnostic spiritualization of much modern American Christianity. This causal relationship is buttressed by the reality that the slave masters had to be taught to interpret the Scriptures in a non-material fashion. Incidentally, the beginnings of the slave trade coincided with Descartes turning inward to the realm of the mind. Likewise, the rationalization of slavery in Western Christianity was taking place only decades before Kant would offer a rationalized reinterpretation of Christian faith as Western moral religion. While I am not suggesting that neo-Gnostic spiritualism and Cartesian rationalism are one in the same, I am drawing attention to the fact that a turn away from the material implications of the Gospel in the didactic pursuits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century slaveholders and a rejection of realism through Kantian Idealism can both be read as influenced by fears of an elevated status for non-white peoples. I will fill out this claim in chapter 2 when interacting with Kant.

Another example given by Raboteau of a similar causal order of events is early American Evangelicalism’s shift from a Gospel potent to change the social order to a Gospel that maintained the social order while changing only the spiritual destiny of converts. He relates the early and enthusiastic response of black Americans to the forthright preaching and experiential, ecstatic worship of revivalist groups like the Methodists and Baptists.105 He paints a picture of an Evangelical revivalism that encompassed people from various ethnic and socio-economic groups. Black preachers were among those who exhorted the multiethnic crowds with the Good News of the Gospel. This reality influenced the strong abolitionism of late eighteenth-century Methodist conferences. Raboteau explains that, by and large, the denominations quickly retreated from abolition in the face of the “strong” and “immediate” pushback from aristocratic landowners. This resistance encouraged Evangelicalism to alter its early pronouncements by making slavery a matter of individual conscience that lay outside the influence of the Faith.106 As a result of this turn away from the heterogeneity of its early communal makeup, Methodist and Baptist Evangelicalism became decidedly more rationalistic and aristocratic. For Raboteau, the characteristic marks of religious modernity are to be found in the problematic early-modern intersection of race and theology.

The early promise of Evangelicalism faded as two distinct and separate Christianities emerged. Black preachers

mediated between Christianity and the experience of the slaves (and free blacks), interpreting the stories, symbols, and events of the Bible to fit the day-to-day lives of those held in bondage. And whites—try as they might—could not determine the “accuracy” of this interpretation.107

Segregated worship influenced a hermeneutical segregation not unlike the strict distinctions between disciplinary silos in the modern academy. Much like the creation of modern religious studies as a methodology detached from theology, “white” and “black” Christianity formed as separate traditions. Under the pressures of white discrimination and black self-determination, separate denominations were formed, such as the AME under the leadership of Richard Allen. While Raboteau is not decrying self-determination as a method of resistance, he is noting that such a necessity removes the possibility of mutual interpretation.

In such separate hermeneutical trajectories, the story of Israel took on quite distinct meanings. Identification with Israel became the point of departure for white and black Christians. White Christianity interpreted the Exodus as a spiritual liberation from sin, while black Christians emphasized the material significance of freedom in Christ.108 These contentions on the part of Raboteau anticipate Carter’s claim that the modern problem of race precludes both linguistic interpenetration and relational miscegenation. Raboteau’s work illumines the fundamentally racial (and thereby racist) character of modernity while suggesting the perspicuity of Carter’s development of this claim: the Rassenfrage is essentially the Judenfrage.109

Raboteau’s Dialecticism

Carter proposes an intellectual atmosphere that will “refuse dialectical intellectual arrangements altogether.”110 Despite their convergence, Raboteau-as-historian remains a dialectical thinker whose philosophical orientation feeds a racialized understanding of identity. Raboteau capitulates to the modern conception of a religious primordium that finds the apex of its expression in Western culture. This becomes evident in his optimism about the promise of America for the overcoming of racial divides.

Raboteau takes as his text the address of Puritan leader John Winthrop in his sermon “Modell of Christian Charity,” in which Winthrop echoes the Sinaitic covenant and Moses’ discourse of blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 30.111 Raboteau reads Winthrop as proclaiming that “possession of the land is contingent upon observing the moral obligations of the covenant with God.” Raboteau lauds Winthrop’s address, which reads the Europeans’ conquest of the New World as consistent with Israel’s taking of the Promised Land. The “mark of the greatness of Winthrop’s address” is that the virtues he extols are “justice, mercy, affection, meekness, gentleness, patience, generosity, and unity—not the qualities usually associated with taking or keeping possession of a land.” It would be “later and lesser sermons” that would encourage the European inhabitants of America to “much more aggressive virtues.” Raboteau is effectually reciting the traditional national mythology about the foundation of America being truth and justice and its continual progression toward a full incorporation of all people into its political commonwealth.

While Raboteau is uncomfortable with the “explicit notion of reciprocity between God’s will and American destiny” inherent in Winthrop’s theological exhortations, he remains hopeful that the promise of America will be made manifest in successive generations.112 He maintains that it was through later perversions that the myth of the American New Israel took on a triumphalist tone. His example is the celebratory sermon of Ezra Stiles in 1783 soon after the success of the American Revolution. As opposed to Winthrop’s invocation of the conditional election of the European pioneers based upon their adherence to God’s law, Stiles proclaimed that the rise of the United States to “an acknowledged sovereignty among the republicks and kingdoms of the world” as “the vine which [God’s] own right hand hath planted” was secured.113 Raboteau claims that it was not until this later “exaggerated vision of American destiny” that such “an exaggerated vision of human capacity” was expressed.114 It is this later, more triumphalist move that Raboteau terms “God’s New Israel becoming the Redeemer Nation.” Raboteau implies that the anthropological problem of race was the result of later hubristic missteps not necessarily intrinsic to the original vision of Puritan America.

Raboteau contends that this later “exaggerated vision of American destiny” was belied by “the presence of another, a darker, Israel” in her midst.115 The Afro-Christian counter-narrative of identification with Israel through the Exodus called into question the myth of America as carrier of “liberty and the gospel around the globe.” Raboteau maintains that the Afro-Christian counter-narrative authentically reclaimed the original promise of the theological vision of Winthrop. The paradigmatic moment of this reclamation was Martin Luther King Jr. echoing this “very old and evocative tradition” in his final sermon at Mason Temple in Memphis, proclaiming, “I’ve been to the mountaintop . . . And I’ve seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”116 Raboteau reads King’s exhortations as the culmination of the American project. Raboteau’s methodology effectually de-radicalizes the resistance of revolutionaries like King, offering them as fulfillment of the noble impulses of American liberty and justice.

While Raboteau acknowledges that the people addressed by Winthrop “long ago took possession of their Promised Land” and that the people addressed by King “still wait to enter theirs,” he maintains that Winthrop’s and King’s versions of the Exodus “were not far apart.”117 They were both looking toward the “American Promised Land.” While Raboteau is correct that King’s rhetoric made extensive use of the promise of America,118 Raboteau does not allow for the possibility that King was assuming the established terms of the debate as a means to subverting them. In other words, could King’s rhetoric have been a way of proclaiming to white America, “this is what you say you believe but you yourselves are not living up to the promise of America”? During his 1963 speech at the march on Washington in which Dr. King utilized the phrase “the true meaning of its creed,”119 could he have been noting that the actions of white America belied the veracity of its own mythology? Carter’s methodology suggests interpretations such as the latter as he maintains that the black intellectual in modernity often adopts the regnant terms of the argument in order to subvert the argument at the level of its own suppositions. Like Paul, whose use of the haustafeln can be exegeted as subverting the objectification of women, children, and bondservants in the household structures of ancient society, King can be read as adopting the ethical conventions of his day in order to shine a mirror of conviction upon their faulty deployment.120 The linguistic structure of King’s speeches, combined with Carter’s method of interpretation, encourages this interpretive path. In this schema, the “true meaning” of the American creed is not the American creed itself, but the meaning which King’s theology supplied. In his prophetic advocacy for justice, King utilized helpful rhetorical devices to subvert the established order.

Carter channels a tradition of reading that he maintains theologically exegetes Scripture against the grain of the social order.121 It is this method of reading that Carter recommends as concordant with the genre of an Augustinian spiritual autobiographical “narration of the self.”122 It is this pattern of counter-exegesis which must be utilized in order to “read . . . inside the crease,” particularly when interpreting African American autobiography against the dominant social order of whiteness.

This suggests that there is an inner logic and rationality peculiar to the Gospel itself that can work within the social reality dictated by the principalities and powers to present a telos divergent from that offered by the regnant system. I contend that it is this eschatological hermeneutic, and not the telos of modernity as religious political hope, that has enabled Christian activists to articulate the divine veracity of their causes. Raboteau’s historiography does not satisfactorily distinguish between the two. Carter maintains that this is because Raboteau’s discipline does not have the means by which to account for the type of tradition Christianity is. I am suggesting that it is because of this lacuna that Raboteau has insufficiently theorized the relationship of King to America. As Carter explains:

But there is the matter of Raboteau’s early difficulty in historically navigating Christianity as a living tradition. Doing so would have required engaging the question of what it means to speak of the hermeneutic encounter of traditions generally and, more specifically, the nature of that encounter when one of the traditions is Christianity appropriated by those on the underside of modernity . . . Another way of handling the hermeneutical encounter of traditions would have been to give an account of the kind of tradition that Christianity is, such that it can receive the traditions of Africa (or the traditions of any people, for that matter) to re-tradition those traditions, and indeed, in the process itself be retraditioned. To account for this—or something like this—would have been to offer a historiographical method . . . [that] would have offered a more cogent account of Afro-Christian life as a Christian emergence.123

While the later Raboteau of A Fire in the Bones has discerned the significance of counter-narrative for African American Christians reappropriating the story of Israel, his historiographic method subtly reinscribes whiteness by being overly optimistic about the liberating power of modern civil religion.

Carter finds Raboteau to be most helpful when he is most theological. In his closing exposition of the “hidden wholeness” between the visions of King and Thomas Merton, who in the common year of their deaths (1968) were in the process of planning a shared retreat, Raboteau maintains that what unites contemplation and action is a kenotic, sacrificial love. It is this love that identifies with the oppressed, unites people “beyond barriers of race, nationality, and religion,” and proclaims that “there are no aliens, no enemies, no others, but only sisters and brothers.”124 It is this latter observation that Carter favorably appropriates as he emphasizes the kenotic love of the particular body of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth.125 It is this salvation narrative that offers an appropriate theology of history.

James H. Cone: Theologizing Race

Cone and Ontological Blackness

We now turn to analyzing Carter’s relationship to James Cone, pioneer of black liberation theology and professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary. The significance of Cone for theologies of liberation in the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Cone was actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in America in the nineteen-sixties, including drafting the 1969 public statement on “Black Theology,” and his theology has been read by oppressed people groups around the world. Cone is a public intellectual whose work has profoundly shaped American civic discourse about race and has opened the door to considerations of the problematic theological posture of whiteness. In this section we will see that Carter draws on Cone in order to diagnose white theology as an abstracting system that undervalues particularity, while ultimately deeming Cone’s oppositional dialectic insufficient for escaping the bonds of racial reasoning, bound as it is to the binary logic of whiteness.

While Carter favorably appropriates the early Cone’s Barthian stress on the concreteness of being, he reads the abstraction of Cone’s later, more Tillichian framework as problematic.126 Carter finds Cone’s early Barthian dialectic between God and creature to be replaced by a later Tillichian dialectic between being and nonbeing.127 Black liberation from oppression becomes the “courage to be.”128 Carter maintains that Cone “remains, to the end, a dialectical thinker”129 in that the “original, antisupersessionist promise” of Cone’s Barthian focus on particularity has been replaced by “Christianity . . . as the answer to a singular, transhistorically existential and ontological situation: the struggle for being against the threat of nonbeing.” It is this later move, referred to by Carter as a “nonhistorical, existential moment” of liberation over against the “privileging” of “a given history . . . as the dominant or unifying narrative,”130 that Carter finds to be least sufficient for overcoming the strictures of racialized identity.

Carter is unconvinced of the necessity of dialectical intellectual arrangements. In suggesting a corrective to Cone’s dialecticism, he offers a prolepsis of his own Maximian Trinitarian conclusion:

[T]he dialectical gap between Christ and culture, between time and eternity, viewed in Christological and Trinitarian terms is really no gap at all. This is because the distance between them, the diastema, and difference between God and the creature . . . is always already traversed within the very person of the Logos and in the unity he has with the Father through the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the traversal of time by eternity—the idea at the core of a theological understanding of transcendence—is, in fact, what frees creation to be itself.131

Carter suggests that the early promise of Cone’s work for “theologically disrupt[ing] modernity’s analytics of race,” recedes to a later ontology which “diasallows transcendence and thus recapitulates the inner logic of modern racial reasoning.”132 While Carter is not content with the end goal being a Barthian dialectic, which he reads as insufficiently acknowledging creation’s—or cultures’—contributions to their relationship with the Father,133 he prefers this particularizing dialectical arrangement to Cone’s later universalizing dialectic. However, Carter finds hope for a way out of racialized identity in an eschewal of dialectic altogether in favor of a more classically Eastern incarnational Christology grounded in Trinitarian relationality.

While I find Carter’s critique of Cone’s ontologically racialized identity to be trenchant, I nonetheless fear that at certain points Carter has both exaggerated the lacunae in Cone’s thought and underemphasized his own affinity with Cone’s methodology. While affirming Carter’s Maximian focus, I am wary of too easily proclaiming the death of dialectic. In the next chapter in our analysis of Milbank, we shall see how an emphasis on the Logos as collapsing the distance between God and culture easily slips into a far too cozy correspondence between Christ and culture.134 I am not fully convinced that, from the point of view of the creature, some sort of dialectical tension can be fully done away with. While it is true that the gap between God and creation has already been crossed from the perspective of divine agency, dialectical tension is useful for the purpose of stressing the finitude and limitations of human agency and creaturely knowledge. As I see it, Cone’s consistent usage of the rhetoric of dialectic is not so much a Christological misstep as it is a way to maintain epistemological humility. Cone reveals the motive behind this aspect of his theological methodology in God of the Oppressed:

[T]he theologian must accept the burden and the risk laid upon him or her by both social existence and divine revelation, realizing that they must be approached dialectically, and thus their exact relationship cannot be solved once and for all time. There can only be tentative solutions which must be revised for every generation and for different settings. When theologians speak about God, they must be careful that their language takes account of the ambiguity and frailty of human speech through humility and openness. They can never assume that they have spoken the last word. But the recognition of the limitations should not lead to the conclusion that there is no word to be said. Indeed the clue to our word and God’s Word is found in human history when divine revelation and social existence are joined together as one reality.135

Cone was attempting to combat the same problem that Carter would later address: the self-reflexive cataphatic anthropology of theological whiteness. While Carter acknowledges that his attacks on whiteness would not be possible without the preliminary volleys of pioneers such as Cone, I cannot help but wonder if dialectic (especially during the cultural milieu in which the early Cone was writing) is a helpful “epistemologically impoverished”136 method of exposing the hubris of the pseudotheological tendencies of whiteness. I am not sure that Cone holds to dialectic solely because he is beholden to the binary logic of modernity. It seems more probable that Cone utilizes dialectic because of the paradoxical task of offering a counter-narrative from the perspective of the underside of modernity; Carter is engaged in a similar task.

Having made this brief caveat into Cone’s use of dialectic, I still find Carter’s argument quite compelling and believe that a reading of Cone demonstrates the limitations of his theological program as suggested by Carter. Carter distances himself from what he names the result of Cone’s theological project: “ontological blackness.”137 Carter borrows this phrase from Victor Anderson, who diagnoses Cone’s theology as a form of “cultural idolatry,” a contention Carter engages in “filling out” through his own analysis of Cone.

The two primary texts of Cone that Carter interprets are his earliest monograph, Black Theology and Black Power, and Risks of Faith, his latest book at the time of the publication of Carter’s Race. Carter utilizes both the earlier book (which, in 1969, was a version of Cone’s doctoral thesis) and the later work (published in 1999) to demonstrate the trajectory of Cone’s career and to highlight several distinctions between his earlier and later thinking surrounding theology and race. In order to adhere to this interpretive method, I take as my primary texts Cone’s God of the Oppressed (1975) and his recent masterwork The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011).138

I use these two texts for several reasons. One, since Carter has so thoroughly excavated Black Theology and Black Power and Risks of Faith, a fresh look at others of Cone’s works will allow me to more adequately compare the two theologians. Two, in a move consonant with the hermeneutical paradigm Carter has established, taking these two texts together demonstrates the arc of Cone’s career and Carter’s increasing divergence from his work. Three, God of the Oppressed and The Cross and the Lynching Tree are the texts that Cone himself offers as representative of his career. In the preface to the 1997 edition of God of the Oppressed, Cone maintains that this text “represents my most developed theological position.”139 Likewise, Cone’s Introduction to The Cross and the Lynching Tree names this text “a continuation and culmination of all my previous books.”140 Four, Cone overtly names his purpose in writing God of the Oppressed the utilization of the black church experience as his primary theological source. Responding to critics who accused him of relying too heavily on white, Western theological sources, Cone intentionally grounded this text in what he terms the greatest influence on his theological perspective and “the true source” of “the black theological enterprise”: “the black community.”141 Cone uses a similar methodology in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Carter makes a similar hermeneutical choice in his invocation of voices from antebellum African American Christianity. Cone and Carter both offer theological reflections that draw on African American theological thought and the black experience of race in America, while incorporating other voices from throughout the Christian tradition.

Cone and the Christological Politics of the Oppressed

God of the Oppressed is the clearest expression of Cone’s systematic theology. Cone later reflected on its writing: “Silence on both white supremacy and the black struggle against racial segregation made me angry with a fiery rage that had to find expression . . . I wrote because words were my weapons to resist, to affirm black humanity, and to defend it.”142 While attempts have been made to classify Cone as simply reactionary, a direct reading of Cone does not bear out this reductionism. Rather than muting his constructive theological insights, his understandable anger at centuries of brutal subjugation and murder often perpetrated in the name of “Christian” mission serves as a catalyst for his perceptive insights. What is surprising is not that anger finds expression in his work, but that this drive is so singularly focused toward a constructive theological vision for liberation and for race relations structured around justice.

I want to situate Cone as a scholar of his times without being reductive. My contention is that where Carter and Cone differ, it is largely due to the realities of the struggles for liberation faced in their respective cultural milieux. As Carter acknowledges, he has the benefit of writing in a theological atmosphere shaped by Cone. While I will read Cone as often collapsing into an ontology of identity that reinscribes the racial analytics of whiteness, and while I will read Carter’s solution as a more sufficient theological rubric within which to consider questions of race, I do not read Carter as cancelling the trajectory of Cone. To the contrary, I maintain that Cone suggests many of the themes that Carter expounds upon, including the concreteness of being, the supersessionist impulse within white theology, and a just and liberating framework within which to imagine reconciliation. While I will read Carter as largely subverting the work of Milbank, I read him as entering into the legacy of Cone and redirecting it. In other words, taken together, the works of Cone and Carter are a “call and response” that, as in the ecstasy of worship, establishes new communal connections and initiates unexpected reflections on being. This non-Eurocentric method of discourse favors communal mutuality to unilateral agency. This aspect of the literary tenor of Carter’s work converges with his thesis of ontological mutual transcendence as an icon of Trinitarian relationality.

Cone and Carter explicitly share the same dogmatic focus: Christology. While Cone names Christology “the starting point for Christian thinking about God,”143 Carter recognizes that Christology is the “capstone of Christian thought”144 and the “theological site of contestation, the site at which to engage modern racial reasoning.”145 Carter reads Cone’s early phase as suggesting “a Christology that deals with the humanity of Jesus as a Jew.”146 Cone explains that “[t]he Jesus about whom I speak . . . is not primarily the one of Nicea and Chalcedon, nor of Luther, Calvin, and Barth . . . For christological reflections, I turn to the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul.”147 It is this Jesus who is “the Jesus of . . . the Spirituals and Gospel Music, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr.” The Jesus of “the biblical and black traditions” is “not a theological concept but a liberating presence.”

Whereas Carter fills out Cone’s Christology by focusing on the particular body of Jesus of Nazareth as the ground for the body politic, Cone’s insights into the particularity of Jesus do not sufficiently present Christ’s Jewish identity as encompassing, connecting, and reshaping all identity. Christ’s Jewish identity as the liberator of the oppressed and as an impoverished member of a first-century minority (as Howard Thurman called attention to in 1949148), means little more for Cone than that he is the God of oppressed people groups everywhere, particularly African Americans. Cone does not explore how it could be that the particularity of Jesus’ body redeems all particularities while simultaneously decentering European particularity-as-universality. Carter improvises beyond Cone in this regard, pointing toward a Christology of miscegenation that is both more radical than Cone’s and more sufficient in decentering whiteness as orienting anthropological metanarrative.149

Carter present a scandalous “impure” confluence of particularities centered upon the particularity of the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the path forward out of the strictures of race and the white hegemony that created them. For his part, Cone has difficulty seeing beyond his recognition that the black struggle is a more authentic representation of the incarnation of the Suffering Servant than is the triumphalist rhetoric often characteristic of both white liberalism and orthodoxy. This leaves Cone with the risky proposal that “black people” are “God’s Suffering Servant” for the “liberation of humanity.”150 While it is not my intent to debate the veracity of such a hermeneutical judgment, it does raise the question of the effects of “freezing” the status of “oppressed” and “oppressor” along racialized lines. If racialized identity is a product of the hierarchical evaluative scale of whiteness, then does not assigning divine election based upon such problematic ontological markers as race or socioeconomic status serve to reconfirm the identity categories of whiteness? At this point, Milbank’s work could offer a salient reminder that theology cannot simply sanctify the conclusions of sociology. Cone lays out a narrative of liberation from material oppression as the sole interpretative framework within which to exegete the Scriptures:

The hermeneutical principle for an exegesis of the Scriptures is the revelation of God in Christ as the Liberator of the oppressed from social oppression and to political struggle, wherein the poor recognize that their fight against poverty and injustice is not only consistent with the gospel but is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ the Liberator, the helper and the healer of the wounded, is the point of departure for valid exegesis of the Scriptures from a Christian perspective. Any starting point that ignores God in Christ as the Liberator of the oppressed or that makes salvation as liberation secondary is ipso facto invalid and thus heretical.151

While social liberation is no doubt an indispensable theme within the narrative of divine salvation, and while this motif has often been ignored within white Western theology, to narrow the scope of God’s work in the world to competing hermeneutical frameworks is a distinctly modern technique refined in the white academy. This exegetical tendency is what Carter refers to as the “oppositional struggle for the right to be hegemon.”152 A polity in which “otherness” is the morally preferable position will be a polity in which more people will find ever new categories by which to define themselves as “other.” As society increasingly splinters into competing groups staking this claim, it may relativize recognition of the evils perpetrated against those most often historically objectified. The problem of race, as the principal anthropological distortion in the history of the West, may not receive the careful and unique attention it requires.

A polity ordered around only a politics of identity cannot help but progress to an ever-increasing social splintering in which the only enemy is hegemony qua hegemony. Both the Christological category of Lordship153 and a particular social ground of being are excluded in such a framework. “Unity” is this modern liberal polity is ordered around an assimilationist universality that Carter calls whiteness. This is why Carter’s focus on the Jewishness of Jesus Christ as the ground for the body politic is so important and is preferable to Cone’s Christological politics of the oppressed.

Cone’s own hermeneutic often serves to relativize his conclusions. He states that we must recognize, as did Imamu Baraka, that “there is no objective anything,” to which Cone adds, “least of all theology.”154 He recognizes the situatedness of all ethical and theological inquiry and utilizes several proponents of the “sociology of knowledge” school to insist upon recognition of “the social context of theology.”155 While this important insight should not be ignored, the significance for my current purposes is that this trajectory leaves him with only one option: “The dissimilarity between Black Theology and white theology lies at the point of each having different mental grids which account for their different approaches to the gospel. I believe that the social a priori of Black Theology is closer to the axiological perspective of biblical revelation.”156 While this is arguably true, this relativizing trajectory places the burden of proof within sociological disciplinary confines and outside the realm of theology. In other words, theology here becomes only a Tillichian “answering discipline.”

If the truth of the biblical story is God’s liberation of the oppressed, then the social a priori of oppressors excludes the possibility of their hearing and seeing the truth of divine presence, because the conceptual universe of their thought contradicts the story of divine liberation. Only the poor and the weak have the axiological grid necessary for the hearing and the doing of the divine will disclosed in their midst . . . Since the gospel is liberation from bondage, and since the poor are obvious victims of oppression because of the inordinate power of the rich, it is clear that the poor have little to lose and everything to gain from Jesus Christ’s presence in history . . . This difference in socioeconomic status between the rich and the poor affected the way in which each responded to Jesus.157

Cone’s ontological freezing of the “difference in socioeconomic status” is further complicated by the fact that Cone calls “black people” “God’s poor people.”158 In like terms, he names “the oppressed” “God’s elect people.”159 And yet he maintains that “poverty is a contrived phenomenon, traceable to the rich and the powerful in this world” and that knowledge of this reality “requires that the poor practice political activity against the social and economic structure that makes them poor.”160 If poverty is described, I believe rightly so, as a “contrived phenomenon” perpetrated by the rich and powerful upon those who must struggle against it, would not that struggle, according to Cone’s logic, entail a rejection of the very ontological designation by which the poor receive divine election? In a similar vein, if “poor,” “black,” and “oppressed” are used by Cone as functionally synonymous, would not overcoming poverty and oppression be an exercise in self-hatred as one seeks to overcome blackness? Here is a marked ambiguity in Cone’s thought: he wants to explode oppression, poverty, and racist classificatory schemas while also privileging them within his hermeneutical framework. For Cone, the hopeful miscegenation envisioned by Carter could only breed a loss of election. The telos of Cone’s framework is a reification of ontological blackness.

There is little room for the realities of ethical complication in a schema of static ontology. Cone finds it hard to allow for the possibility that the objectified “subjects” of whiteness could acquiesce to living out the politics of objectification or that members of the regnant social order could repent and call objectification into question by choosing to be identified with those objectified. While he does not negate the latter scenario, he declares it to be “the rare possibility of conversion among white oppressors.”161 He maintains that “it must be made absolutely clear that it is the black community that decides both the authenticity of white conversion and also the part these converts will play in the black struggle of freedom” and that “[t]he converts can have nothing to say about the validity of their conversion experience.”162 While he astutely diagnoses both the chronic resistance of white theology to submit to unlike others and its propensity to co-opt the struggles of others in its own self-reflexive identity-struggles, the effect of redirecting the agency of reconciliation from the free work of God to the judgment of “the oppressed” is a weakening of the theological ground upon which the problematic patterns of white views of reconciliation may be criticized. While Cone’s stated intention is to escape “a view of reconciliation based on white values,”163 his solution is theologically problematic, based on his own insistence upon “the objective reality of reconciliation” as “an act of God.”164 Encouraging the passivity of whites in the process of reconciliation may also further encourage the problematic interior reflective patterns of whiteness. Cone recognizes this self-absorptive tendency in white theology, which he refers to as “a bourgeois exercise in intellectual masturbation.”165

While I suspect that Cone is overstating his position a bit in order to make a necessary point about the objectifying nature of most white talk about “reconciliation,” Carter reads Cone’s work as not being sufficiently “trenchant” in diagnosing what makes white theology “white.”166 Cone’s overstatement is displayed in his envisioning of a process of “reconciliation: black and white.”167

Whites must be made to realize that they are not only accountable to Roy Wilkins but also to Imamu Baraka. And if the latter says that reconciliation is out of the question, then nothing the former says can change that reality, for both are equally members of the black struggle of freedom. Unless whites can get every single black person to agree that reconciliation is realized, there is no place whatsoever for white rhetoric about the reconciling love of blacks and whites.168

While Cone’s point is that if whites are “truly converted” to the struggle for liberation they will “know that reconciliation is a gift that excludes boasting,”169 thereby precluding the possibility that “white converts” could use experiences in the “[black] community as evidence against blacks,” it seems improbable that Cone actually desires a logistical scenario in which white people try to “get” (a word that invokes manipulation) “every single black person” to validate them in their desire for community. There is not much that could more effectively encourage the paternalistic and self-obsessed psychology of whiteness than such a pursuit of reconciliation. Shifting the agency of reconciliation from the dominant social order to the objectified “other,” rather than recentering it on the particularity of the divine work in human history through the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, reconfirms the binary logic of whiteness. Cone more sufficiently summarizes his position when he notes that “liberation” is the “precondition for reconciliation.”170

Cone appears to recognize that freezing ontological status based on relative sociological status may not be an entirely valid move, allowing himself several moments of vulnerability in reflecting on his contention that “Jesus is black”:

If Jesus’ presence is real and not docetic, is it not true that Christ must be black in order to remain faithful to the divine promise to bear the suffering of the poor? Of course, I realize that “blackness” as a christological title may not be appropriate in the distant future or even in every human context in our present . . . But the validity of any christological title in any period of history is not decided by its universality but by this: whether in the particularity of its time it points to God’s universal will to liberate particular oppressed people from inhumanity. This is exactly what blackness does in the contemporary social existence of America . . . To say that Christ is black means that God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, not only takes color seriously, he also takes it upon himself and discloses his will to make us whole.171

This is the point at which Cone’s argument gains the most traction and most clearly anticipates Carter’s later conclusion. Further clarifying this contention he states:

I realize that my theological limitations and my close identity with the social conditions of black people could blind me to the truth of the gospel. And maybe our white theologians are right when they insist that I have overlooked the universal significance of Jesus’ message. But I contend that there is no universalism that is not particular . . . As long as they can be sure that the gospel is for everybody, ignoring that God liberated a particular people from Egypt, came in a particular man called Jesus, and for the particular purpose of liberating the oppressed, then they can continue to talk in theological abstractions, failing to recognize that such talk is not the gospel unless it is related to the concrete freedom of the little ones.172

By insisting on theological particularity, Cone prefigures Carter’s argument regarding supersessionism. Cone laments the divorce of theology and ethics, maintaining that this separation is a result of the Western imbibing of Greek philosophy rather than the Judeo-centric nexus of biblical revelation. This misstep has influenced the “exorbitant claims” Christian theologians have made regarding the “universal character of their discourse,” which “was consistent with the God of Plotinus but not with the God of Moses and Amos.”173 For Cone, questions related to theology and race cannot be considered without recognizing the misstep the Church took in substituting Greek discourses of philosophical power for the biblical discourse of liberation. This disregard for situatedness carries with it a universalizing motif that finds expression in certain “cultural values.”174 These cultural values are named by Carter as whiteness.

While Cone’s account of Jewish theological particularity prefigures Carter’s theology, his disallowing of transcendence locks him in a static ontology. Whereas Cone freezes humans as either “oppressed” or “oppressor,” Carter names them “Jews” and “Gentiles,” thereby more sufficiently decentering the creature in light of the free agency of the Creator, rendering both oppression and objectification theologically untenable. While Cone should not be expected to bear the burden of reflecting upon white identity, Cone’s theological trajectory tends to lock whiteness into a self-reflexive pattern that has trouble moving beyond “white guilt” into concrete work for justice, liberation, and relationship. If the white, Western worldview cannot be filled with a new spirit following the casting out of its demon, then it will produce little more than an “evil generation” filled with “seven other spirits more wicked than itself,”175 a reality we are witnessing in the escalation of racial violence in “colorblind” twenty-first-century America. Static ontologies are unable to contend against this evil.

Cone and the Lynched Flesh of Christ

In his most recent work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone more strongly states the universal import of his theology, suggesting the redemption that is possible for all people as they are together identified with the flesh of the oppressed and crucified One. In God of the Oppressed, Cone held out the possibility of repentance from whiteness, referring to it as “white people becoming black.”176 This suggests that even in his earlier thought, his static categories of identity were a bit more permeable than he overtly allowed. Just as “white” and “black” are not for Carter about racial reification, so for Cone blackness may be more about the flesh of Jesus than about racial essentialization. “Becoming black” is akin to Carter’s language of miscegenation, through which fictive blood lines are rejected in the desire of people for one another. If miscegenation threatens what Carter calls “the idolatrously false purity” of whiteness,177 then it is not inappropriate to envision repentance as blackness. For Carter, this does not mean that the particularities of any one people should be unilaterally enthroned or rejected. What it does mean is that the particularity which masquerades as universality (read: “whiteness”) is disavowed as various particularities together participate in the Jewish flesh of Jesus. Carter’s language of miscegenation, or what he calls “a theology of participation” over against “an ontology of separateness,” is a more precise formulation than Cone’s.178

Drawing from the grammar of Chalcedon, Carter maintains that orthodox Christology must be understood as the life of YHWH being fully suffused with the life of the creature. This covenantal Christology “decenter[s] dialectic” by refusing “ontologized understandings of the person and work of Jesus”:

The problem with dialectical thinking and related forms of philosophical thinking is that they begin from closure and then have to negotiate passage through an “ugly broad ditch” between things that are closed . . . The covenant witnesses to the fact that for God, and only because of God’s identity as God for us, there is no ditch to be crossed by us. God has from the first bound Godself to us in God’s communion with Israel as a communion for the world. This is the inner logic of the identity of Jesus, the inner logic by which Israel is always already a mulatto people precisely in being YHWH’s people, and by which therefore Jesus himself as the Israel of God is Mulatto . . . He is miscegenated, and out of the miscegenation discloses the God of Israel as the God of the Gentiles too.179

Because God is on both sides of the covenant, that of the Creator and that of the creature, dialectical frameworks such as Buber’s I-Thou are “not radical enough.”180 While Cone has labored to transform the I-It relationship that whiteness maintains with the “other” to an I-Thou relationship in which the latter party is no longer objectified by the former, Carter contends that Cone’s theology is ultimately unsuccessful in dislodging the “I” as the normalizing side of the equation. Carter explains that this formulation is “really only a settlement with whiteness, not its overcoming.”181 While it is “alluring” because it carries with it the benefit of a “settlement with blackness,” a settlement with the “blackness that whiteness created” is only a settlement with whiteness “in the idiom of cultural blackness.”182 In that arrangement, the “I relates to the other but allows it a separate-but-equal status in relationship to itself as I.”183 Carter’s analysis suggests the theological exhaustion that comes from the intellectual calisthenics necessary for the creature to attempt to fill the position of pseudo-creator as the universal “I.” Carter suggests the redemption that can be found in the arms of “impure” relations:

The conclusion to be drawn from my analysis is this: black liberation theology’s refusal to see the I, and in fact all of creation, in gratuitous terms, that is, as a covenantal reality, leaves the problem of whiteness uncontested, insofar as at root it is a theological problem. As a theological problem, whiteness names the refusal to trade against race. It names the refusal to enter into dependent, promiscuous, and in short, “contaminated” relations that resist an idolatrously false purity. The blackness that whiteness creates names the same refusal, albeit cast as the photo negative that yet retains the problem. What is needed is a vision of Christian identity, then, that calls us to holy “impurity” and “promiscuity,” a vision that calls for race trading against the benefits of whiteness so as to enter into the miscegenized or mulattic existence of divinization (theosis).184

As fraught with risks as this process may be, no less than this is at stake in the existence of a new body politic imaging Trinitarian mutuality. While a Conian ontologizing of blackness may be a helpful step out of objectifying relational patterns, a relationality of vulnerability and mutual dependance cannot be envisioned within his framework alone. Carter’s Christology more satisfactorily points to the beautiful messiness of the Incarnation.

I contend that, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone’s sounding of several more hopeful and conciliatory notes about the relational possibilities within the body of Jesus Christ allows him to more satisfactorily frame his critique of whiteness. I read The Cross and the Lynching Tree as written, at least in part, in response to Carter’s work. Cone is well aware of the work of Carter, about whom he has said: “I have nothing but praise for this work by a young African American scholar who must be reckoned with.”185 While I am not suggesting that Carter’s work was the direct impetus for the authoring of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, it seems that there are several points within the text at which Cone implicitly responds to Carter’s critique of him.186 Since Cone offers The Cross and the Lynching Tree as a “culmination” of his career, he is no doubt interested in utilizing the utmost precision in his theological formulations as he further cements his legacy. While some of his prophetic fury has mellowed a bit, his articulation of the theological problem of whiteness has intensified. Perhaps counterintuitively, this increased theological precision allows him to utilize rhetoric that is less self-conscious.

One gets the strong impression in reading God of the Oppressed that, for all its fire, the book was in some sense an apologetic to make black faith more palatable to whites. While it made use of primarily African American ecclesial sources, it did so in a way that sought to explain their insights to those not versed in a “black” church tradition. While he explicitly disavows the necessity that his reflections be judged against “the theological treatises of Euro-American theologians,”187 he nonetheless labors extensively to explain to the reader “why black people” utilize certain language or cultural forms in worship.188 Rhetorical formulations such as “this is what black people are affirming when they say . . . ” are presumably unnecessary for the very people Cone is describing. References to ecstasy in worship as “making it difficult for an observer to know what is actually happening,” demonstrate an ambiguity in Cone’s method. On the one hand, he wants to say that his utilization of black church traditions is in no way answerable to the white academy and, on the other hand, engages in describing what is “actually happening” in the worship of non-white bodies (as if the truth of the experience is found in an externally verifiable reality other than what the worshippers are themselves experiencing).

While this suggests that Cone is bound to presuppositions that favor white conceptions of rationality, in these moments one also feels that Cone is standing between two traditions and attempting to “translate” from one to the other. This proclivity in his work demonstrates both the paradoxical task of the black intellectual in modernity and, even in his early work, a marked desire to build connection and intimacy with others. Much in the same way as I interpreted Cone’s use of dialectic as a way of maintaining epistemological humility, I interpret Cone’s anger at subjugation as a deep desire for human connection and affirmation of the divinely-granted dignity of the creature. Rather than being committed to either dialectic or apologetic, Cone is defending people so as to establish non-objectifying connections between them. What I have characterized as Cone’s “apologetic of palatability” can also be read as desire for mutual vulnerability. Even in God of the Oppressed, while stressing “self-determination,”189 his goal was that “the neighbor [be] an end in himself or herself and not a means to an end.190 This posture is a point of convergence between the works of Cone and Carter.

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone asserts the similarity between the instrument of the torture and death of Jesus at the hands of the Romans and the instrument of the torture and death of thousands of African Americans at the hands of white Americans. He asks how it could be that lynching has been so quickly “forgotten” in our collective memory and how it could be that the leading theologians of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries could have escaped the obvious parallels between them in their theological ethics. His contention is that white Americans would prefer to forget lynching because of the obvious Christological consequences of such a recognition, while black Americans have attempted to bury the memory because it is simply too painful to endure.191 Cone again presents black existence as cruciform existence, which bears similarities to Carter’s iconographic ontology. Whereas in God of the Oppressed the path from bondage to liberation was self-determination alone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree the hope is that the demon of racism can be exorcised in part by white recognition of complicity in sin and a communal re-telling of the story of liberation. I will demonstrate several ways in which Cone’s thought is moving in the direction of Carter’s.

First, he states that his purpose in writing is that the “credibility and promise of the Christian gospel” would be maintained and that the hope of “heal[ing] the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society” would be realized.192 While not being inconsistent with his earlier thought, the stated desire for the healing of ecclesial division is now presented in a different inflection. In his new preface to the second edition of God of the Oppressed, Cone invokes a desire to “make real the beloved community” and notes that:

Human beings are made for each other and no people can realize their full humanity except as they participate in its realization for others. While some critics, shocked by my accent on blackness, missed this universal note in my theology, it has been there from the beginning. The end point of my theology is as important as the particularity out of which it was born.193

Second, Cone calls for black and white alike to retell the story of the lynching tree in their veneration of the cross, suggesting that whites can “separate themselves from the culture that lynched blacks” by “confront[ing] their history and expos[ing] the sin of white supremacy.”194 He acknowledges that “a host” of people, “black, white and other[s] . . . of many walks of life,” “sacrificed their bodies and lives for . . . freedom.”195 This recognition, while perhaps being present throughout his work, has not been stated as clearly as it is now.

Third, in his criticism of Reinhold Niebuhr, Cone hints at the possibility that, in the ironic words of Niebuhr, “a fully developed interracial church” would be the “ultimate test.”196 Cone is not suggesting that Niebuhr’s observation was wrong, but criticizing Niebuhr for not working to make this a reality at Bethel Church in New York, when two African American parishioners were opposed in seeking membership. Niebuhr had remarked that he “never envisaged” an intentionally interracial worshipping community, explaining “I do not think we are ready for that.”

A fourth convergence with Carter is Cone’s subversion of a prominent modern theologian. While Carter directs his critique against Milbank, Cone explicitly calls Niebuhr to account for his failures to discern the primary theological hypocrisy of his age and thereby personally combat racial objectification. While Carter criticizes the Radical Orthodoxy of his teacher, Cone reproves his predecessor at Union Theological Seminary, the ethicist of “Christian realism” who has been a canonical source for much contemporary thinking on social justice and a key influence on Cone. Like Carter, Cone reveals how the “best” of “progressive” white theology often falls short of adequately addressing the theological problem of race. Cone presents Niebuhr as a Christian socialist who actively spoke out against racism and waxed eloquent about the “terrible beauty” of the cross while neither discerning the terrible irony of the lynching tree nor being able to submit to learning from black subjectivity.197 Niebuhr, whose social ethics focused on justice rather than love,198 demonstrated a “defect in the conscience of white Christians.”199 Niebuhr, while calling racism “the gravest social evil in our nation,”200 counseled gradualism in the struggle for black liberation, unlike either King or Malcolm X. Cone maintains that Niebuhr showed little interest in dialoguing with African Americans about racial injustice, preferring instead to speak on behalf of them.201 This critique is all the more trenchant given Cone’s personal story of joining the faculty of Union Seminary and receiving Niebuhr’s letter regarding his favorable, and yet paternalistic, assessment of Black Theology and Black Power.202 In contrast, Cone cites Bonhoeffer’s involvement in an African American church and his study of black theological and cultural resources during his time at Union to demonstrate that, “it has never been impossible” “for white people to empathize fully with the experience of black people.”203 While I will later address what may be problematic about this latter formulation of Cone’s, the point is that Cone suggests that Niebuhr failed to learn from King, although King explicitly cited Niebuhr as a primary influence. Cone laments that “[w]hite theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology.”204

Fifth, Cone is careful to qualify his invocations of mutual love by recognizing that reconciliation without liberation is empty.205 In referencing the work of the literary giants of the Harlem Renaissance, Cone contends: “Artists recognized that no real reconciliation could occur between blacks and whites without telling the painful and redeeming truths about their life together.”206 Whereas in God of the Oppressed reconciliation had been impossible without the unanimous and unilateral consent of blackness, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree shared truth is the prerequisite for life together. The reason Cone is hesitant to speak of reconciling love is because “whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans.”207

Sixth, Cone moves toward diagnosing what is faulty about the Christian imagination. He recognizes that the distortion of Christian identity runs so deep that “even in the black community the public meaning of Christianity was white.”208 He states that “the most ‘progressive’ of . . . white theologians and religious thinkers” have failed to recognize the distortion in the “American Christian imagination.”209 One cannot help but wonder if Cone has appropriated from Jennings this manner of phrasing the issue. Cone’s purpose has been to explore how one can simultaneously be black and Christian when Christian identity has been defined by whiteness.210 Cone’s focus on the distorted imagination of Christianity as white intuits Carter’s and Jennings’ critique of supersessionism.

Seventh, in exploring what he calls the racialized scale of “white over black,” Cone explains that the greatest fear of Anglo-Saxon civilization has historically been that of “race-mixing” or “mongrelization.”211 Even as sexual relations between the races were often consensual, miscegenation, or the perceived possibility of its occurrence, was the primary justification given for lynching. Protecting white women from the supposed “insatiable lust” of black men was the moral “duty” of white mobs.212 This was in a climate where African American men desiring to protect their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers from white male rape of black women often brought down “the full weight of Judge Lynch” upon themselves. If, as Cone maintains, the fear of miscegenation served as the ethical justification for the perpetration of one of America’s greatest evils, then for Carter to identify this Christological and ecclesiological “scandal” as the greatest hope for resisting the false gospel of whiteness is all the more poignant.

Eighth, Cone gestures beyond ontological blackness by presenting black faith much like an “icon” for the salvation of all people: “I wrestle with questions about black dignity in a world of white supremacy because I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy.”213 Cone offers all people the opportunity to “step into black people’s shoes” to realize that

humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort.214

Against the self-assumed vocation of the “elite” (which we will see is characteristic of Milbank’s ethics of virtue), Cone, like Carter, offers the historical and theological resources of black faith as a path out of the abstractions of whiteness.

In these ways, Cone, like Carter, presents the space of black-white relations as the space of the lynched body of Christ:

Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience. What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves—their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers, and fathers . . . Whites may be bad brothers and sisters . . . but they are still our sisters and brothers . . . All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom . . . We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus . . . What God joined together, no one can tear apart.215

The Limits of Ontological Blackness

While I have listed eight themes in The Cross and the Lynching Tree which demonstrate that Cone’s thought is moving in the direction of Carter, I will suggest that, for all its flourish, Cone’s theology is in the end less radical than that of Carter.

First, I am unconvinced by Cone’s assertion, in relation to Bonhoeffer, that anyone can “empathize fully” with the experience of another. I am likewise unconvinced that any person can “fully” understand his or her own experience. While I appreciate the point Cone is making, empathy is ultimately less radical than participation. “Empathy” names a quest to share the feelings of another. “Empathy” alone can be as much an exercise in objectification as antipathy. It does not necessarily cross what Carter terms the “ugly broad ditch” of dialectic; empathy does not exclude the possibility of an “ontology of separateness”; empathy is less radical than mutual participation. Bonhoeffer, who is Cone’s example of one who “fully empathize[d]” with black subjectivity, demonstrates in Creation and Fall that he does not trust even his own conscience.216 In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer flatly declares the quest for relational immediacy to be antithetical to the Gospel.217 If Jesus Christ is the sole mediator, then empathy, in addition to not being “fully” possible, could provide a substitute for the path of the cross, through which one receives the “other” back through the participatory mediation of Christ’s body. Perhaps this “forgetfulness” of self in the knowledge of God is what enabled Bonhoeffer to more adequately respect, learn from, and be immersed in nonwhite theological resources and ecclesial communities. Carter’s theology of “participation” moves the church in this direction. Miscegenation, as understood by Carter, names trading against race and becoming dependent upon the “unlike” other in order to enter divinization. This mulattic participation is to be distinguished from empathy.

Second, that Carter’s vision is more radical than Cone’s is seen in the paternalisms that plague Cone’s work. Cone regularly speaks as if he were an outside observer categorizing those he desires to see liberated. For instance, while Cone confesses that he has been justifiably criticized for not satisfactorily listening to female voices in his work, when he does listen male paternalism sometimes creeps into even his most favorable assessments. In presenting Ida B. Wells’ campaign against lynching as a prime example of theological integrity, Cone claims that “black women activists . . . did not need theological imagination to show [lynching to be wrong].”218 Yet he has already labored to show that the lived experience of resistance produces theological imaginations that are profound in ways that more formal and detached reflections are not. Cone’s implication that the experiential insights of women engaged in the struggle for freedom were less sophisticated theologically suggests that he maintains male subjectivity as the normalizing pole of the equation. Likewise, when referring to black ministers with “little or no formal training in academic theology,” Cone claims that “they spoke from their hearts, appealing to their life experience . . . and the Spirit of God” while proclaiming “what they felt in song and sermon.”219 Yet again, why should “little or no formal training in academic theology” render someone unable to speak from the mind, as well as from the heart? Can those who have not been assimilated into white, Western theology not love God with all their minds? Is not Cone’s appeal to “untutored” African American preachers’ reliance upon their hearts and the Spirit very similar to those white authors like Piper who picture “the black experience” as adding a bit of soul or spirit to the Western tradition?220 What does this have to say about Cone’s views of what constitutes rationality and the “human”? As can be seen through these two examples, Cone’s ontological blackness far too frequently produces objectifying classifications.

Finally, Cone’s racialized ontology causes him to inadequately theorize Jewish identity. Whereas the early Cone suggested the particularity of the Jewish flesh of Jesus as the antidote to abstracting, white theology, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree Cone several times equates Jewishness and whiteness. For example, he calls Julius Bloch both a “white artist” and a “Jew from Germany.”221 He paradoxically names Abel Meeropol, author of Strange Fruit, a “white Jewish school teacher” while attributing his sensitivity about racial injustice to being part of a “marginalized community who had a long history of suffering at the hands of white Christians.”222 While Jewishness and whiteness may be used interchangeably within modern, racialized identity reflections, Jennings contends that the colonial genesis of racialization was born out of a desire to extricate the Jewish contagion from European lands. This demonstrates that Cone does not conceive of whiteness as primarily a sociopolitical order but a skin color, which cannot but slip into essentialized conceptions of race. Carter maintains that Jewish flesh is covenantal, not racial flesh. We will see in the next chapter that race, in the modern era, was activated by distancing whiteness from Jewish flesh.

Although Cone has moved in the direction of Carter, his framework of ontological blackness complicates his many positive strides. Although Carter incorporates many aspects of the theological foundation laid by Cone, his relationship to Cone must be assessed as one of greater divergence than his relationship with Raboteau. We will now move to explicating Carter’s relationship to the scholar from whose trajectory he most clearly distances himself.

Charles H. Long: Signifying Race

Long and the Religious Primordium

Charles Long is a celebrated historian of religions who retired from the Religious Studies Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara after teaching at both the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate and worked closely with Mircea Eliade in establishing many of the parameters of their discipline. His work is representative of the manner in which modern religious studies tends to consider race. In this section I will show how Carter reads Long as more precisely recognizing the racial problematic than either Raboteau or Cone, yet more problematically imbibing the philosophical structure of Enlightenment than either scholar. Long’s areas of expertise include creation myths, cultural contact in modernity (including cargo cults), and African American religious history.223 His signature text is Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, which is a collection of essays that probe the nature of “religion,” cultural encounters, and the “symbols” of “Afro-American Religion.”224 In his treatment of the black religious academy, Carter substantively interacts with Long to demonstrate trends about which he has serious reservations. I will read Carter in contrast to Long in order to further explicate Carter’s theology of race and to demonstrate the contributions Carter makes toward overcoming the modern problem of whiteness.

As he analyzes the problem of race in America, Long explores the meaning of the term “signifying” for African American communities. Signification is a way in which oppressed communities offer resistance against being signified by the oppressor; Long interprets African American religious history as little more than a complex system of signification. “Signifying,” or “verbal misdirection,” is a “very clever language game,” not subject to “the rules of the discourse”225 (rules that Carter identifies as being tied into whiteness). For Long, the significations of oppressed peoples must be analyzed so as to discern the “reality” underlying the mythology; he claims that this process is often “frustrating.” Long explains that signifying creates, in the words of Saussure, an “arbitrary” bond between the “signifier and the signified,”226 a relationship which is used to subversive effect by the community on the underside of the power structures.227 Thankfully for Long, “all is not signification.”228 To the contrary, there is a “long tradition in the interpretation of symbol” that reveals an “intrinsic relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized.” It is this “long tradition,” embodied in religious studies, that Long purposes to inhabit. Rather than “reduc[ing]” all hermeneutical decisions to the “problem of the sociology of knowledge,”229 this tradition is able to offer an “archaic critique” sufficient to engage in “crawling back through . . . history” so that “the languages and experiences of signification can be seen for what they are and were.”230 “The religious experience” is the interpretive lens that is able to achieve this objectivity. For Long, the discipline of religious studies is able to get to the heart of the matter in ways theological studies is not. This claim on the part of Long is similar to Cone’s project in describing “what is really happening” in African American worship. Carter reads both as being tied into the modern descriptive project and reinforcing the white gaze.

Long’s trajectory displays key hermeneutical distinctions between his methodology and that of Carter. For Long, while the Enlightenment and colonial conquest are the “two critical issues” that have influenced Western descriptions of the “other,” particularly as the West encountered heretofore “unknown” indigenous peoples, the Enlightenment itself offers the resources with which to interpret religion in a non-hegemonic fashion. Long’s identification of colonization and modernity as the two points at which Western intellectual reflection created the “other” bears similarities to Jennings’ and Carter’s analyses, respectively. It is in this phase of his argument that Long, even more so than Raboteau or Cone, has his finger on the pulse of the problem as identified by Carter. Not unlike Long, Carter maintains that Christianity “betrays itself” by acting as “a universal, hegemonic discourse.”231 Carter states that Long’s “challenge to the hegemony of (Christian) theology over other religions, and thus, over religion qua religion is rightly posed.”232 However, Long comes to widely divergent conclusions. Carter claims that Long’s reduction of particular theological commitments to a universal religious “primordium”233 misinterprets how Christian theology, at its best, should be understood. While Long is resistant to a Christianity that is seen as a religion crowning a hierarchy of religions, Long’s Religionswissenschaft is not radical enough. Carter maintains that Long’s science of religions renders Christian theology, and any theology for that matter, as little more than an “answering discipline” to the modern category of “religion.”234 In this manner, Long rounds off all particular theological commitments to a bland modern universal humanist religious impulse. It is this privileging of the “religious” as such that Carter will identify with the Kantian construction of race. Carter reads Long “as providing the philosophical orientation on the meaning of history that is ambiguously present in Slave Religion [Raboteau’s early work]” and “as giving the philosophical infrastructure to James H. Cone’s post-Barthian black liberation theology.”235 It is the Longian philosophy of religious studies with which Carter most clearly contrasts his own position:

As one surveys the discipline of African American religious studies, from history to theology to philosophies of religious humanism, it is indisputable that Long’s view of religion generally and his view of black religion particularly is more or less the order of the day in the field of African American religious studies. Insofar as this is the case, Long and religious scholars who are heir to his general approach to religious studies would take African American religious thought in a direction counter to the direction I start to sketch at the end of the last chapter [Cone] and that I develop further in part III [Hammon, Douglass, Lee]. Indeed, it can be said that through his interpretation of black liberation theology as an opaque discourse, Long culminates the intellectual trajectory of black liberation theology as a pure science of religion: as Wissenschaft . . . My objective in this chapter is to raise a note of serious alarm regarding this direction of the field.236

While I will focus at the end of this chapter on Carter’s alternative to this trajectory, I will first identify in Long that which so clearly troubles Carter.

Long’s diagnosis of the racialized underpinnings of the Enlightenment is similar to Carter’s:

While the reformist structure of the Enlightenment had mounted a polemic against the divisive meaning of religion in Western culture and set forth alternate meanings for the understanding of the human, the same ideological structures through various intellectual strategies paved the ground for historical evolutionary thinking, racial theories, and forms of color symbolism that made the economic and military conquest of various cultures and peoples justifiable and defensible. In this movement both religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations—they were signified.237

In his most trenchant moments, Long utilizes language that hints at the theological distortions Carter identifies. When Long maintains that “peoples throughout the world were created anew,” he gestures toward what Carter identifies as the distortion of creation that is whiteness, indicating the implications it had for anthropology and the natural sciences, with their evolutionary logic of human “progress” versus “primitivism.” Long recognizes the problematic nature of the modern project, yet finds the path forward to be in the same methodological commitments. He imbibes the orientation of the modern religious academy in ways that neither Raboteau nor Cone did:

I perceived that there was a structure for the universal in the human world that, though created from Enlightenment understandings of the human venture, expressed an opening for the authentic expression of others. Religion thus became the locus for a meaning that carried an archaic form; it was a root meaning and could thus become the basis for radical critical thought. The essays presented in this volume explore the possibilities of a form of thought that is rooted in the religious experience of black traditions.238

It is not so much the particularities of “black traditions” that are important for Long. What matters is the universal religious “root meaning”—the “primordium”—which the modern academy discerns within and through those traditions, or any traditions for that matter. While Long recognizes the problematic nature of modern classificatory schemas, he nonetheless finds hope for their overcoming through the “opening” the Enlightenment created: religion. Long defines religion as “orientation”: “how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”239 Longian religion is non-transcendent; it is a product of the human quest for self-situatedness. Long maintains that “the religion of any people is . . . experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles, and rhythms.”240 Black theology, or any theology, is nothing more than human self-actualization. The “archaic critique” of religious studies discerns what was “actually taking place” in the spiritual experiences of various peoples.241 Instead of calling modern encyclopedic methodologies into question (as does Carter), Long has in effect upped the ante in their favor. For Long, the problem is not with the modern scholarly gaze, but that the intellectual quest has been distorted by what he calls “latent” power.242

More often than not, the differences that bring a culture or a people to the attention of the investigator are not simply formed from the point of view of the intellectual problematic; they are more often than not the nuances and latencies of that power which is part of the structure of the cultural contact itself manifesting itself as intellectual curiosity.243

Long implies that if the power differential could be accounted for, the “point of view of the intellectual problematic” could produce a pure form of “cultural contact.” This is epistemologically problematic to say the least. For Long, it is not the ability of the historian, scientist, anthropologist, sociologist, or religious scholar to arrive at a satisfactory observational knowledge of the “other” that is in question. Rather, the problem is that the “pure” empirical stance has not often been achieved because of the pursuit of power: desire for conquest was “masked by the intellectual desire for knowledge of the other.”244 Long maintains that by working to get behind “the creation of discourses of power,” “what really happened” will be recognizable in the obvious “facts of history.”245 Carter’s thesis suggests that Long’s approach drastically underestimates the power that is wielded through the modern presumption of the ability to “know” and “describe.”

Carter’s vision of a Pentecostal re-ordering of language within “impure” relations calls into question the ability of the observatory stance of the modern religious academy to adequately discern the voice of the other. Carter’s analysis suggests that the best that studies of “cultural contact” can achieve is a more “positive” evaluation of the particularities of the other (which is not a completely bad development). However, this reformist evaluative structure is less radical than mutual participation. The problematic nature of Long’s descriptive tendencies can be seen as he reflects:

For example, on the descriptive level, one cannot deny that there are peoples and cultures of dark-skinned, kinky-haired human beings who do not wear clothing in the manner of the cultures of the investigators, and, in addition, they express very different meanings regarding their orientations in their worlds. While this may be true on the descriptive and analytical levels, the fact that these characteristics were noted as the basis for significant differences is often unexplored. In other words, what leads one to locate the differences within what is the common?246

Long drastically under-emphasizes the significance of the comparative aesthetic judgments he is making. For Long, the evaluative ability of the observer is assumed; he sees the problem to be the assignation of comparative value. While he has a valid point regarding the problematic nature of maintaining a normalizing pole in cross-cultural encounters, what he takes to be analytically undeniable is itself an unrelenting aesthetic comparison that racializes the “other.” For example, do not designations such as “kinky” or “dark-skinned” in and of themselves introduce the “other” into a linguistic world in which the assignation of comparative value is made possible? Surely calling hair “kinky” is itself a value judgment that assumes straightness of hair to be “normal.” While descriptive words need not be as pejorative as “kinky,” description as a form of analysis is not exempt from making aesthetic value comparisons. In the descriptive project, the self-articulation of the “described” person is necessarily muted. Carter’s work leads to the conclusion that the discipline of religious studies would do well to recognize its limitations.

It is worth noting that Long’s religious studies methodology seems to have begun from a posture of vulnerability. He reveals the situatedness of his own inquiry as he relates that his “concern for the meaning of the religious reality of black Americans” stemmed not only from his “scholarly discipline” but also from his “desire to make sense of my life as a black person in the United States.”247 He found the “history of religions” to be “the only discipline” that “responded to the . . . expressions of my origins.” He purposed to “not begin with a methodology of pathology, one of the primary . . . cultural and social scientific languages about blacks.” Yet Long’s religious studies trajectory does not as sufficiently resist the problem of race as does Carter’s theological focus. As a discipline, religious studies remains beholden to the modern methodological stance that introduced conceptions of pathology into the academy. While Long admirably laments that “the actual situation of cultural contact itself is never brought to the fore within the context of intellectual formulations,”248 his epistemological humility collapses into the assumed objectivity of the disciplinary posture into which he is so clearly invested. Contrasting with Long, Carter presents a vision of mutual dependence in his language of miscegenation and linguistic interpenetration. Carter finds the methodological stance of religious studies to be central in the maintenance of the sociopolitical order of whiteness.

Long and the New God

Carter contends that Long’s relegation of theology to the role of answering discipline does not decenter Western primacy. Rather than an Enlightenment schema in which Christianity is the apex of a hierarchy of religions, Long has substituted an Enlightenment schema which identifies a universal humanist religious impulse undergirding all cultural expressions. Longian religious studies has retained and redirected the rationalist aesthetic of modernity.249 It is this stance that assumes a Kantian religious rationality which Carter will implicate in the construction of race. In this section, I will suggest that the religious studies enterprise is a reaction to deformities in the Christian tradition and offers a less satisfactory anthropology than Carter’s invocation of theology done on the underside of modernity.

Gavin D’Costa’s Theology in the Public Square is helpful in this regard.250 While D’Costa’s vision of a reenactment of classical “Christian culture”251 is problematic in ways that Carter identifies in his treatment of Milbank, D’Costa’s critique of secularization as the only acceptable public discourse is helpful in understanding Carter’s critique of Long. It provides a way to understand how Carter can implicate both religious studies and virtue ethics in the maintenance of whiteness. D’Costa maintains that a post-Christian ethos of secularization is not more open to other modes of thought than is the Western rationalized Christianity of modernity.252 Both are tied into the Enlightenment in ways that Christian theology need not be. D’Costa suggests that it is precisely from particular convictions devoutly held that genuine dialogue and mutuality can be had. It is genuine openness to the other in which true plurality is found, not in a universalizing religious impulse that rounds off the corners of religious doctrine in favor of a bland pluralism. What D’Costa defines as “the ideological nature” of “secularism” can be loosely correlated with how Carter reads Long’s religious studies discipline. It suggests that pluralism as a dogma is static in ways that a thick theology of the Incarnation resists. D’Costa’s recognition of the genuine encounter made possible within a Christian theology shaped by epistemological humility, over against the cultural imperialism of secular religious studies, bears similarities to Carter’s invocation of Christian theology as a mode of “weak thought.”253

Carter reads Long’s approach to religious studies as a reaction against a Christianity that had already long been distorted by supersessionism.254 Long gives a genealogy of religious studies in which he traces the development of the discipline from Max Muller, the eminent linguist and progenitor of modern religious studies, through Rudolf Otto, Joachim Wach, and to Eliade (his colleague).255 Long relates Max Muller’s opposition to Adolf von Harnack, the influential modern liberal historian of dogma. Long extols Muller’s approach and continues his criticism of Christian theology as unable to take seriously the study of other religions based on the merits of their own accounts. Long relates that Harnack was opposed to the establishment of the history of religions as a discipline because he “felt that such study would lead to dilettantism and that those who wished to study other religions should study them through Christianity.”256 Long maintains that Harnack viewed Christianity as “the absolute religion” by which all other religions should be evaluated. Long suggests that Muller’s approach, which posits a sensus communis undergirding all linguistic forms, leading to an experience of the sacred known as the sensus numinous, was a liberating alternative to Harnack’s absolutism.257 Long presents his genealogy of religious studies as the progression from the sensus communis to the sensus numinous, “that capacity for the experience of the sacred that has always been the same for every human being.”258 For Long, Muller’s quest for a “new primordium for Western culture” has now been realized in “the nature of experience itself as expressive of a primordium of human consciousness.”259 Long maintains that “religion is a practical social concern” whose “objective pole,” while needing to “be validated by communal consensus,” is “a mode of release from the entanglements of the social” and “the awareness of an objectivity that lies beyond the social and the existential.”260 Religious studies is a quest to ascertain the universality of the human spirit. In this quest, a transcendent god is irrelevant. A religious primordium is substituted for deity. For Long, it is the death of God261 and his replacement by the universal sensus numinous that Long celebrates as the rise of a “new god” who, while unable to be expressed in “the older theological languages,” has evoked a “new beat, a new rhythm, a new movement.”262