A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
own inquiry into a theology of race “proceeds with the acknowledgement that black theology sees beyond its predecessors only by standing on their broad intellectual shoulders.”68 He clarifies that, in choosing several key figures (such as Cone) as paradigmatic of larger trends within black theological thought, he is not attempting to “be reductive” but rather is acknowledging the role of such luminaries in defining a discipline. Carter will draw from his interlocutors while not being locked within the philosophical infrastructure undergirding the religious academy. Carter demonstrates the most convergence with Raboteau, from whose work he draws a theology of history that provides him with a proton and eschaton that will lead him to his Maximian view of dynamic identity. Carter progresses through Cone, the theologian of black liberation theology whose importance cannot be overstated, even as Carter takes issue with his “static” ontology. Finally, Carter ends with Long, the scholar of religious studies whose work is most congruent with the evaluatory stance of the modern (white) descriptive gaze and from whose work Carter most fully distances himself.
I read the structure of Carter’s text as mirroring his relative level of convergence with, or divergence from, his interlocutors. Section One of Carter’s text lays the groundwork for his inquiry by demonstrating the racialized religious underpinnings of modernity. Section Two begins in convergence with Raboteau and progresses through Cone to a quite stark divergence with Long. In contrapuntal fashion, Section Three of Carter’s text is moving toward his constructive thesis of the genius of early Afro-Christian spirituality and its similarity to Eastern patristic theological anthropology. Therefore, Section Three demonstrates increasing convergence with antebellum African American authors, from Hammon, through Douglass, to Jarena Lee, with whom Carter is in closest agreement. Read in this way, Carter establishes the problem in Part I (the supersessionist Christology of Kant), before proceeding to trace a centripetal trajectory that begins with convergence (Raboteau), moves outward to divergence (Long), prepares to move inward again (Hammon and spiritual autobiography), and ends in convergence (Lee and Maximus). By structuring his text in this manner, the narrative construction of his text (centripetal convergence) mirrors his thesis (a retrieval of the centripetal narrative structure of a theological history centered on the scandalous particularity of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth).
One can sense a marked resistance in the works of Carter and Jennings to being classified as “black theology” (or, as Jonathan Tran has named it, “the new black theology.”69) This is no doubt in large part due to the reality that being named can render one an object to be classified and can reaffirm the distortion of creation that is whiteness as identity signifier.70 Titles such as “black theology” are ironic given the stated intent of Carter to explode the false category of “the blackness that whiteness created,” which he reads as little more than a settlement with whiteness.71 Carter does not intend his resistance to “blackness” to be a cession to the neo-Gnosticizing claim of “colorblindness” prevalent in contemporary Western public discourse. Rather, Carter’s particularist approach is geared toward maintaining the cultural integrity of various peoples without an accompanying essentializing or reductive impulse. Tran’s title appears to be a subtle query about how effective Jennings’ and Carter’s theological race theory actually is in dislodging essentialized identity. I will examine Carter’s relationship with the black academy so as to investigate this concern.
Albert J. Raboteau: Historicizing Race
Raboteau and an Iconography of Race
I now turn to investigating the connection between Carter’s theology of race and the historiographic research of Albert Raboteau. In this section we will see how Carter borrows an iconographic focus from Raboteau while distancing himself from Raboteau’s historiographic method. Raboteau, whose scholarly focus is religious history, including the history of American Catholicism, African and African American religious history, and Eastern Christian spirituality, is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Raboteau’s landmark study Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South72 was published early in his career and became a benchmark in the discipline. One of his later works, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History73, is a collection of essays that trace the scope of his career. It is with this latter text that Carter devotes the majority of his interaction as he maintains that it is in this work that Raboteau “makes a signal contribution in showing how black religion generally and Afro-Christianity particularly disrupt the logic of modern racial reasoning.”74
Carter arrives at this conclusion by elucidating the relationship of Raboteau to the cultural anthropology of the Boasian anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. Herskovits explored what he called the “genius” of a people: that which is unique or distinctive about a particular people.75 Herskovits’ innovation was that he began to speak of “cultures” as opposed to a single monolithic “culture” toward which humanity was progressing. Through interaction with thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, Herskovits had come to appreciate the specificities of a people’s cultural memory and therefore his thinking morphed into delighting in the particularities of “cultures,” as opposed to the overcoming of “cultures” by human “culture” as such. Carter maintains that this innovation by Herskovits and his teacher, Frank Boas, was the birth of “a new method and practice of historical inquiry . . . ethnography, which through the analysis of language, aesthetic and literary productions, folk artifacts, and religion in many ways does the work of history.”76 Carter notes that it is this ethnographic analysis of cultural traits that so easily essentializes the concept of race, reifying identity into a myriad of opaque, hard, static givens.
Carter reads Raboteau the historian as avoiding this essentialization of race by pushing beyond a strict historical ethnography into a theology of history. Carter does not maintain that this glimmer of hope amounts to a complete disavowal, on Raboteau’s part, of the modern understanding of the racialized being. As Carter contends, Raboteau is ultimately a dialectical thinker who “remains within the gravitational pull of a racialized understanding of identity.”77 Yet the glimmer of hope is Raboteau’s serious consideration of “the Christian element in antebellum slave religion,”78 identified through his insistence on the significance of narrative and plot.79 For Raboteau, history and religion are both faith practices. While the historian, through the priority she gives to various events, characters, and sequences, necessarily imbues history with a meaning and a structure, religious faith contends that “salvation history,” as understood within the “will and providence of God,” grants a continuity to the events of history.80 Raboteau identifies the historiographic method as “[reminding] Christian believers of the scandal of the Incarnation, the historical specificity and contingency of Jesus.”81 By reminding theology of the historical nature of salvation’s narrative, history as such does the important theological work of preserving the notions of the particular and the unique. As signposts of the Incarnation, the particular and the unique are iconographic in nature. It is through the various particularities of being itself that divine being is seen; being is therefore ekstasis. Carter finds hope in the realization that, for Raboteau, history is not simply a causal sequence of seemingly random events but is itself a window into the life of the Triune God. In this sense, Raboteau’s theology of history may more appropriately be termed an “iconography of history.”82 It is this iconographic view of the historical salvation narrative, and the plot structure that it bequeaths to all history, that Carter finds best represented in the work of Maximus the Confessor and best intuited in the work of Jarena Lee.
For Carter, Raboteau’s “signal contribution” may also be identified in his insistence on the importance of the narrative scope of history, specifically his recognition of the theological significance of the story of Israel for understanding African American religious experience. It is the significance of plot that allows Carter to maintain that “whiteness is the ‘political unconscious’ of false emplotment.”83 Because it is A Fire in the Bones that prompts this important observation and because Carter finds it the most promising of Raboteau’s major works, I take it as the key text in analyzing Carter’s methodological relationship to Raboteau.
Raboteau was raised an American Catholic, but has since converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. I take this journey to be archetypical of what I will read as Carter’s progression from the Anglo-Catholic retrieval narrative of Radical Orthodoxy into an aesthetic sensibility akin to Eastern iconography.