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
