to religion and culture and a conservative nostalgia for a virtue-based reclamation of Occidental subjectivity. Carter and Jennings read both of these trajectories as bound to the racial imagination of whiteness in important ways. Neither scholar is content with the identity politics of modern religious studies or the centrality of the European body in retrievals of virtue. I will analyze the works of Carter and Jennings in turn by positioning them between and beyond modern religious studies and Western “classical” scholastic theology.
I begin in chapter 1 with a brief summary of Carter’s Race: A Theological Account before unpacking his central assertions in contrast with those of the modern religious academy. Through his interactions with Raboteau, Cone, and Long, Carter demonstrates the ways in which he is both heir and foil to the African American religious academy. Raboteau the historian, Cone the theologian, and Long the scholar of religion each contribute something to Carter’s argument while Carter must ultimately disavow significant portions of their philosophical infrastructure as tending toward reification of race. Carter maintains that such essentialization tends to further harden the ontological categories of whiteness and renders static the anthropological designations introduced by it. I read Carter’s ordering of his text as evincing increasing divergence with the black religious academy. While he borrows quite a bit from Raboteau in his shared interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and while Cone’s volleys against whiteness have been helpful in allowing Carter to break a hole in the wall of racialized identity, Long’s relativizing “universal religious primordium” does little more than reenact the objectifying gaze of whiteness. Throughout chapters 1 and 2, I also intimate Carter’s relationship to early Afro-Christian sources, in whose autobiographical treatises he finds the intuitive moves necessary to undermine the anthropological objectifications perpetuated by European rationality through both cultural studies and theology.
In chapter 2, I position Carter in contradistinction to a popular contemporary way of theologically imagining identity. While I have noted Milbank’s positive contribution in demonstrating the viability of theology over against sociology, I read Milbank’s nostalgia for an Anglo-Catholic virtue ethic as a subtle reenactment of several characteristics of the theological architecture of British imperialism. While Milbank astutely diagnoses the impotence of liberal “secular” sociology to construct a satisfactory ethic, I read his revival of a “classical” Greek philosophical framework as suggesting insecurity about the decentering of the European tradition in the face of an ethic of “multiculturalism.” Carter criticizes the soft imperialism of Radical Orthodoxy through his counterintuitive read of the similarities between Milbank’s and Kant’s theological anthropologies. Much like his read of Milbank, Carter reads the religious moorings of the Kantian Enlightenment project as grounded in Kant’s insecurity about the relationship of white and non-white bodies vis-a-vis European conceptions of rationality and progress. Carter reads Kant and Milbank as constructing their systems out of their respective perceptions of the ascension or loss of white male subjectivity. While Radical Orthodoxy stands in explicit opposition to the Kantian project, it appears that the driving force behind both trajectories is the relation of the European subject to forces beyond that subject’s control. As I close chapter 2, I briefly explicate Carter’s invocation of Maximus the Confessor in order to demonstrate in concrete terms how he reads the Christian tradition against itself so as to offer a new way forward for theological discourse.
Chapters 3 and 4, in mirroring the treatment of chapters 1 and 2, present my argument in symmetrical fashion. In these chapters, I investigate Jennings’ The Christian Imagination by structuring my analysis similarly to that which I performed in relation to Carter’s Race. I first delve into Jennings’ relationship to the discipline of cultural studies, of which he evinces several similar sensibilites, before finishing with Jennings’ critique of a MacIntyrean virtue ethic.
In chapter 3, I begin with an overview of Jennings’ key moves by locating them within the autobiographical narrative he offers in his Introduction. Jennings uses his own life story to introduce the themes he explores throughout his text. Because this methodology is unique, I spend a bit longer introducing Jennings’ argument than Carter’s. Jennings’ methodology has influenced my use of a similar structure in my Introduction. I have attempted to join with Jennings in exemplifying the sort of vulnerability needed to question the assumed objectivity of European subjectivity while not collapsing into a hermeneutic of suspicion. Jennings’ use of autobiography as an opening to theological analysis suggests that a first step toward undermining whiteness is vulnerability through joining. In the body of the text, I do not overtly place my own experience into my analyses of Carter and Jennings because I recognize the importance of hearing their voices on their own terms as much as possible. It is not until the Conclusion that I again introduce several personal ecclesial experiences so as to theologically describe the practical entailments of an ecclesiology suggested by Jennings and Carter.
After explaining Jennings’ thesis by analyzing his introduction, chapter 3 delineates Jennings’ relationship to the disciplinary atmosphere of cultural studies. For each of the four historical characters Jennings utilizes (Jose de Acosta, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Olaudah Equiano, and Bishop William Colenso), I choose several of the key scholars in cultural studies consulted by Jennings. While the literature surrounding each of these four figures is plentiful, the theological significance of each thinker has been largely overlooked. Jennings contends that this “oversight” is due primarily to the ways in which each figure exposes the imperialist grid of early-modern Christian theology.53 Jennings largely accepts the narrative of events as chronicled by each scholar. However, his conclusions necessarily diverge from those of the ethnographic resources he consults. Whereas the disciplinary confines of historiographic treatments limit the scholar to conclusions little more revolutionary than a relativizing comparative analysis, Jennings as theologian is able to locate these seemingly disconnected narratives in a story of distortion, disconnection, and hope. Jennings retains hope that the Gospel, the story of YHWH inviting various particularities to join one to another in the particularity of Israel through the particular body of Jesus Christ, is neither an imperialistic nor assimilationist vision. He maintains that it is the Incarnation that allows for a new cosmopolitan body politic. I close chapter 3 with an intimation of what I call Jennings’ Christology of joining. Jennings demonstrates the ways in which the philosophical infrastructure of the religious enterprise undergirds the modern missiology of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew F. Walls, who propose a “translation” of the universal Gospel message into various particularities. As Jennings demonstrates, this translation is a unilateral one that introduces the non-white body into the ordo of whiteness.
In chapter 4, I turn to an in-depth analysis of Jennings’ use of Acosta as the paradigmatic figure exhibiting early-modern theology’s assessment of place and people (hence the title A Theology of Race and Place.) Jennings’ choice of Acosta as primary interlocutor aids in understanding his criticism of the philosophical system of MacIntyre, its theological outgrowth in Hauerwas, and its inculcation through the theological academy. Whereas I read Radical Orthodoxy as buttressing European hegemony through its invocation of the “guiding virtuous elite,” I read Hauerwas’ anti-Constantinian ecclesiology as showing initial promise in transitioning the theological imagination from its collusion with Empire to embodiments of mutuality in local communities of faith. However, I contend that the initial promise of a Hauerwasian ecclesiology is limited by the manner in which it presents intellectual and spiritual formation within a MacIntyrean reclamation of virtue, thereby reenacting the pedagogical structures in which European colonialism flourished. Through Hauerwas’ aesthetic, ethical, and liturgical vision, he tends to undermine the counter-cultural promise of his radical ecclesiology. After I detail Jennings’ divergence from Hauerwas, I briefly align Jennings’ theological anthropology with that of Barth and Bonhoeffer. I likewise demonstrate how Jennings’ Barthian theological anthropology differs from that of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, the intellectual palette from which colonialism painted the world.
Jennings’ “Christology of joining” is the starting point for my Conclusion, in which I expand upon the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter by proposing a consonant “ecclesiology of joining” oriented around the
