Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  Carter’s book is a comprehensive account of the origins and development of the problem of “whiteness” in Christian theology. He also provides a summary prescription for its solution. Curiously for a book entitled Race, the extensive analysis and critique of “whiteness” conspicuously fails to address the observable reality of intractable differences between the various races of mankind. More damaging still to the credibility of Carter’s argument is his deeply flawed historical theology: he insists that the Christian humanism arising out of Christian supersessionism36 became the prototype of Christian racialism rather than a theological issue. In short, Carter treats “racism” and “whiteness” as synonyms. Christianity, as such, only narrowly escapes being tarred with the same brush. Although Christian theology was complicit in the social construction of whiteness, “divinity and humanity are conjoined in Jesus’ poor Jewish flesh”. Conversely, Carter attempts to “divinise” black folks by discussing at great length several nineteenth century autobiographies in which the Negro authors appear to re-enact the life of Christ.37

  Carter insists “that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God”. Those who inhabit “white” flesh labour under a heavy burden of guilt. Despite the zeal displayed by “white” theologians such as Migliore in their ceaseless condemnation of racism and anti-Semitism, they cannot invoke the presumption of innocence. In Carter’s judgement, even the most progressive of his professional peers have “yet to reckon with the ways they perform theology in continuity with Catholic and Protestant theology’s racial-colonial past”. Not only was Christian theology “deployed to justify European expansion,” for centuries Christian theologians also “spearheaded the invention of discourses of race in relationship to theology to further justify Western expansionism”. Given the dead weight of such a shameful history, a long-term theological counter-movement will be required to overturn “the tyrannical logic of racialization”. Carter believes that to “enter into Christ” it will be necessary “to exit whiteness and the identities that whiteness creates.” But, interestingly, for Carter, “blackness,” too, is an identity or condition which must be transcended.38

  Carter is a Christian humanist not a black nationalist. Indeed, he distances himself from the “black theology of liberation” because its founder James Cone “reproduces the aberrant theology of modern racial reasoning”.39 Ironically, Cone himself is not really a black nationalist; he certainly does not advocate the creation of an autonomous black ethno-nation within the continental United States. On the contrary, in the words of Harold Cruse, the leading black nationalist of the Sixties, Cone, like countless other black politicians, preachers, lawyers, and activists, works to perpetuate the “racial drama of love and hate between slave and master, bound together in the purgatory of the plantation”.40 On the other hand, asserting that “divine truth is God’s liberation of the weak from oppression,” Cone never shrinks from the charge that he allows theology to be determined by social interest. The only important question for him is: “whose social interest, the oppressed or the oppressors”?41

  White Theology and Black Oppression

  Like Cone, however, Carter believes that because “white theology” remains fixed in the “axiological perspective” of an oppressive white culture it “is an ideological distortion of the gospel of Jesus”. Both men believe that it is “impossible to be white (culturally speaking) and also think biblically” because “the oppressed are the only true Christians”.42 But, when Cone goes on to allege that all white “communities and theologies are formed by the will of white people to oppress others not of their genetic origins,” he sets off an alarm in Carter’s mind. Such talk of genetic differences between whites and other racial groups is anathema to Carter. It conjures up the spectre of an “ontological blackness” which posits race as a biological phenomenon which “objectively exists independent of historically contingent factors and subjective intention”.43 In other words, Cone inadvertently concedes the possibility that the sorry state of black America has less to do with the oppressive character of “white culture” than with intractable genetic differences between black and white populations.

  Like most other black intellectuals, therefore, Carter refuses to acknowledge the existence of empirical studies of the measurable differences in average intelligence, behaviour, and temperament between the major continental races.44 Accordingly, he cites Cornel West to establish the major premise of his argument; namely, that race is a social construct not an empirically observable biocultural phenomenon. West purports to identify “what it is about the very structure modern discourse at its inception” that produced “forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity as well as aesthetic and cultural ideals” that “require[d] the constitution of the idea of white supremacy”. West’s unexamined assumption is that there no objective empirical much less genetic basis for any form of black inequality “in beauty, culture, and intellectual capacity”. Both Carter and West want “to put an end to any understanding of race that would see it as a static, nonmutating category” corresponding “with a purportedly real racial something — actual races one might say — out there in the world”.45 With that goal in mind, Carter purports to explain the genealogy of a theologically-inflected racial discourse in the modern Western world.

  According to Carter, the remote origins of racialized discourse in the West are to be found in the Gnostic heresy which allegedly sought to sever the early Christian church from its Jewish roots. Determined to uphold the superiority of the spiritual realm over the world of matter, the Gnostics developed a proto-racialist narrative of “the true church beyond Israel” which “supported the supremacy of the pneumatics” over other, earthier, hence lesser, breeds of humankind. But it was the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that created the need for a political theology that could cope with “the modern problem of race, religion, and the politics of the modern state”. In Carter’s view, the Judenfrage was at the core of the problem of race and identity in the modern world. Kant was the theorist who “bequeathed to the modern world…its first rigorously scientific and philosophically sophisticated and, hence, its first fully developed theory of race”. In doing so, Kant helped to “rationally” reposition Christianity within the political economy of modernity. Through this process of repositioning, Christianity “was decoupled from its Jewish roots”. Race became “the discourse to constitute whiteness in relationship to a non-Jewish alien without and a Jewish alien within the body politic”.46

  Carter accuses Kant of revitalizing Gnosticism and reconstituting Christianity “as the moral religion par excellence of reason”. No longer does Jesus disclose “YHWH or the God of Israel as the ground of redemption for Jews and Gentiles alike”. Instead Kant credits Jesus with the overthrow of Judaism and empowering the human species to “make itself into a moral creature”. On Carter’s reading, “Kant’s ultimate concern is with the success of the universalist project of modernity, the project of whiteness as the advance of cultured civilization (which is the advance towards the perfect race of humans)”. His greatest fear was that “miscegenation, or racial intermixing” would derail the white race from its destiny by raising the “possibility of the mulatto, of ‘impure’ interracial existence”. On Carter’s reading, Kant believed that “oriental” Jews, “the alien within,” posed an especially high risk of “mulattic contamination”. Indeed, Jews were “the sole negative racial other” in Kant’s lectures on anthropology; as such, they were made to “stand in for all nonwhite flesh”.47

  Jews and Otherness

  Strangely enough, Jews play the same role in Carter’s theology. Accordingly, he presents supersessionism as the original sin lying at the root of the modern Western racism and colonialism. At the core of Carter’s “theology of participation” lies YHWH’s “covenantal relationship” with “the people of Israel”. Carter rejects any suggestion that the Old Covenant with the Jews was suspended by the New Covenant creation inaugurated by Chri
st. Whiteness and the modern racial imagination, he charges, were “built upon the severance of Jesus from the covenantal people of Israel”. To resolve the problem of whiteness, Carter insists, it will be necessary to understand “Christian existence as ever-grounded in the Jewish, non-racial flesh of Jesus and thus as an articulation of the covenantal life of Israel”. He believes that it is through communion with Israel that all non-white peoples enter into communion with God. The inner logic of Jesus’ identity as the Word made flesh is “the inner logic by which Israel is already a mulatto people precisely in being YHWH’s people.” According to Carter’s anti-white logic, “Jesus himself as the Israel of God is Mulatto”.48 In effect, Carter implies, “white” folks alone must reject their socially-constructed “white” identity to enter communion with Israel. There is a massive irony here since early patristic writers such as Eusebius of Caesarea held that the biological basis of kinship in carnal, national Israel had been superseded, finally, by the spiritual brotherhood uniting the new race of Christians in the church.49

  Significantly, Carter provides little or no biblical authority to support the suggestion that the Old Covenant remains in force today. He is altogether oblivious to the providential import of the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70. By any reasonable standard, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple was an event of world-historical significance; not least of all for Jews since it was accompanied by the death of over a million of their co-ethnics and forced exile for countless others. But the destruction of the temple was not a random event coming unexpectedly; the prophets of Old Covenant Israel, as well as Christ and the apostles, repeatedly predicted that the providential history of Israel after the flesh would be consummated when the Lord came in judgement upon Jerusalem.50 Biblical prophesies of a new heaven and a new earth were to be fulfilled “when the power of the holy people has been completely shattered” (Daniel 12:7). A new creation was inaugurated when the Jerusalem temple, the physical centre of the old heaven and the old earth, was destroyed in AD 70.51

  Conclusion

  Catholic traditionalist writers such as E Michael Jones agree with preterist Protestants such as Don K Preston that that the incarnation of Jesus Christ signalled a radical discontinuity in the history of Israel. Indeed, the “confrontation between Jesus and the ‘Jews’ leads first to a redefinition of the word ‘Jew’”. A term that once referred “to the chosen people now refers to those who reject Christ”. Indeed, the Book of Revelation calls the Jews who reject Christ “the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9 and 3:9). Carter denies Jones’ conclusion that the “Church is now the true Israel.” Nor does he believe that “the people who profess to be Jews” will die in sin so long as they continue to reject Christ and deny the truth of his gospel message.52

  Such mindless ecumenism cannot be good for Christians. Nor is it good for the Negro race in America. It is a great pity that Carter has no interest in an African-American Christian ethno-theology that goes beyond “black liberation theology” to promote the economic, political, and cultural unification of an autonomous Negro ethno-nation. Fifty years ago, Harold Cruse warned Negro intellectuals not to accept Jewish leadership in a civil rights struggle focussed on the promise of racial integration. Integration and assimilation, Cruse warned, “have all to do with individuals, but very little to do with ethnic groups.” To foster a self-sustaining group identity, he added, Negro intellectuals must declare independence from Jewish influence and commit themselves to “cultural nationalism — an ideology that has made Jewish intellectuals a force to be reckoned with in America”.53

  Refusing to recognize the need for Negroes to marry racial solidarity with a binding sense of collective moral responsibility securely grounded in political autonomy and economic self-reliance, Carter prefers to blame “whitey” for the shortcomings and failures of his own people. Indeed, Carter is doing the devil’s work when he finds something Christ-like in black America’s descent over the past half century into a dysfunctional and degrading culture of rampant welfare dependency, drug addiction, soaring rates of illegitimacy, escalating violence, and chronic criminality.

  Postscript

  The lecturer, Dr Ben Myers, awarded this paper a Distinction grade and appended the following comment:

  I find this paper disturbing on many levels — not least in the way it interprets the significance of AD 70.

  In terms of the mechanics of the essay, the engagement with Carter and Cone is thoughtful and intelligent — but there are crucial points at which you simply assume, instead of carefully arguing your conclusions.

  For what it’s worth, I’d like to encourage you to read (much) more widely in the areas of (a) exegesis of the Book of Revelation; and (b) some historical studies of early Christian/patristic eschatology. Your footnote on supersessionism (note 5) gives the impression of a monolithic “orthodox” supersessionism in patristic thought — but this is really not the case. (You can still hold to your own position of course, but it’s a pretty serious misrepresentation to call it “orthodox”!)

  6. Church History Learning Cells 1–5

  Learning Cell # 1

  Reading Assignment: Henry Chadwick, “The Early Christian Community”

  Chadwick surveys the first two and a half centuries in the history of the Christian church, from St Peter to the Emperor Constantine. More accurately, I suppose, “the history of Christians” in that era. His approach to the subject is that of a secular historian employing the conventional “methods of historical investigation.” “Acts of God” fall outside his bailiwick.

  Chadwick concedes “that something important happened to transform the disciples from a huddle of frightened men into bold missionaries risking their lives for their faith.” His account begins with the apostolic community’s understanding the place of the church in the Kingdom of God on earth. He explains the origins of Gentile Christianity, noting that “Christians believed that by the death of Jesus…God had formed a new covenant not only with the Jews but with all peoples of the earth.”

  In that context, the narrative moves onward to the mission of St Paul to the Gentiles and the challenges that emerged to their spiritual leadership of the early Christian communities of late antiquity. Gnosticism with its rigid division between spirit and matter effectively denied the divinity of Christ. Montanism, at the other extreme, insisted that the Holy Spirit moved through the ecstatic possession of the body. Hence, the need for (a) a canonical form of the Scriptures, and (b) durable structures of ecclesiastical authority ie bishops, presbyters, and deacons. Chadwick ends with thumbnail sketches of several of the Church fathers.

  In conclusion, Chadwick observes that the other-worldly mind-set of early Christians helped “in the long term” to create “the modern secularising notion” that the pursuit of “power, pleasure, and prosperity” is “irrelevant to religion and vice versa.”

  Questions:

  1. Does Chadwick’s secular humanist commitment to conventional “methods of historical investigation” distort or deny the providential meaning of Christian experience in the first century AD? He does not tell his readers when the new covenant actually entered into force. Nor does he reveal that Peter, Paul, and their contemporaries expected Christ to come back in “clouds of glory” before all those living had passed away. Why not?

  2. The second question, therefore, is why does Chadwick simply ignore the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70? Even if Chadwick cannot determine the providential significance of that event, is it not an act of God that remains indisputably open to conventional methods of historical investigation?

  3. Chadwick notes that for the disciples the crucifixion “was not the end.” What was? The resurrection; or the destruction of Jerusalem and the concomitant creation of a new covenant world?

  4. Another question is whether Chadwick correctly identifies Christ as “the climax of an already long story of a divine education of humanity through the special illumination given to the prophets of Israel? [emphasis
added] Already? Had the Chinese, Indians, or sub-Saharan Africans been illuminated by the story of Old Israel even before the advent of the Messiah? What does that word “humanity” really mean?

  Learning Cell # 2

  Reading Assignment: Stuart Hall, Doctrine and Practice Chapter 4

  In this chapter Hall examines the proliferation of heresies during the second century AD and the threat to the unity of the church posed by such doctrinal splits. Drawing on Walter Bauer, Hall makes the interesting point that “heresy precedes orthodoxy.” In other words, the church set out to establish its institutional authority at a time when there was a bewildering excess of “competing organizations and doctrines,” each promoting its own brand of Christianity.

  Hall appears to dissent from Bauer’s conclusion that the Roman church eventually imposed its version of orthodoxy on the churches of the East. He points out that doctrinal disputes and schisms were rife in Rome as well. But he doesn’t pursue the point since this chapter is devoted to a discussion of the major “heresies” against which orthodoxy began to define itself.

  He first examines the work of Marcion whose work appears to have much in common with the Gnostic movement although it is unclear whether it preceded or was directly related to that movement. Hall devotes much more space to an examination of the Gnostics, discussing the seven dominant “family features” shared by many different groups “blending elements of philosophy and pagan religions with Christianity (and perhaps also Judaism).”

  He concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of Eastern Christianity and Montanism both of which posed problems the resolution of which helped to define orthodoxy in the church-at-large.