Gentile Christian Critical Race Theorists Should Know Their Place
I have been engaged in Critical Race Theory for a while now. Even though I could consider myself a late comer to this game, I could also reasonably argue that from elementary school through high school and onto college, I had been doing CTR informally. J. Kameron Carter’s RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT radically changed the way I did both theology and race theory. Willie Jennings’ text has added to that transformation.
For Jennings, race theory is just not about studying how skin and stereotypes have been constructed, but also how place [i.e., land] has been stripped from the formations of our identity, and for what purpose (Jennings, page 63). This I think is crucial for the heart of Jennings’ argument, which is protest against “the deformities of Christian intimacy” (9-10). Willie Jennings unmasks Enlightenment universalism as a docetic venture (that is, a gaze that denigrates our material realities) while problematizing “post-modern” contextualization as adoptionist in nature (that is, an insular project incapable of speaking to or inviting outsiders). On contextualization/relativity if you will, if one argues as the 19th century bishop Colenso of South African (as well as other Protestant liberals yesterday and today) argued that God has been with everyone, they just don’t know it approach to religion [ala the anonymous Christianity of Karl Rahner], then what they are really doing is living in an entirely “nationalist intellectual enterprise” (Jennings 166-167). Self-reliance on the national level apart from YHWH is what Jennings refers to as Gentile arrogance.
This arrogance arrives in the Colonialist moment that removed land as a possible site of transformation since it is eliminated as a signifier of our identity (page 248). Jenning’s constructive proposal is one that advocates a Gentile humility, where Israel is not an ethnic group like all ethnic groups striving for political salvation, but as a hermeneutical key, with YHWH fuctioning as “an epistemological crisis” (254). Gentiles are excluded, Jennings implies, from moralizing against YHWH’s crusading activity in the Ancient Near East. Even by postulating that Christians are to imitate these Wars of the Holy One is a supersessionist position, for the church or the nation-state has replaced YHWH and Israel (whose lives are tied together).
For Jennings, “Thus, the question for the living Israel is not, how do you form faith people, what does it mean to form faithful people, given the complex social situations for our theological pedagogies?” (285). In this light, one must understand ideas such as Zionism (and I would include black separatism as well) as reactionary responses to the colonial moment.
A post-racial future for Jennings must not mean a further commodification of space [land] at the expense of skin-color [biology] & cultural practices [social constructs] continuing to up-end place (289). This would also assume that assimilationist projects are sites within the processes to re-create human beings as commodities, objects to be thingified.
After critically engaging this text, reading, and asking question after question, I think I can accept the direction of where Jennings’ and Carter’s similar projects are going, with a few qualifications, and without the Barthianism–if you continue to quote Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Von Balthasar, and T.F. Torrance throughout your works, in my book, you are a Barthian.
My one question to Jennings would be this: Why should we start with the Medieval context as where Christian supersessionism and therefore, the fall to the Colonial Moment began? If this is the case, as Jennings has argued, I don’t see a difference between Jennings’ Protestant account of history [he's a baptist like me 
] and other Protestant accounts that point to the “Dark Ages” of the Middle Ages in between early Christianity and the Enlightenment. I would say that certainly anti-Judaism has its roots earlier than this era, in fact, leading up the 2nd century in [greek-speaking] Alexandria in Roman Egypt, Jews were banned from being full citizens. Is there something in Greek philosophy or the Graeco-roman pantheon that is hostile to the philosophy of Moses, Ezekiel, and Solomon? My point is that these developments precede the Middle Ages and are begging us to take another look at these items.
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Thanks for the clear review.
“This I think is crucial for the heart of Jennings’ argument, which is protest against ‘the deformities of Christian intimacy’”
Intimacy? Like the moralizing navel gazing intimacy of white devotional practices (don’t sex your neighbors’ wives and husbands? – or, privately pray until you get a tingle? – have good table manners?)? Or intimacy like, “bend over and get on that boat to the plantations?” In close context (in your comments, but not the book? –follows next the Enlightenment), so the rationalism of the Enlightenment is the intimacy? Lost here. What’s the intimacy?
“ … [ala the anonymous Christianity of Karl Rahner]”
Got the anonymous Christianity (I kinda like that though, darn it!). Stretch Rahner a bit toward Lonergan, would this criticism apply to Lonergan’s empiricism?
“Jenning’s constructive proposal is one that advocates a Gentile humility, where Israel is not an ethnic group like all ethnic groups striving for political salvation, but as a hermeneutical key, with YHWH functioning as ‘an epistemological crisis.’”
What about the Gentile non-humility (play along) of Jethro suffering advice to Moses’s epistemological crises of judging all those ethnic people in order to apply their chiseled-into-stone Mosaic ethnic law (so the story goes – yes, I know that “Moses” was promiscuous in borrowing heathen law – an aside)? – or is Jethro excused from this rude and intruding Gentile status (was he circumcised?) on account of in-law-ship via marriage (or did Jethro really agree with his daughter that Moses was a bloody father?)?
Rod, really, why do I feel that the turn toward “a hermeneutical key” is looking away from the ethnic law which was at least one object of these ethnic hermeneuts? Or is the key that this is the way Jenning wants it to be?
A little more cuttingly …
I would agree with Jenning that circumcision is quite an “epistemological crises.” Not to go there …
But circumcision was not the only cutting that those good old boys did on – cutting into Gentile nations. In the land grab.
… these questions above are open ones, not defenses of a settled position.
Trying to get the feel.
Cheers,
Jim
Hey Jim,
A lot to answer here. Let’s see if I can help; i took notes on the book.
“What’s the intimacy?”
Well, actually, Jennings is try to avoid the language of reconciliation which has been co-opted by persons who do not want to talk about histories of oppression. He prefers intimacy for now; I hope his trajectory changes on this. But hey, intimacy isnt that bad— he does have a notion of what it means to be intimate–but it is more than human bodily sexual contact.
“would this criticism apply to Lonergan’s empiricism? ”
I am unfamiliar with Lonergan but I felt like his words about “anonymous Xianity” are closer to how I feel. Is a person human to the extent they live up to the same religious virtues as me? I get frightened at the task of making such an analysis. What Willie excludes from his theology, which gives away his barthian leanings and influence of Brueggemann, is the notion of the imago dei. I think, like Christ, humanity made in the image of God is something we can know, as well as something that remains a mystery. I think it is a crucial doctrine, and Xians would be wise to continue to re-consider it as a doctrine.
“What about the Gentile non-humility?”
A ha. Good question. About Jethro. In Jethro’s case, I think he was passing along wisdom to Moses, and Moses, being the most humble man on the planet as Numbers says, took that advice. Jethro, like Job, represents the “ideal” Gentile engrafted into the covenant.
“why do I feel that the turn toward “a hermeneutical key” is looking away from the ethnic law which was at least one object of these ethnic hermeneuts? Or is the key that this is the way Jenning wants it to be?”
Jim, I could not agree more with this question. I kept asking myself the same question as I was reading this text, trust me. The last chapters in Ezra and Nehemiah are really disturbing. Jennings, however, wants us to move away from “God is free to do whatever he wants” to looking at God existing in covenant, being bound to the material realities of Israel. But at the same time, when Jennings argues things like, “we Gentiles do not have any more ground to stand on to judge God’s actions,” it makes me wonder if Jennings’ stance is connected to his education in an evangelical background–Calvin College as an undergrad, Fuller for his masters. I am with him half way, especially trying to avoid looking at Israel as just another nationalistic people striving toward political salvation in this western universal gaze. But his view really does not help with circumcision, Ezra/Nehemiah, and I would venture to say the Davidic Monarchy–which he implies is a good thing, but I beg to differ.
Much clearer. Helpful answers all around. Moses on listening-humility. Outstanding.
English version please.
I’ll even settle for an ebonics version, or even spanish. Its just, I don’t speak psychobabel.
?
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Excellent piece
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