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
