A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper

A Theology of Race and Place - Andrew Thomas Draper


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destiny” inherent in Winthrop’s theological exhortations, he remains hopeful that the promise of America will be made manifest in successive generations.112 He maintains that it was through later perversions that the myth of the American New Israel took on a triumphalist tone. His example is the celebratory sermon of Ezra Stiles in 1783 soon after the success of the American Revolution. As opposed to Winthrop’s invocation of the conditional election of the European pioneers based upon their adherence to God’s law, Stiles proclaimed that the rise of the United States to “an acknowledged sovereignty among the republicks and kingdoms of the world” as “the vine which [God’s] own right hand hath planted” was secured.113 Raboteau claims that it was not until this later “exaggerated vision of American destiny” that such “an exaggerated vision of human capacity” was expressed.114 It is this later, more triumphalist move that Raboteau terms “God’s New Israel becoming the Redeemer Nation.” Raboteau implies that the anthropological problem of race was the result of later hubristic missteps not necessarily intrinsic to the original vision of Puritan America.

      Raboteau contends that this later “exaggerated vision of American destiny” was belied by “the presence of another, a darker, Israel” in her midst.115 The Afro-Christian counter-narrative of identification with Israel through the Exodus called into question the myth of America as carrier of “liberty and the gospel around the globe.” Raboteau maintains that the Afro-Christian counter-narrative authentically reclaimed the original promise of the theological vision of Winthrop. The paradigmatic moment of this reclamation was Martin Luther King Jr. echoing this “very old and evocative tradition” in his final sermon at Mason Temple in Memphis, proclaiming, “I’ve been to the mountaintop . . . And I’ve seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”116 Raboteau reads King’s exhortations as the culmination of the American project. Raboteau’s methodology effectually de-radicalizes the resistance of revolutionaries like King, offering them as fulfillment of the noble impulses of American liberty and justice.

      While Raboteau acknowledges that the people addressed by Winthrop “long ago took possession of their Promised Land” and that the people addressed by King “still wait to enter theirs,” he maintains that Winthrop’s and King’s versions of the Exodus “were not far apart.”117 They were both looking toward the “American Promised Land.” While Raboteau is correct that King’s rhetoric made extensive use of the promise of America,118 Raboteau does not allow for the possibility that King was assuming the established terms of the debate as a means to subverting them. In other words, could King’s rhetoric have been a way of proclaiming to white America, “this is what you say you believe but you yourselves are not living up to the promise of America”? During his 1963 speech at the march on Washington in which Dr. King utilized the phrase “the true meaning of its creed,”119 could he have been noting that the actions of white America belied the veracity of its own mythology? Carter’s methodology suggests interpretations such as the latter as he maintains that the black intellectual in modernity often adopts the regnant terms of the argument in order to subvert the argument at the level of its own suppositions. Like Paul, whose use of the haustafeln can be exegeted as subverting the objectification of women, children, and bondservants in the household structures of ancient society, King can be read as adopting the ethical conventions of his day in order to shine a mirror of conviction upon their faulty deployment.120 The linguistic structure of King’s speeches, combined with Carter’s method of interpretation, encourages this interpretive path. In this schema, the “true meaning” of the American creed is not the American creed itself, but the meaning which King’s theology supplied. In his prophetic advocacy for justice, King utilized helpful rhetorical devices to subvert the established order.

      Carter channels a tradition of reading that he maintains theologically exegetes Scripture against the grain of the social order.121 It is this method of reading that Carter recommends as concordant with the genre of an Augustinian spiritual autobiographical “narration of the self.”122 It is this pattern of counter-exegesis which must be utilized in order to “read . . . inside the crease,” particularly when interpreting African American autobiography against the dominant social order of whiteness.

      This suggests that there is an inner logic and rationality peculiar to the Gospel itself that can work within the social reality dictated by the principalities and powers to present a telos divergent from that offered by the regnant system. I contend that it is this eschatological hermeneutic, and not the telos of modernity as religious political hope, that has enabled Christian activists to articulate the divine veracity of their causes. Raboteau’s historiography does not satisfactorily distinguish between the two. Carter maintains that this is because Raboteau’s discipline does not have the means by which to account for the type of tradition Christianity is. I am suggesting that it is because of this lacuna that Raboteau has insufficiently theorized the relationship of King to America. As Carter explains:

      But there is the matter of Raboteau’s early difficulty in historically navigating Christianity as a living tradition. Doing so would have required engaging the question of what it means to speak of the hermeneutic encounter of traditions generally and, more specifically, the nature of that encounter when one of the traditions is Christianity appropriated by those on the underside of modernity . . . Another way of handling the hermeneutical encounter of traditions would have been to give an account of the kind of tradition that Christianity is, such that it can receive the traditions of Africa (or the traditions of any people, for that matter) to re-tradition those traditions, and indeed, in the process itself be retraditioned. To account for this—or something like this—would have been to offer a historiographical method . . . [that] would have offered a more cogent account of Afro-Christian life as a Christian emergence.123

      While the later Raboteau of A Fire in the Bones has discerned the significance of counter-narrative for African American Christians reappropriating the story of Israel, his historiographic method subtly reinscribes whiteness by being overly optimistic about the liberating power of modern civil religion.

      Carter finds Raboteau to be most helpful when he is most theological. In his closing exposition of the “hidden wholeness” between the visions of King and Thomas Merton, who in the common year of their deaths (1968) were in the process of planning a shared retreat, Raboteau maintains that what unites contemplation and action is a kenotic, sacrificial love. It is this love that identifies with the oppressed, unites people “beyond barriers of race, nationality, and religion,” and proclaims that “there are no aliens, no enemies, no others, but only sisters and brothers.”124 It is this latter observation that Carter favorably appropriates as he emphasizes the kenotic love of the particular body of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth.125 It is this salvation narrative that offers an appropriate theology of history.

      James H. Cone: Theologizing Race

      Cone and Ontological Blackness

      We now turn to analyzing Carter’s relationship to James Cone, pioneer of black liberation theology and professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary. The significance of Cone for theologies of liberation in the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Cone was actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in America in the nineteen-sixties, including drafting the 1969 public statement on “Black Theology,” and his theology has been read by oppressed people groups around the world. Cone is a public intellectual whose work has profoundly shaped American civic discourse about race and has opened the door to considerations of the problematic theological posture of whiteness. In this section we will see that Carter draws on Cone in order to diagnose white theology as an abstracting system that undervalues particularity, while ultimately deeming Cone’s oppositional dialectic insufficient for escaping the bonds of racial reasoning, bound as it is to the binary logic of whiteness.

      While Carter favorably appropriates the early Cone’s Barthian stress on the concreteness of being, he reads the abstraction of Cone’s later, more Tillichian framework as problematic.126 Carter finds Cone’s early Barthian dialectic between God and creature to be replaced by a later Tillichian dialectic between being and nonbeing.127 Black liberation from oppression becomes the “courage to be.”128 Carter maintains that Cone “remains, to the end, a dialectical thinker”129 in that the “original, antisupersessionist promise”


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