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PNEUMA 36 (2014) 447–455
New Winds
A Response to the Essays
Willie Jennings
Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina
Abstract
These essays, which respond to the work of Brian Bantum, Jay Carter, and myself, highlightsome of the ongoingchallengesfacing Christian theologytoday.Togetherthey point to several problems that attend modern Christian theology: first, the problem of narration of both Christian and racial identity; second, the problem of doing theology after the emergence of cultural nationalism; and third, the problem of situatedness for theological work and Christian intellection. These problems, which are yet to arrive onto the workbenches of most theologians and ethicists, might be engaged productively from the site of pentecostal-charismatic thought.
Keywords
racial identity – Jew-Gentile existence – land – whiteness
I want to thank the editors of Pneuma for granting me the high honor of responding to these outstanding essays. I continue to be humbled by the re- sponses to my work and that of my brothers Jay Carter and Brian Bantum. I can think of no more exciting context in which to reflect on that work than here at the intersection of black theology and the legacies of holiness tattooed on the skin of modernity by the pentecostal and charismatic movements. The future of the church in the world is a pentecostal/charismatic future, so any attempt to think the present aimed at the future must reckon in a substantive way with the workings of the Holy Spirit on the body, corporeal and political.
I could not possibly do full justice, in the space allotted in this journal, to the conceptual intricacies of these marvelous essays, so I will highlight some of the crucial insights and questions they raise for me with a view toward future
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03603047
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conversations. Together these essays draw our attention to several crucial prob- lems that attend modern theology and with which I continue to wrestle, begin- ning with the dual narration of Christian identity and racial identity. How does one, in the words of Judith Butler, give an account of oneself?1 Here we might be aided by Butler’s advice. She suggests that giving an account of oneself is always in relation to others who, by their existence and their real history, call forth from us discursive practices that make us visible to ourselves and vulnerable to them.2 This visibility and vulnerability are good and open up the possibil- ities of deeper ethical deliberations. The new reality that is being pressed on theology is for Christian intellectuals to give an account of themselves in ways heretofore unimagined, that is, in relation to nonwhite flesh.
In this regard, it is important not to lose sight of the way of whiteness. Whiteness is not simply a way of being seen in the world but also at the same time a way of seeing the world. W.J.T. Mitchell’s recent attempt to articulate this in his work Seeing Race certainly moves in the right direction, but he lacks sight of the deeper colonial Christian matrix for this identity-optic.3 Recognizing this identity-optic helps us resist forms of narration that lose sight of their positionality and its constituting energies. Take, for example, the re-emergence of biological racial thinking masquerading as science. In her groundbreaking text Fatal Inventions, Dorothy Roberts shows us the ways in which discussions of dna and race engage in precisely the same kind of racial mapping that supported virulent forms of racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 The new dna-inspired discussions of racial difference, much like those of the prior centuries, take racial difference as an assumption upon which to build scientific theory, with the result that derogatory visions of black peoples are given the veneer of scientific truth.
Coupled with the new environmental determinism that characterizes the work of such people as Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs, we are on the verge of a new, more powerful, derogatory narration of nonwhite flesh that again conceals the positionality of the white narrator.5 These new determinists invite us to enter a painfully abstract vision of life in which the contingencies of
1 Judith Butler,Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 2 Ibid., 63–73.
3 W.J.T. Mitchell,Seeing Through Race(Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2012). 4 Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the
Twenty-First Century(New York: The Free Press, 2011).
5 Jared Diamond,The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies(New
York: Penguin Books, 2012); Jeffery Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our
Time(New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
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geography, biology, and so-called natural developments become more decisive than the actions of peoples, nation-states, and merchants. Biological determin- ism joined to environmental determinism drains agency of its energies and corrupts our historical consciousness of the real career of racialist thinking and imagining that have flowed through scientific investigation and pronounce- ments in the last three centuries. Given this tragic, unrelenting, and still vir- ulent habit of narration, we must continually interrogate ways of construing peoples that naturalize constructed racial cultural difference and then assign us to particular cultural frameworks. In distinction from racializing habits of narration, I have suggested that we rethink Christian positionality in relation to gentile existence. Gentile existence is a call to imagine life from a different angle, from a different trajectory. Gentile existence must be imagined as Ruth- like existence.
This brings me to the important findings of Dr. Medina’s fine essay. He rightly points to the complexities of the intercultural, recognizing the long history of cultural erasure and assimilation that marks Christianity especially as it entered the deep waters of modernity. His remedy for this is a power- ful christological vision of inclusion that, as he suggests, “… upholds distinct ethnocultural horizons as spaces of divine activity and disclosure.” He wor- ries that my colleagues and I, in our re-centering of the Jewish covenantal relations with yhwh, have too quickly mapped the Jewish-Gentile relation onto a white-black frame and thereby reinscribed the white universal in “… which people’s actual ethnocultural identities are neutralized if not disposed of” and thus have no real bearing on their experiences and expressions of faith.
Dr. Medina has pinpointed the fundamental challenge of doing theology after the emergence of cultural nationalism. This is yet another crucial prob- lem that has occupied my thinking for a long time. Cultural nationalism frames theology so powerfully in our time because it is bound inextricably to the white universal, establishing a theological imagination under constrained con- ditions. The cultural nationalist option is an impoverished option. As Pascale Casanova so brilliantly points out in The World Republic of Letters, it was set in place through the innovations of Herder countering the supplanting of Latin by the French, who pressed their own language as the site of the universal.6 Herder’s genius was to conjure cultural genius—a genius to be found in each people’s own literary and artistic expressions. With this later joined to Schleier-
6 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press,
2004).
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macher’s profound reworking of divine presence executed through Kantian sensibilities and lodged centrally in the mundane longings of individuals and peoples, we now had the tools through which formerly colonialized subjects could speak back to empire or join empire in shared projects of cultural and national inclusion or expansion.
The way forward is not through separate but equal ethnocultural horizons or spaces. Ruth-like existence, not hybridity or mixture, is the point here. Jew-Gentile existence, theologically speaking, draws us to a complex journey of joining. To envision existence through the prism of Jew-Gentile is to step onto a plateau that opens up possibilities of life beyond cultural eradication or assimilation in which a quilting might occur of peoples, ways of life, forms of joy, rituals of memory, and life-strategies for mutual thriving. In this regard the idea of culture does not serve us well, because it shares the same tattered history as the concept of race. It is a way of seeing that often hinders our seeing. We must have a way of imagining the possibility of life together beyond the constraints of cultural nationalism in which we can again capture the significance of life in translation, life in love with those we should not love, love of other peoples, other ways of life, and the beautiful complex negotiation of differences in the quotidian realities of eros, of bodies joined. This for me is the pneumatologically constituted intercultural, one in which the Spirit presses us toward those whom we would not choose.
Which brings me to the magisterial essay of the esteemed Dr. Cheryl Sanders. Dr. Sanders is right. Dr. Sanders is usually always right in these matters. Once again she has named the deep dilemmas of theological speech and Christian intellectual life for those of us yet caught in the racial matrix. As she states,
We gaze at our own images in distorted mirrors designed to depict our otherness as deficiency. We gauge our own destinies following maps and directions that divert us away from known paths of righteousness and fulfillment.
Dr. Sanders has pinpointed the exact challenges that face those articulating a black theology for this crucial moment. That theological expression yet per- forms a death-bound black subject. She notes three fatal flaws that continue to dog black theology projects. First, they pay scant attention to contemporary efforts of congregations to address black suffering that choose to focus obses- sively on historical narratives of black struggle. Second, they have poor sight of spiritual practices that might liberate people of color trapped in anger and out- rage at the struggles of racial representation and oppression. Third, they lack the imaginative capacity to summon the black churched and unchurched to
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a salvation full and free that draws from the spiritual depths and power of a catholic and evangelical spirituality.
What we need, Dr. Sanders rightly suggests, is an alternative soteriology that speaks to the spiritual and intellectual longings of people, especially people of color, and especially people under forty years of age. Such an alternative soteriology must turn strongly toward the Holy Spirit. In this regard, Sanders draws the powerful conclusion that the only viable black theology must be a pentecostal black theology or, more precisely, a theology that understands the Azusa Street matrix as a fresh conceptual site from which to think the present moment. Azusa Street and the work of William J. Seymour do not represent a narrow ethnic (read: black) expression of a broader pentecostal phenomenon, but the emergence of a new possibility of a Christian diasporic response to racial, gender, and class oppression and a pattern for solidarity among diverse people that builds on the powerful impulse of the revivalist traditions of Christianity. I wholeheartedly agree with this sage advice and I would add that future black theological projects as well as all viable theolog- ical projects must also finally follow the radicality of the Spirit’s movement in reconstituting life together in shared projects of lifelong discipleship on the ground. It is exactly the ground that is missing, the earth that is miss- ing, and the land that is missing in contemporary pneumatology and theol- ogy.
This is why I am so thankful for the essay by Dr. Tarango, because she has captured the matter that I long for more theologians, historians of doctrine, and ethicists to see and that is one of the fundamental problems of Christianity, and especially of church life, bequeathed to us with racial modernity. We are geographically adrift and we have normalized the racial encasement of identity activated alongside the virulent privatization of space and the absolute transformation of animals into pure utility. This is not a minor matter. As I like to say, most Christians in the West do not have a real doctrine of creation. We do not imagine ourselves spatially and therefore our sense of connectivity and belonging tends to be incredibly thin. As Dr. Tarango states, “Developing a deeper understanding of the land begins to peel away some of the colonialist past of Christianity.” And Native American believers are a profound question to the fundamental nature of Christian thought and Christian intellectual life. Will Christianity take the land and our situatedness in space and place seriously, not only in terms of the crucial memory work we must do as we learn from our indigenous sisters and brothers and others, but also begin to gain a deeper geographic consciousness for our common life?
Dr. Tarango has placed on the table the most serious question for the future of a pentecostal theology: Will it, too, follow the same geographic obliviousness
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that marks western and westernized theologies? Her pointing to the history of the relation between the Assemblies of God and their Native American converts suggests that this will be a significant challenge for the work ahead. What is at play here is not simply different epistemologies, western versus indigenous, but the extent to which western Christians will retain a diseased form of Christianity that has been heretofore fully at home with segmenting forms of existence born of the commodification of land, animals, and the material world. Yet, how one gives a historical account of these matters for theology is exceedingly difficult, as Dr. Lim in his very learned and generous essay suggests. I feel the limitations that Dr. Lim so astutely notes. How does one capture a problem so massive that it extends itself over the horizon and becomes the horizon itself? This brings me to the third problem that I have already begun to outline with Dr. Tarango’s fine essay, and that is the problem of situatedness for intellectual work.
In this regard, one of the crucial problems that historical theology has not faced as part of its own history of intellection is that world-turning moment when theology faced the geographic density of the world, coupled with the unprecedented power to transform reality not simply by the doing but by the looking as well. Here we must reckon with a density of effects that together constituted a new ground on which theology would do its work. Of course, Dr. Lim is correct that there were countervoices in the long centuries of colonial hegemony, and we do need the stories of those voices unearthed and analyzed, and as Gustavo Gutierrez taught us many years ago, Las Casas is an important voice for tracking the counter-hegemonic.7
We must be on guard, however, against ideological deployments of the heroic that is now a standard trope of whiteness. We stand in a long his- tory of the operation of the heroic as a way to turn our attention away from the identity-structuring trajectories that flow from the colonial moment. As Pierre Bourdieu has wisely said, agency is always complexly bound up with structures and structuring realities and we can especially see this in the the- ologians working from the colonial sites.8 As I note in my book The Christian Imagination, José de Acosta is an endlessly fascinating figure precisely because
7 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (Maryknoll, ny: Orbis
Books, 1992). Of course, we should remember that Las Casas, even with his groundbreaking
generosity of Christian thought, was also embedded in the colonial matrix to such an extent
that he found it necessary to maintain a black slave in his service for several decades.
See Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and
Ecclesiastical Imperialism(Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2007).
8 Pierre Bourdieu,The Logic of Practice(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 42–65.
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he faithfully carries out ancient Christian gestures and Christian rationality albeit now encased in colonial form, one aspect of which was pedagogical imperialism. This for me points to some of the problems of trying to reimag- ine theology and historical theology inside traditioned intellection because traditioned intellection is itself inside the reconfiguration of space and per- forms that reconfiguration of space as private property. That is to say, the current deployment of tradition by theologians, philosophers, biblical schol- ars, and ethicists performs private property albeit in deep intellectual ges- ture.
What we need for our own theological rehabilitation is a more precise historical accounting than I was able to give in my recent work of this density of effects—geographic, literary, linguistic, optical, economic, and so forth—as well as more historical accounts of those missionaries and others who “went native,” that is, those who resisted the colonial operations and paid the price for that resistance. Christian theology in the western academy constantly fails to be instructed by and from formerly colonized sites of Christian witness. This is why I am so appreciative of Dr. Wariboko’s important and informative essay on Nigerian Pentecostalism. His trenchant account of the idea of chosenness in its sociopolitical mediation among Nigerian Pentecostals brilliantly captures the way racial consciousness draws directly into traditions of chosenness. I find completely convincing and compelling his insight that
[t]he weight that Africans, and particularly Nigerian Pentecostals, bear is constantly shifting from site to site … The racially weighted world is felt acutely as the burden of poor economies and racism that feeds on levels of gross national product (gnp). Africans not only directly bear the brunt of low levels of economic development, but they also endure the devaluation and degradation of their racial identity as the world increasingly links racial respect to performance of national or regional economies. There is a wicked theory of gnp afoot in the world; and it is in the face of Africans … The logic of this hermeneutics of gnp is part of the axiomatics of the current global formation, which, before any engagement and dialogue, determine which race or people is to be taken seriously beyond the pale of politically correct tolerance in world economic-political affairs. Today, the connection between gnp and racism is an important and particular site of the destructive weight of the world on Africans.
Dr. Wariboko is drawing our attention to the complexities of pentecostal perfor- mance in the theater of global economics, on what Arjun Appadurai called our
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modernflowsofcapitalandthenewethnoscapesitconstitutes.9Chosenness as a theological category must be thought through within the historic flows of cap- ital. In this regard, there is an important analogy between the phenomena that Dr. Wariboko notes and the history of African-American Christian response to racial consciousness. That history also shows the deployment of ideas of chosenness but, more precisely, the idea of election bound to an unrelent- ing theological problem, that is, the horrific deployments of a vision of provi- dence. African Americans were forced to struggle against a vision of providence bound to white identity and white supremacy. Their response, following simi- lar lines of what Dr. Wariboko has noted, imagined an African-American future within the conceptual confines of American exceptionalism, as the esteemed Dr. Raboteau taught us.10 Thus the ideas of election and chosenness become the spoiled goods left for black flesh (and others) trying to make sense of itself in the worlds constituted by white supremacy. Riding high on the winds of nationalist consciousness and white manifest global destiny, Christian ideas of election and chosenness hardened and then shattered into a thousand pieces, dispersed over vast populations of peoples, and invited them to sew together these lifeless fragments into visions of a future that, if followed, would draw peoples inextricably toward ethnic chauvinism and unrelenting competition as the fundamental way of imagining relationships among peoples.
I do think that chosenness and election are yet productive ideas, but they must be recalibrated away from their supersessionist trajectories and stripped of their cultural nationalist incrustations in order again to spy out the possibil- ities of a new global body politic that seeks to make connections beyond the operations of the merchant, and that in fact overturns the constituting power of the merchant. In this regard, we still need far more extensive analysis of the transformations of Pentecostalism at the hands of those I call their theological economists, Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Fred Price and their massive progeny. These theological economists expose the absolute dominance of west- ern capitalism within the intellectual and spiritual currents of our time. They are more than a passing phase in popular Christianity because in and through them we can see how the form of rationality born of capital has merged with theological reflection and woven itself into Christian identity. They raise the very serious questions of whether and how Christianity could free itself from a
9 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
10 Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
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pro-capitalist default position. Capitalism is now becoming the way many sec- tors of the church imagine how the true, the good, and the beautiful might be produced with political economies. Mammon has not become God, but it has become God’s most important servant. It has become the servant of the ser- vants.
Together these essays do far more important work than reflect on my thought and that of my colleagues Jay Carter and Brian Bantum; in fact, they mark the rough terrain that must yet be negotiated if Christian theology will have a future that gives witness to a triune God who yet risks everything for the world.
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