Christology. At this point Jennings could be a helpful conversation partner for the CCDA as his theology of place and particularity provides a more sufficient framework for considering the joining of diverse peoples. While the CCDA is invaluable as an unlikely community of diverse practitioners joined together as advocates with those on the margins, it is not first and foremost a theological school.
Somewhat more sophisticated works have been produced recently which share similar theological sensibilities to those of the CCDA. From the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice have edited a series called Resources for Reconciliation, in which they pen Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing.25 Katongole and Rice attempt to move beyond truncated visions of reconciliation often expressed in Evangelical circles by expanding those accounts into a holistic vision of the reconciliation of all things in Christ. Likewise, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explores a practical theological vision of reconciliation in his semi-autobiographical account Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line.26 Wilson-Hartgrove reflects on learning to “hear the Gospel in a new key” as he was welcomed into a historically black church in Durham, and what this journey has meant for his understanding of identity and ecclesiology. While referencing Jennings and Carter as his teachers, and acknowledging their works as an important emerging “school” in “American theology,”27 the genre of Wilson-Hartgrove’s text limits the scope of his explorations of the theological genesis of the racial imagination.
In many ways, the intersection of religious thought and race in contemporary American public discourse can be shown to be inextricably linked to the dual legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. As Cone demonstrates in Martin and Malcolm and America, the divergent emphases of Martin and Malcolm, which were heading toward greater convergence when the life of each religious leader and activist was violently snuffed out, demonstrate two distinct yet interconnected ways of viewing relationships across lines of ethnicity.28 As demonstrated through MLK’s collected papers and speeches in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.29 and the two preeminent accounts of Malcolm X’s life, Alex Haley’s famous interviews with X entitled The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the recent acclaimed biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable,30 the trajectories of both men overlapped in ways not acknowledged in common conventional accounts of their legacies. While MLK is famous for his invocation of “the beloved community,” he died somewhat of a pariah for his outspoken resistance to militarism and the systemic nature of poverty in the modern capitalist West. Likewise, while X is famous for his resistance to the evils perpetrated by the “white devil,” his religious experiences through his pilgrimage to Mecca and his theological insistence upon particularity as a path toward universality marked a later more inclusive shift that would cost him his life. Neither man advocated mutuality without justice. Both paid the ultimate price for resisting the sociopolitical order of whiteness.
Two of the most recent works relating to the intersection of theology and race are Brian Bantum’s academic text Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity31 and John Piper’s popular text Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian.32 The former is sensitive to the theological sensibilities of Jennings and Carter, while the latter exemplifies the manner in which the race antinomianism of supersessionist logic is often refracted through popular Christian works. Bantum’s review criticizing Piper’s manner of envisioning racial reconciliation by rendering ethnicity inconsequential clearly draws from the works of Jennings and Carter.33 While I will interact in some detail with each text at key points in this treatment, I introduce them here so as to indicate the ways in which they converge with or diverge from the theological school of Jennings and Carter. Bantum, as a student of Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School, had the opportunity to learn from both Jennings and Carter and aims his theological reflections in roughly the same direction as that inaugurated by the two latter thinkers. In my constructive Conclusion, I will utilize Bantum’s Christological reflections on hybridity to orient my ecclesiological focus. At that point, I will enumerate what I read as Bantum’s dual relationship to the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter and the classical retrieval impulse of Hauerwas. My intention is not to exaggerate Bantum’s divergence from Jennings and Carter, but rather to indicate an inclination in his work not entirely at home in their theological trajectory.
I do not read Jennings and Carter as opposed to theological retrieval; their work is much more open to engaging with the “tradition” than that of many other scholars who write about identity issues. At the same time they do not uncritically incorporate the tradition; they recognize the fallibility of the luminaries of both orthodoxy and liberalism. They contend that it is within orthodoxy itself that supersessionism took root. Appeals to tradition as the preeminent theological norm can obscure this reality. Much like Kierkegaard and Barth, Carter and Jennings recognize that each generation must engage afresh and anew with the word of God. In their theological race theory, neither tradition nor liberalism alone is sufficient to this task.
I read Piper’s Bloodlines, which is a non-academic theological work, as evincing a manner of imagining racial identity which is utterly divergent from Jennings’ and Carter’s vision. In short, Piper’s work represents a popular way of enfolding concerns about race into justification of a narrow doctrinal system. Piper utilizes race to buttress his American Reformed tradition. Ironically, he proclaims an end to ethnocentrism through a “colorblind” appeal to the theological legacy of the Puritans. Piper’s reflections on black flesh can be read as opportunities for theological self-defense. What appears to be anti-ethnocentric is in reality radically assimilationist.
The Theological Race Theory of Jennings and Carter
The theological race theory of Jennings and Carter was forged in a particular space. While Jennings reveals that the soil with which his mother worked is perhaps more constitutive for his understanding of place and race than is the academy of which he was a part for years,34 it is not inconsequential that Duke is the space within which scholars such as Jennings, Carter, and Bantum were joined. It can be assumed that Jennings’ interest in Jose de Acosta was influenced, at least in part, by his interactions with Walter D. Mignolo, the scholar of cultural studies at Duke who wrote the commentary on the new translation of Acosta’s Historia, published by Duke University Press.35 Additionally, it is probable that an environment in which questions are being asked about the centrality of Jesus Christ in a cosmopolitan milieu encouraged space for the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter to take root. These are the sort of questions asked by a wide range of prominent theologians at Duke, such as Stanley Hauerwas, Gregory Jones, and Richard Hays, although their answers differ from those of Jennings and Carter.
It is significant that Jennings mounts an implicit critique of the theological atmosphere of Duke in his critical read of Alisdair MacIntyre and “traditioned moral enquiry.”36 Given Duke’s public reputation as a center for reconciliation studies, it is as if Jennings is suggesting that the “best” contemporary Christian talk about reconciliation often falls prey to objectifying views of the “other” made possible by supersessionist patterns of theologically imagining identity. Jennings is not singling out Hauerwas for criticism nor is he suggesting that Duke is susceptible to the racial imaginary to a greater degree than the Christian academy in general. Rather, he is demonstrating that a reclamation of the “tradition” in the face of liberalism
