First, the racialized scale inaugurated in the colonial period and maturing in modernity is identified by Carter through his interaction with the racialized architecture undergirding Kant’s Aufklarung and by Jennings through his interaction with the racialized imagination of Acosta in his sixteenth century theological narration of the New World. It is this descriptive hierarchy that allows a white-Latino man to discern the morality and intentions of a black teenager with a glance. It can also be seen in my early struggle to theologically imagine black-white relations in a way that does not foreground assimilation.
Second, that the racialized scale is theological in nature is demonstrated by Carter in his close reading of Kant, whose rationalized “religion” was the engine of Enlightenment, and by Jennings in his careful analysis of four Christian thinkers engaged in intercultural interaction in a world re-shaped by colonization. These forms of “pseudotheology” find voice in Zimmerman’s confession to a television news host that the purposes of God can be discerned in the killing of a non-white “other” and in the religious right who finds no discrepancy between the Way of Jesus Christ, Israel’s Suffering Servant, and a legal system in which “Stand Your Ground” laws, funded by the gun lobby and justified by an anachronistic reading of the supposedly infallible Second Amendment, are upheld. I personally experienced the theological draw of supersessionism several years ago as I was writing a reflection on the second chapter of Ephesians, relating to Paul’s invocation of Jesus as the peace between Jew and Gentile, making one new being out of the two,37 as a way to narrate the reality of my ecclesial community. I ran up against my inability to biblically frame white-black relations as anything other than a hierarchical relationship between Jew and Gentile. It was at this point that I gave off writing because I intuitively recognized that this manner of framing the issue was inherently prejudicial. It was soon thereafter that I read Jennings’ The Christian Imagination and Carter’s Race: A Theological Account and understood the depth of the theological deformities I had inherited.
Third, Carter finds whiteness to be the heretical ordo which, as a distortion of the Christian doctrine of creation, invites all being into its static ontological categories. Similarly, Jennings elucidates whiteness as the orienting structure behind the displacement enacted upon various peoples through the reordering of creation by colonization. The resultant static mode of being can be seen to have influenced Zimmerman’s recognition of Martin as one who threatened him simply by being “a black male.”38 Blackness was the bottom of a static ontological structure into which Martin was escorted by Zimmerman’s gaze. The static ontological designations assigned to various peoples by whiteness are also those which would keep me as pastor-scholar trapped within the bounds of my white male subjectivity. While I certainly cannot supersede my spatially-oriented status as a particular creature (which is a key element of Jennings’ thesis), Carter suggests, through the work of Maximus the Confessor, that creation in the image of the One who is Trinitarian relationality, and recreation through the Jewish body of Jesus of Nazareth, renders being itself as ekstasis. It is this ecstasy of being that can be experienced through resisting the strictures of whiteness through a process of miscegenation in which non-white subjectivity is superabundant.
Fourth, Carter and Jennings both identify that the “best” of contemporary theological ways of imagining identity fall short of diagnosing what is most problematic about modern and early-modern Western theological anthropology. While Carter interacts with the Radical Orthodoxy of Milbank, and Jennings with the virtue ethic of MacIntyre and its theological deployment by Hauerwas, they are interested in the manner in which such ways of imagining Christian identity are refracted more broadly through intellectual and spiritual formation in the academy and church. Just as Jennings’ and Carter’s targets are not strictly Milbank and Hauerwas, but rather what they represent, so my aim in this text is not to discount the many positive contributions of each scholar. Rather, I am rendering explicit Jennings’ and Carter’s critique so as to censure myself and caution confessional Christians about the limitations of uncritical appeals to tradition or the narrative of the Christian West. I take Hauerwas’ critique of modernity as a given—and as an important development—but suggest that moral formation in the academy and church has tended to introduce Christians into paternalistic ways of pursuing reconciliation and pejorative patterns of imagining the “other.” While I do not believe that liberalism has fared much better, I am suggesting that Jennings and Carter offer a way forward distinct from this gridlock.
Jennings’ and Carter’s analyses suggest that an emphasis on the church as radical counter-culture does not sufficiently take into account the ways in which whiteness was the outgrowth of the collusion of Christian theology and its attendant late medieval and early-modern politics. Just as it was not a “secular” Empire alone that instigated the racial imagination, so modern secularism should not be seen as the moral antithesis of the Christian tradition. While anti-modern polemics may serve to alert the novitiate to the problematic nature of moral modernity, they tend to retain white male subjectivity as the normalizing pole in aesthetics and ethics. Through appeals to “tradition,” such accounts tend to reassert and reimagine Occidental prominence in the face of “multicultural” (or “pluralistic”) contact. While I would not suggest that the responses I received to my reflections on the Martin-Zimmerman case were specifically influenced by virtue ethics, I am suggesting that both are invested in the maintenance of white subjectivity in similar and describable ways. Neither exhibits a fundamental openness to learning from those on the “underside of modernity.”39 This intransigence was exhibited in the resistance of Christians of “moral” character to recognizing the racial gaze within themselves when confronted with it in Zimmerman.
Fifth, Jennings and Carter both demonstrate that modern liberal discourse is not better at articulating a satisfactory analysis of race. Jennings and Carter identify the modern disciplines of cultural studies and religious studies as heirs of the racialized vision that took root within Western scholasticism as it engaged with colonization. While Carter offers a critique of the religious academy, Jennings presses beyond modern cultural studies to demonstrate the theological character of the origins of race. This methodology suggests that, while orthodox Christian belief has been a carrier of the virus of racialization, orthodoxy (as an expression of the particular salvation event centered in Jesus of Nazareth) is not to be jettisoned in favor of the humanistic spirit of the age. In this sense, the methodology of this book and that of Jennings and Carter (this is especially true of Carter) is not completely at odds with that of retrievals of orthodoxy. I contend that Jennings and Carter point to moments within the tradition that shed light upon a Faith more authentically Christ-like than the dominant narrative of the tradition. I will demonstrate several ways in which Carter and Jennings subvert the methodology of retrievals of tradition by radicalizing it.
As the shared genealogy of their theses suggests, the problem is that the supersessionism maturing in Occidental hegemony was embryonically present in the early Hellenization of the Faith. Jennings and Carter read liberalism as a modern maturation of the tradition of Western philosophical rationality. One can see the inability of liberalism to sufficiently analyze this problematic legacy in the manner in which race is commonly framed within public discourse. As was demonstrated by the FBI report which attempted to find some evidence of “racial animus” or its lack in Zimmerman’s past,40 modern ethical discourse is characterized by an obsession about the will of the individual. Interestingly, the Christian right has imbibed the ideal of the autonomous moral agent, tending to argue ethical issues as universal moral imperatives (on this point, virtue ethics is to be preferred).41
As I discovered