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PNEUMA 36 (2014) 379–385
Introduction
Race and Global Renewal: Mulattic Tongues
and Hybridic Imaginations to the Ends of the Earth
Erica M. Ramirez
Drew Theological School Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
Abstract
This introductory article reviews defining concepts of recent theological works by James K. Carter, Willie Jennings, and Brian Bantum. The works of the “Duke School” illuminate how racist ideations have marred western theology. The three authors also engage race, though socially constructed, as a site in which Christ’s humanity can be rendered more fully visible. Christ’s ethnic materiality becomes an emancipatory embodiment. The six essays under consideration speak to the complexity of delineat- ing the racist impulse and subsequent trajectory in western theology, to the ambivalent potentials in racializing terms such as “chosen” and “indigenous,” and to the failure of imagination attending those black academic theologies too beholden to the Civil Rights era past. Broad, divergent strokes are drawn in competing visions for what might constitute the “pentecostal” future. This essay canvasses such salient beginnings and critical intersections.
Keywords
race–historical–theology–WillieJennings–pentecostal–blacktheology–whiteness
This special edition of Pneuma features the five essays presented at the 2013 conference of the American Academy of Religion in Baltimore, Maryland. These essays comprised a panel presentation titled “Race and Global Renewal: Mulattic Tongues and Hybridic Imaginations to the Ends of the Earth,” jointly hosted by the Pentecostal Charismatic Theology and the Black Theology groups (and over which I was invited to preside). The panelists were tasked with an
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03603041
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exploratory engagement with the works of Duke-affiliated theologians J. Kame- ron Carter, Brian Bantum, and Willie Jennings, in consideration of interracial history and present global trajectories of pentecostal, new-pentecostal, and charismatic movements worldwide.
The recent innovative theological contributions of Carter, Bantum, and Jen- nings have earned them shared recognition as the Duke School. Each of their works featuresa critique of waysin which the notion of race,a thoroughly social construct, has decisively malformed western theological thinking. Likewise, all three feature a reengagement with Christ’s ethnic materiality as means by which to redeem theology from its long complicity with race ideation. Carter’s work in Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008) identifies gnostic rejection of materiality and Jewishness as the origin of the Christian racial imagination. In Carter, Kantian thought is the full fruition of the gnostic racial imaginary, as Jewish identity and Christ’s life and death are recast in uni- versalized, moral, and rational terms. Kant, Carter argues, actually produces a theological vision of whiteness as the apex of human potential.
Bantum’s Redeeming Mulatto(Baylor University Press, 2010) creatively gives racial hybridity new christological life. Racial hybridity assumes the biological complexity of humanity—never as simple as being “black” or “white”—and makes the reality of the mixing of ethnicities a postcolonial virtue. Bantum takes the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s dual natures—both fully man and fully God—and presents Jesus as substantially mulatto. Jesus’s hybrid nature destabilizes notions of racial purity and disrupts idolatrous visions of the subject as a self-contained, self-consistent human. Bantum’s Christ, the Tragic Mulatto, calls his followers into an ever more hybridic existence of life in the flesh and the Spirit at the same time.
Willie Jennings’sThe Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010) boldly problematizes the delinking of place to identity as the previously unrecognized material conditions that have given, and continue to give, rise to existential crises of identity. Jennings suggests that this problematic of migration engenders substitutionary compensation in the form of the fantasy of race. In response, Jennings offers a radical reconstruc- tion of the notion of place by reappraising Jesus’ inextractibility from Israel. Jesus’s Jewish roots serve as the historical and geographical moorings by which Christianity can be secured anew, freeing Christian theology from its pervasive, heretofore enduring, racist hallucinations.
Now to our panelists. Paul Lim’s erudite treatment of the joint works of Carter, Bantum, and Jennings further complexifies the historicity of the Chris- tian racial imagination and the dissemination of its racial discourses. Lim appreciates that colonial history is indispensable for an authentic compre-
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hension of Christian theology, but reflects that too little is really being taken into the Duke theologians’ accounts. “How does one make that leap from the emergence of supersessionist Christian thinking in the fourth century ce of this expansionary period in the history of Christianity and 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?” Lim contours the legion proportions of the problem: present-day theology is haunted by a mul- titude of former racist incarnations. The transmission of racial theological knowledge cannot be owed to patristic origins. If these ideas have gnostic beginnings, how and why did they gain traction and ideological endurance again and again? Can any architectonic narrative do justice to the tremendous complexity of the processural, historical sites of racialization? What of the sites and processes that gave rise to resistance theologies?
Jennings invokes the politically situated theologian as, in the main, the shaper of theological discourse, citing Bourdieu’s notion of structured agency. Power has structured the categories, functions, and shadows of theological thought and Jennings inherits these political biases in western theological dis- course. Jennings highlights “the problems of trying to re-imagine theology and historical theology inside traditioned intellection because traditioned intellec- tion is itself inside the reconfiguration of space and performs that reconfigura- tion of space as private property.” Professional theological discourse has itself always been structured by class and colonial struggle. Bearing the imprint of “the colonial moment,” theology sanctifies the colonial perspective, performs the colonial gaze, and is comorbid with the commodification of “land, animals, and the material world.” Maintaining that the dominant theological narrative has overwhelmingly been a narrative that sanctifies racism, Jennings seeks not Lim’s suggested history of those heroes who are the exception to colonial rule, but “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.” Still, it remains to be seen whether and how critical historiog- raphy will assert its own concerns in this conversation, which could well be a successor chapter to that late 1980s–early1990s engagement between Wilson J. Moses, William D. Wright, and black afrocentrist theologians.
History becomes a point of contention in Cheryl Sanders’s “Wanted, Dead or Alive” as well. Sanders juxtaposes the vibrancy of black pentecostal-charisma- tic church traditions with the academic preoccupations of black theology. Sanders diagnoses black theology, as transfixed in its devotion to the trials and triumphs of the church leaders of the Civil Rights era, as stuck in a brilliant past. Black church culture, however, largely emphasizes the present and the future,
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leading to a state of alienation. Black churchgoers and black academic theolo- gians fail to engage one another.
But charismatic church culture and academic theologians stand to gain much from each other. Sanders illustrates ways in which she finds promis- ing inroads carved into the work of Bantum, Carter, and Jennings. For exam- ple, Sanders identifies Bantum’s attentive deployment of Martin Luther King’s kitchen conversion and Carter’s description of Jarena Lee’s sanctification (“a pentecostal reshaping of black existence”) as examples that urge “serious reflec- tion upon the pneumatology that tends to be ignored, devalued, or dismissed by most black theologians.” Moreover, Sanders argues that in Jennings’s work “new light on the meaning of Pentecost” is cast. Quoting Jennings, Sanders echoes his vision:
The presence of the Holy Spirit presents a profoundly counterhegemonic reality in which the sign of the Spirit’s coming is language imposition … The disciples performed a gesture of communion, a calling to all peoples that the Spirit of God would have them join together, and together they would worship the God Jesus reveals.1
Critically, this vision will be taken up again on the panel. Lurking in the shad- ows of this discussion, however, is an undiscussed treacherousness on the part of theology for the work of black theology. Jennings perceives that theology— “traditioned, intellectual” theology—performs private property via “deep intel- lectual gesture.” Yet, the patristic theologies he attempts to rehabilitate are those that black and womanist theologians critically eschew in preference for historical black, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, voices. One wonders whether “the master’s tools” could possibly pull down his temple.2 How, then, do Pentecostalisms mediate ethnic identity? How can pentecostal theologies and black theologies enrich and/or challenge each other’s engagement with notions of race? Angela Tarango’s “‘The Land is Always Stalking Us’: Pente- costalism, Race and Native Understandings of Sacred Land” supplies a rich case
1 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 266–267.
2 Audre Lorde famously highlights the ineffectiveness of using signifiers of domination to
undermine the project of domination. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the mas-
ter’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never
enable us to bring about genuine change. …” See “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master’s House,” in Audre Lorde,Sister, Outsider: Essays and Speeches(Berkeley, ca: Crossing
Press), 110–114.
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example of Christian entanglement with race ideology. Tarango revisits the mission efforts of the Assemblies of God to Native American peoples. Assem- blies of God leadership, early in the twentieth century, adopted the “indigenous principle,” the belief that converts to Christianity were best led by persons from their own communities. Tarango’s retelling of the experiences of West- ern Apaches illustrates how the colonial, racial imagination compromised real, principled moves toward indigeneity. Especially revealing is Tarango’s spotlight on the differences between Native American conceptualizations of land and those of missionaries. The modern pentecostal imagination often projects dark and demonic presences onto the physical landscape of a region, and spiritual warfare is undertaken to rid a territory of the remnants of a bygone culture’s “false gods.” Native peoples, on the other hand, have an ongoing relationship with the land as a “repository and shaper of the memory of a particular people.” Tarango reveals profound opportunity within this impasse in understanding of land. By allowing Christianity to be truly indigenized, that is, fully realized within the receiving culture anew, Pentecostals can shed their supercessionist visions of land in favor of an enriching Native American respect for and attach- ment to natural places. Implicit in this contradistinction is a radical shift in the concept of possession: Tarango urges a consideration of a people’s sense of being as possessed by the land over and against any capitalist commodi- fication of land and animals as things to be owned. Jennings likewise notes that land commodification is particularly destructive to the Christian imagi- nation: “[t]here is no mystery to race. But until we reckon with its substitution for place and place-centered identity, its power will remain and remain myste- riously ever renewing with each generation of race-formed children.”3
Nimi Wariboko’s essay, “Pentecostal Theology as a Discursive Site for Weight of Blackness in Nigeria,” presents another vivid example of the intertwining of race ideology and Christian theology. Wariboko’s discussion illustrates how notions of chosenness, imported from the Old Testament portrayal of the Israeli people and rehabilitated in the form of a spiritualized cultural nationalism, inform present-day African political discourse. Nigeria is imagined to be on the cusp of a spiritual and economic rebirth led by Spirit-filled believers, a vision that, in Wariboko’s opinion, is issued by the anxieties that attend blackness. “The weight of blackness” is a burden that saddles Africans who bear twin dis- advantages of long-term economic exploitation and a theological “hermeneu- tic of gdp,” which reinscribes white exceptionalism and chosenness in the guise of providence. In this atmosphere of continual degradation, “black” becomes
3 Jennings,The Christian Imagination, 289.
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almost unbearably “heavy” and Africans use Pentecostalism’s techniques of the body to perform a righteous overcoming of black forsakenness and perceived failure. This process of charismatic renewal of the body will, they hope, result in a national renewal of Nigeria itself, who will then lead Africa out of her “dark- ness.” Here is the intersection of the body individualized and the body political that must be critically rethought by pentecostal and black theologians, one that Jennings notes must be reckoned with by any future-looking Christianity. Wariboko’s own portention of this pentecostal racial imagination reads some- what grim: having taken up the polluted notions of chosenness to deal with poisonous notions of “blackness,” Wariboko surmises that theologies of white- ness will ultimately endure and fears that Nigerian Pentecostalism will locate, within itself, black bodies of its own to reject and exploit. Wariboko’s portrayal of Nigerian blackness and national identity bears striking resemblance to black American millennialism: a fascinating extension of this conversation might start by inspecting this millennialism for signs of Wariboko’s new “blackness.”4
Néstor Medina envisions different possibilities on the horizon of Pente- costalism. “Transgressing Theological Shibboleths: Culture as Locus of Divine (Pneumatological) Activity” is a constructive theological counterproposal to the pneumatology shared by Carter and Jennings. Carter and Jennings advance recognition of the Jewishness of Christ as the historical specificity that chas- tens the Kantian “universal,” which makes of whiteness a global telos. Jennings issues a call for a remedial Ruth-like “joining,” by the Gentile Christian, into the covenantal relationship with yhwh made possible only in Christ. In this way, Gentile Christians enter into Israel’s history, which is made possible by the Spirit, who calls the believer to a “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.” In Jennings’s work, the Holy Spirit pulls the believer into liminal, intercultural spaces, toward others, but stops us short of assimilation, too: instead of becoming “one” with Jews, Christians are “quilted” into life together with them.
For Medina, this vision risks reinscribing the very “white pseudotheologies” that Jennings and his colleagues strive to avoid.5 He finds that their shared
4 See Timothy E. Fulop, “The Future Golden Day of the Race: Millennialism and Black Ameri-
cans in the Nadir, 1877–1901,”Harvard Theological Review 84, no.1 (1991): 75–99. Many thanks
to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.
5 Medina notes, along the same lines, that Bantum adds that since the divine act of mulatto-
intermixture is enacted in the incarnation and embodied in the life of Jesus, intermixture-
hybridity-mulatto really point to the divine act of taking on humanity in order to raise human-
ity up to God—a kind of apotheosis in which all humanity, in all its diversity, is included.
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rejection of all notions of cultural particularity in favor of the sole Jewish par- ticularity of Jesus “quickly and dangerously turns into a kind of universalizing theological shift within which people’s actual ethnocultural identities are neu- tralized if not disposed.” Medina offers, instead, that Jesus’ Jewish life is testa- ment not to Israel’s enduring singular particularity, but instead to culture itself as a valid locus for pneumatological activity. Thus Jesus, as an ethnically partic- ular exemplar, demonstrates that Godself-disclosesto humans within the social matrices of their shared cultural knowledge and experiences. Every culture, therefore, becomes potentially host to its own Pentecost, thereby multiplying the engagements of the Spirit with humanity into polydisclosure, as opposed to quilting cultural defectors/believers into the history of Israel. Thus, Med- ina cites not an imposition of language but a flourishing of languages as the bequeathment of Pentecost, a critical difference from the understanding artic- ulated by Jennings.
These contrarian visions of the work of the Holy Spirit most vividly dis- play the creative tension that arises in the following essays, but there are many points of convergence and dissonance awaiting further discussion. As Jennings explains, his work and that of his colleagues attempts to force Christian the- ology to “give account of itself” in relation to non-white bodies. Conversely, the work of Jennings and his colleagues presses the question of how nonwhite bodies—more specifically black ones, in these cases—give account of their Christian identities to their white sisters and brothers, and the “answers” to this question, such as it is, remain open, as the next few pages suggest. In sim- ilar manner, the following papers reveal how fruitful it is for black theologians and pentecostal-charismatic theologians to consider themselves in relation to each other and the broader Christian theological conversation. For if, as Jen- nings notes, the future of Christianity is unequivocally pentecostal, that future cannot afford to be ignorant of our racialized past. Any real hope for a healthy Christianity rests, in part, on wrestling with the voices represented in this jour- nal.
Following the notion of hybridity-as-encounter, he claims that “Israel’s promise was bound to the incorporation of strangers, to encounters with the nations that amplified their own calling and demarcated those encounters.”
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