An Asian American Renewal Historical Theologian’s Response To The Duke African American Nouvelle Théologie Of Race

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An Asian-American Renewal Historical Theologian’s Response to the Duke African-American Nouvelle Théologie of Race

Paul C.H. Lim

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

[email protected]

Abstract

In this article I critically engage the Duke theologians of race—Carter, Jennings, and Bantam—devoting attention especially to Jennings. While appreciating and acknowl- edging the significance of these projects, I critique Jennings’s selective historiography and suggest that engaging the Anglo-American early modern supersessionist theolo- gies of culture and race would have benefitted Jennings’ project. Then I trace out some implications of Jennings’s call to re-engage Israel and examine how his ideal- ized vision of “submersion and in submission to another’s cultural realities” affects the notion of conversion theologically. As an Asian-American historical theologian, I argue that race is not and should no longer be looked upon as a black-white binary reality. In conclusion, I call for a historiographical fine-tuning of these theologies of race.

Keywords

Christian imagination – Christ, conquest and conversion – Bartolome de Las Casas – idolatry and early modern slavery

I have been aware of the new wind of theological revisionism of the most ambitious and creative sort blowing from Durham, North Carolina, for some time. Furthermore, I have, for the most part, eagerly awaited an opportunity to give the books by J. Kameron Carter, Willie Jennings, and Brian Bantum a

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03603042

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thorough read.1 When I was asked, therefore, to engage them in this format at aar 2013, I jumped at the opportunity to do so. Thanks to Amos Yong, Dale Coulter, and others for organizing this most robust and diverse panel, andgreat thanks to Professors Bantum, Carter, and Jennings for their willingness to have their work analyzed, dissected, and discussed in this forum.

First of all, allow me to offer some general prefatory comments, mostly com- plimentary in nature, followed by a few points for further engagement. To say that Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford, 2008), Bantum’s Redeeming Mulatto: Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity(Baylor, 2010), and Jennings’s Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale, 2010) have taken the contemporary theological world by storm would not be an overstatement. Rather than bracketing off or completely eliding theological perspectives from the Christian traditions—broadly construed, inclusive of the Cappadocians as well as subsequent voices—Carter and Jennings have gone beyond James Cone and other African-American theologians precisely by engaging these disparate voices to offer a poignant and powerful countervailing narrative to tackle both the origins of prejudicially racist theological discourse and the consequences of this colonialist theo-logic. By exposing the efforts of modern western theolo- gies, whether intentionally shielding or blissfully oblivious to the whitewashing legacies of their own tradition since the Age of Discovery, Carter and Jennings (hereafter referred to as c&j) have provided a much needed, orthodox metacri- tique of thetendenzof western theology. As a result, Carter’sRacewas heralded (on the back cover) as an “intellectual tour de force” for demonstrating “great intellectual range and theological imagination” by James H. Cone himself, the doyen of black liberationist theologians. Similarly, Jennings’s Christian Imagi- nationhas won the top award in the “Constructive-Reflective Studies” category by the aar. No mean achievements for both their first books!

As a historian of Christianity with particular research focus on the seismic shifts in early modern European Christianity, and as a historical theologian who cares deeply about both the etiological accounts of modernity / Enlightenment paradigms of religious reconfiguration and the long-term of consequences of such theological innovations, I could only issue forth a loud “Hallelujah!” for their work. When I read a bevy of critical appraisals from scholars such as Jonathan Tran in Christian Century, it became clear that c&j’s programmatic proposals were to have long-lasting effects in the way theology, and not just

1 J. Kameron Carter,Race: A Theological Account(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Willie

James Jennings,The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race(New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2010); Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: Theology of Race and Christian

Hybridity(Waco, tx: Baylor University Press, 2010).

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black theology, was to regard its own task, particularly the way it will look at the historical precedents that have given rise to the particular moment, momentum, and modalities of situating itself in the larger canvas of ideologies in the contemporary postmodern, post-secular world.2

For the sake of this article, I will engage with the texts and times with which I am more familiar as a historian of Christianity, namely, the early mod- ern period, also known as the putative Age of Discovery. That means, then, that what follows is primarily circumscribed by Willie Jennings’s The Chris- tian Imagination and the thematic challenges that he issues therein. Overall, I found Jennings’s much-needed revisionist theological historiography, or what I would call a “cartographical gerrymandering,” extremely creative and thought- provoking throughout. The bold trajectory that he outlines I find persuasive and entirely suitable for the type of theological revisionism in which he and Carter are both engaged. By singling out, as the key moment of lapse of true Christian theological imagination, the inversion of the sense of hospitality initi- ated by the entrance into the New World of Christian mercenaries, merchants, and missionaries, Jennings argues powerfully that the “persistent preoccupa- tions of the modern theological academy with various enlightenment prob- lems bound up in such matters as answering the intellectual threat of athe- ism, reasserting the importance of orthodoxy, engaging in new forms of the conservative-liberal debate, determining how one should read sacred texts, or the obsessive labeling and positioning of theological trends … not only display the continuing encasement in racial logics and agency, but also reflect the deep pedagogical sensory deprivation of this horrific imbalance. Western Christian intellectuals still imagine the world from the commanding heights.”3 This is as sweeping an indictment as the metacritique that John Milbank had offered in his Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, and the challenge of the Radical Orthodox group in their eponymously edited volume, published in 1999.4

2 Jonathan Tran, “The New Black Theology: Retrieving Ancient Sources to Challenge Racism,”

Christian Century129, no. 3 (February 8, 2012): 24–27. For a similar contribution in this period

and the reconfiguration of Christianity in particular, see Paul Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The

Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jonathan

Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2005).

3 Jennings,Christian Imagination, 8.

4 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Malden, ma: Blackwell,

1991), and John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A

New Theology(New York: Routledge, 1999).

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What follows in his Christian Imagination, then, is nothing less than an epochal, etiological diagnosis of “modern Christianity’s diseased social imag- ination.”5 For Jennings, the loss of communal caritas among the explorers of the New World, whose insatiable desire for material gain stopped at noth- ing short of a complete extirpation—indeed, a genocidal enterprise—of the indigenous population led to a grotesque distortion of the true picture of Chris- tian mutual indwelling, as the triune God, whose identity and activity is the exemplary locus of all human aesthetics and ethics, indwells among the three persons of the Godhead. Furthermore, this triune identity, for Jennings, was most clearly revealed in the coming of the Jewish Jesus, sent by the Father, in full communion with and empowered by the Spirit. Put bluntly, the colonialist logics of economics, anthropology, theology, and geography were all manifesta- tions of the corrosive effects of “diseased Christian social imaginations.” Worse yet, Jennings shows the missionaries’ willing complicity in their offering of the theological buttress to the mercantile and mercenary greed, whether Zurara’s tears or Acosta’s laughter.6 It is these white Spaniards’ punctilious taxonomical project that gave rise to the systemic “downgrading” of the Natives as inferior to the Europeans, en toto as racial categories. This racial categorization went hand in hand with the denigration of the native religious praxis, which was often seen not only as primitive and thus inferior, but also cannibalistic and thus diabolical as well. Adding ontological insult to the racial injury, Zurara, Acosta, and others erected a carefully calibrated hierarchy of intellectual capac- ities, from sub-Saharan black Africans at the nadir to the European whites as the apotheosis of this stairway to heaven, and their descendants have main- tained this racialized ladder system ever since.7

The stroke of Jennings’s theological ingenuity is to link the lapse of Western caritas vis-à-vis the “racial-and-religious Others” to the supersessionist modal- ity of being, which had a long pedigree in the Christian discourse: the marginal- ization and demonization of Israel and Jews from the divine plan of redemp- tion. As that inherently anti-Semitic move was made, little to no room remained for Christians to have any sense of indebtedness to anyone other than themselves and the super-hypostatized God. Consequently, this self-reflexive paradigm of gratuitous and self-gratifying ontology, which was inflexibly, indeed incorrigibly, supersessionist, dominated the Christian theological and intercultural imagination. Jennings then argues that this carry-over effect of

5 Jennings,Christian Imagination, 9. 6 Ibid., chaps. 1 and 2.

7 Ibid., 36.

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supersessionist modality was simply inserted in the way the western Christians encountered the New World, and it made the pernicious ingress into the way the racial-and-religious others were interpreted, sold off, exploited, and ulti- mately damned as the intransigent reprobates whose refusal to be converted, or their slow pace of acquisition of religious truth, only proved their innate infe- riority.

This sounds entirely plausible to me as a theologian, but as a historian I have one nagging question: How does one make that leap from the emergence of supersessionist Christian thinking in the fourth century ce of this expan- sionary period in the history of Christianity to the emergence of early modern empires/nation states? What of the late patristic, medieval, and late medieval worlds? What of the encounters manifested during this period, a ripening period of anti-Semitic attitudes and ideologies? If the intervening centuries from the sixth to the fourteenth were no less mired in this supersessionist mode of being, then what makes Jennings so confident that the anti-Israel superses- sionist modality was the main culprit for the Spanish Catholic conquistadores and their Jesuit compatriots? As a theological hook, this idea works superbly well; yet, as an analytical tool for historical inquiry, I see the requisite fuzziness that can problematize the overall salutary nature of this type of explanatory matrix. More on it later.

If God is “responsible for colonial desire,” were any internal critique and desiderata, such as that of Fr. Antonio de Montesinos or of Las Casas, brought up for correction?8 Here is another interesting example of Jennings’s selective historiographical inclusion. Why not say a bit more about Las Casas? Would the overall thrust of his argument have become weaker if he had talked a bit more about Las Casas as an internal contrapuntal movement within the colo- nial logics and the dastardly imaginaries that firmly buttressed this predatory experiment without even a whit of remorse of self-critical edges?9

To be sure, singular heroic exceptions do not an alternative history make (as Jennings made clear in his response to my aar presentation). Moreover, Las Casas himself was committed to the idea of a benign form of slavery in Cumaná, Venezuela, so even his own narrative is a far cry from a pristine and impeccable anti-colonialist hero, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s counter-narrative notwithstanding.10

8 Ibid., 92.

9 Ibid., 100–101.

10 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor in Jesus Christ (Maryknoll, ny: Orbis

Books, 1993). See also Gutiérrez’s hagiographical account of Las Casas in his Foreword to

Witness: Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas(Maryknoll, ny: Orbis Books, 1992). For a more

measured account, yet one still redolent of hagiographical tendencies to see the singular

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Then, again, who really was (and is)? Were their voices simply stifled by the calamitous and untamable desire for acquisition, utilizing divine providence as a mere ideological pretext to justify their incursive behaviors? Judging from the perfect hindsight of the contemporary geopolitical landscape of Latin America, it seems clear that Las Casas and Montesinos were exceptions, but even in Montesinos’s own admission, as he preached that famous Advent Sermon in 1511 from the text of the “voice of one calling in the desert,” they remained prophetic dissidents from the colonial desires.11 In doing so, isn’t Jennings also falling into the same trap of selective historiography of disallowing agency to those minoritized voices “crying in the wilderness”?

Assuredly, there is an “Ouch!” factor in Acosta’s most infelicitous appropria- tion of the “ugly daughter” analogy and the way in which it has justified the past dispensations of divine providence—namely, allocating a “great abundance of mines in the Indies” vis-à-visthat of the Iberian peninsula. Howcould Acostabe so oblivious to the suffering of the Indians and the horrifyingly inhumane treat- ment the putative providential agents of God were meting out to the hapless victims?12 Jennings rightly excoriates and laments the “insularity of [Acosta’s] theological vision” and the correspondingly “profound commitment to colo- nial rule,” the sine qua non in his fundamental axioms about the descriptive and prescriptive parts of his Historia. The emerging colonial empire—hence descriptive—is undergirded by his belief in the providential orchestration of all quotidian affairs so that it receives a theological justification and normativ- ity. Furthermore, the prescriptive part in his construal of the colonial affairs in the “New World” was such that to do otherwise would be tantamount to doing injustice to the divinely ordained errand into the wilderness of enhancing the quality of life for the “ugly daughter,” who was so keen on paying a large sum of dowry! Convoluted theo-logic, we might say. What kept this wunderkind from seeing the errant (not errand) ways of his compatriots and coreligionists?

Inasmuch as I find Jennings’s tour de force theo-logic, I must beg to differ with his interpretation of how Acosta erected his own hermeneutical super- structure. Jennings writes, “Acosta’s hermeneutic of idolatry vivified in the New World was an outgrowth of his Aristotelian-Thomist training, which under- stood that the true nature of an object was discernible only through correct intellection.” I am not taking umbrage at this statement—namely, at what is

contribution of Las Casas, see Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Biography

(Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

11 Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 56–59.

12 Jennings,Christian Imagination, 93–94.

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said—but, rather, with what is left “off the menu,” that is, the Pauline origins of this type of indictment of humanity’s wayward pattern of idol-making, a cul- tural and cultic praxis that St. Paul noticed in the first century of the Christian era, considerably before the colorization of the colonial “Other” actually took place. Does this vitiate the overall thrust of Jennings’s argument? Not neces- sarily. The overcoming of the “hermeneutics of idolatry” took place within the writings of St. Paul, between Romans 1 and Acts 17. What Las Casas does is to take seriously the putatively abominable praxis of child sacrifice, not as a way of positing that as thetelosof religious imbrications of material culture, but as a way of pointing that out as a moment along the way toward Christianization. To see it any other way, it seems to me, is to miss Las Casas’s overall missiological project.

When I read Willie Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, Alasdair MacIntyre’s influentialThree Rival Versions of Moral Inquirycame immediately to my mind, although in this instance I thought ofThreeRivalVersionsofTheologicalInquiry, perhaps as instantiated at Duke. As some had suggested calling this bold, revisionistic theological enterprise “Duke theologians of race,” it immediately perked my interest in raising a corresponding question: “Who are the other theological voices at Duke?” And to what extent, if any, do these voices consti- tute “rival versions of theological inquiry”? To frame it differently: “What would c&j’s Catholic colleagues at Duke think about all this?” I don’t mean to suggest at allthat c&j need the imprimatur of these colleagues, let alone their blessing, to do their own theological bidding. But how do they negotiate these two seem- ingly divergent accounts of the Christian past, particularly since both c&j (for sure) and their colleagues (quite likely) care deeply about how the past itera- tions of Christian imagination impinge upon the way Christian theology and praxis are instantiated?

The other area to which I wish Jennings (and Carter, for that matter) had paid some attention was the closer analogue to the Anglo-American early modern and early Enlightenment supersessionist theologies of culture and race. What I mean is this: While the replacement hymnody and paraphrastic psalmody of Isaac Watts is interesting for sure (Jennings, Chapter 5, “White Space and Literacy”), I think Jennings would have gotten a great deal more polemical mileageif theyhad studiedthe Elizabethan andStuart periodin English history, particularly in the way the English Protestants imagined themselves as the true representatives of God’s will. Especially since the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and especially since England became the dominant player in the international slave trade, mastering the art of the Middle Passage and the concomitant ruthless rule of the white man, Jennings would have made their theological meta-critique far more potent had they done a bit more extensive

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research on this period. The work of my former doctoral student, Tamara Lewis, in this regard is eagerly anticipated.13 Her supple and subtle account of the construction of race in early modern England demonstrates powerfully how the English saw themselves as true representatives of God on earth, and yet the way in which ontological blackness emerged depended equally on such contingent and seemingly arbitrary factors as Hakluyt’s voyages as well as on Walter Raleigh’s and Samuel Purchas’s travelogues.

The most convincing section for me, as a historian, came at the end. Chapter Six, “Those Near Belonging,” chronicles in a powerful and poignant way the tragic memory loss of the church’s covenantal indebtedness to and indissoluble connection with Israel. Jennings firmly reminds us that this cultural and cultic amnesia has had a irrevocably deleterious effect in the way Jewish identity had been virtually eliminated from the Christian socio-religious imagination, only by recognizing that the overwhelming majority of Christians aregoyim, and are made partners to the Covenant of Grace that yhwh had established with Israel only through the ministrations of a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Here is Jennings’s trenchant critique: “Jesus is Jewish, and it is a sad and grotesque ironic reality that the supersessionist movement in Christian theology was enabled through Christian reflection on Jesus Christ.”14

As such, Jennings’s clarion call for the Christian community to re-engage with Israel, whether figuratively or literally, needs to be taken seriously among those committed to various renewal movements within global Christianity. For instance, does this commitment manifest itself in a deeper interest in Israel as a nation-state in the Middle East, or in diasporic Jews worldwide? What of the real anti-Zionist movement within a substantial part of modern Jewry? Perhaps that was not a crucial concern for Jennings to articulate the exact trajectory of his argument, but it would have helped the reader who was ready to be convinced by him to move toward praxis!

The other crucial question for me can be framed as follows. Jennings per- suasively argues that the net effect of Christ’s sacrificial work was “reclaiming the world through communion.”15 Does this communion require conversion of any sort, whether conceived of in traditional terms or in some innovative fashion? Conversion, at least the lexical and existential reality it entails, has

13 Tamara Elisabeth Lewis,To Wash a Blackamoor White: The Rise of Black Religious Rhetoric

inEarlyModernEngland(PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2014). Tamara Lewis is Assistant

Professor of the History of Christianity at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern

Methodist University.

14 Jennings,Christian Imagination, 259.

15 Ibid., 267.

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fallen on hard times, especially in our postcolonial contexts, and Jennings is clearly aware of this. If coming to Christ the true Israel means, especially for the goyim, to find one’s true human identity in communion with him and “His Body,” and if this Gentile person had no prior understanding of and love toward Christ, then, surely, does it not require some kind of new alliances and alle- giance to the people of Christ and to Christ himself? Or was it a superfluous, indeed supersessionist, gesture which we would do well to erase from our cul- tic memory and eradicate from our liturgical praxis now? I believe that what Jennings is envisioning as part of his idealized vision is to see all peoples live in “submersion and in submission to another’s cultural realities,” a truly sublime statement with which I agree wholeheartedly.16 Then, while it solves one set of issues, I believe that it yet intensifies another set of issues. It solves the problem of invasive colonial legacy and its pernicious, predatory praxis since one lives in submission to the dictates of the Cultural Other. However, the Pentecost experi- ence of Acts 2 seems to be about proclaiming in other languages the wonders of God’s redemptive plan, which had reached its climax in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, now vouchsafed for the Jewish-Christian community by the coming of the Holy Spirit. Submersion and submission of other cultural modalities seem to be predicated christologically, which, by traditional reck- oning, was also predicated on owning the lordship of Christ, via conversion. Conversion often meant surrendering one’s own prior personal and cultural perspectives, predilections, and prejudices, and as such it was both transac- tional and transformational.17

As a Christian historian-cum-theologian who cares deeply about global renewal in reordering our desires through Christ the true Israel, reading Jen- nings’s last chapter was simultaneously illuminating and alienating. I com- pletely understand and agree with Jennings’s discursive strategy to talk about the “black, Jewish” modality as a key metric and site of overcoming the colo- nialist evisceration of caritas as a global, communal good to be shared. Yet, completely unintentionally, Jennings occludes Hispanics and Asians—be they in the Americas or elsewhere—from the palette of colors to be utilized to mar- shal a stronger anti-colonialist position. Where do they fit in? Can the subaltern speak in Jennings’s text? In the existing binary of “black and Jewish,” how can

16 Ibid., 266.

17 This is no mere theoretical matter as global renewal movements have emphasized con-

version processes that have involved repudiation of prior ways and forms of life; see, for

instance, the by now classic essay of Birgit Meyer, “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’:

Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse,” Journal of

Religion on Africa28, no. 3 (1998): 316–349.

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other minoritized and marginalized voices and peoples find their participatory role? What would that look like?

IhavelongwonderedaboutwhatIwouldcallan“invisibleweightinessofyel- low”18—that, due to the white-racist hegemonic cultural imaginaries, Asians and Asian North Americans are increasingly and inescapably seen as model minorities, without qualifying narratives of oppression and without trails of tears, thereby disqualifying them from the discourse of special protection and privileging of their underrepresented status. Thus it is rendered invisible, yet there is an inescapable sense of its weight: the weight of exclusion, the weight of having no place—all of which I find ironic and tragic since I find Jennings’s pro- grammatic plea absolutely spot on, and yet it generated deeper pathos from me than reading other texts that are straightforward neocolonialist! Being left “off the menu” by someone who is championing the cause of the formerly colonized was truly a disorienting reading experience.19 For example, this powerful state- ment is both liberating and limiting: “The way forward for a renewed Christian social imagination will be greatly aided by meditating on the racialized bod- ies of blacks and Jews in modernity. Such a meditation would allow us to peer through the cracks of modern racial calculus and discern fragments of the orig- inal situation of Israel and Gentiles, of Israel and a Gentile church, of the Jewish body and the Gentile body joined.”20

My last question stems from the fact that I am an Asian-American historical theologianwhocaresdeeplyabouttheglobalrenewalofChristianity,andthisis a genuine query with no polemical baggage loaded anywhere. If /since my own theological training had taken place in a setting in which the bloodied hands of white theologians had taught me a whitewashed history of the Reformation period and beyond without any mention of Acosta, Las Casas, and others, and sincethatand not any other theological training gave impetus to my desires to see global communities of faiths renewed according to the leading and impulse of the Holy Spirit, is my thinking about the necessity of such encounter with Christ a flawed and neocoloniallegerdemainfrom the outset? Can one have the

18 Other Asian-American renewal theologians have also begun to address such important

matters, including Amos Yong, The Future of Evangelical Theology: Soundings from the

Asian-American Diaspora(Downers Grove, il: ivp Academic, 2014).

19 Perceptive readers can tell that I am borrowing the expression “off the menu” from

Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita

Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Seung Ai Yang (Louisville: Westmin-

ster John Knox Press, 2007).

20 Jennings,Christian Imagination, 275.

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missiologicalcakeandeatittoo?21Thatis,havingrepentedoftheepistemicand ethical sin of occluding this sordid history and theological method from being told more frequently, can we adopt the c&j theological modality, which is far more capacious and non-supersessionistic, and hope for a global engagement of renewal?

To limit my comments to the foregoing alone would do gross injustice to the powerful wake-up call offered by Professors Bantum, Carter, and Jennings. But suffice it to say that I have learned a good deal from these tour de force texts, and my historiographical and historical quibbles ought not to detract from my overall appreciation. Perhaps the next phase might be to further fine-tune our own historiographical lens in the task of offering a “theological history” and/or “historical theology,” for the success of these interrelated fields is predicated on our correct notions of the relevant racial, regional, and religious particularities. God forbid that we would offer pernicious statements of this magnitude in our theological-historical reflections, as had Francisco Cabral: “the Japanese are n-ers and their customs barbarous.”22 To not repeat that, I can only say about the Dukenouvelle théologieof race texts, “Tolle lege, tolle lege!” Thanks to Professors Bantum, Carter, and Jennings for stretching my historical vision and for illuminating my theological horizon so that my heart’s desire for embrace of the other can find its proper theological lexicon.

21 This is an important question inasmuch as the explosive growth of Christianity across

the global South has been facilitated substantially by missiologically motivated renewal

churches and movements; see, e.g., Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Na-

ture of Early Pentecostalism(Maryknoll, ny: Orbis Books, 2007).

22 Cited in Jennings,Christian Imagination, 32.

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