Monthly Archives: December 2020

After Whiteness by Willie Jennings—A Non-Review Review

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I hate to break promises! Well, perhaps, I’m not breaking my promise. I’m just not able to fulfill it to the degree I had hoped. In the previous post “Race, Gender, and Identity…Oh My,” I promised to reflect next on Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020). I re-read the book this morning—It’s only 115 pages long—and I came away a second time with that I-don’t-get-it feeling. In part, it’s that perplexity I want to explore in this essay.

At present, Jennings is an associate professor of theology and Africana studies at Yale University. He also taught at Duke University Divinity School and served as an associate dean while at Duke. His latest book focuses on theological education at seminaries and divinity schools. As someone who has written several books and hundreds of essays, I understand an author’s and a publisher’s desire to select a title that is both descriptive and provocative. Authors want to be read and publishers want to make money. “After Whiteness” is provocative.

Jennings lets us know in the Preface that “whiteness” is not completely synonymous with being white. For Jennings, whiteness is an ideal image of a fully developed human being constructed by Europeans over centuries. This ideal is embodied in the individual white male who has mastered himself and others (especially white females and all non-white people) through scientific reason and technology. He is self-sufficient, analytical, heterosexual, and individualistic, and he objectivizes everything and everyone. According to Jennings, this ideal human being serves as a mold into which Western education—specifically Western theological education—attempts to squeeze everyone. Switching metaphors, the theological school is Procrustean bed in which those who do not naturally fit—women and people of color—are trimmed and shaped according to the ideal pattern. Note the violence in the language. Those for whom whiteness is simply the truth view this educational process as civilizing, uplifting, and empowering.

When I say of Jennings’s book “I don’t get it,” I do not mean that I disagree with him. In fact, I’ve long resisted the ideal he describes as “whiteness,” and I think theological education is long overdue for a radical reformation. I hope to voice my critique of the state of theological education in future essays. What I mean by “I don’t get it” is that Jennings presents his critique and offers his vision as a series of extended metaphors and vignettes. They convey a mood and articulate feelings, but I don’t see a clear vision of the new community of belonging of which Jennings dreams. The book’s subtitle indicates that Jennings’s alternative to whiteness is belonging. From what I read in the book, this community of belonging will be founded on a decision for mutual acceptance of everyone’s identity, their experience, and their stories. What I don’t get is how this book, with its metaphors and stories, offers a critique of “whiteness” (as defined by Jennings) that meets whiteness on its own turf and demonstrates its theological and ethical weaknesses. Perhaps my assessment on this score says as much about me as it does about Jennings. After all, to meet whiteness on its own turf and use its own weapons against it would be to grant it a kind of legitimacy.

I wondered briefly why Jennings used the term “whiteness” in his title only to explain in the Preface that he did not mean “white people.” It’s an eye-catching title, to be sure, and publishers love that sort of thing. But is there more to it? To use the term “whiteness” to describe the Western rational and scientific approach to education, whatever the term’s descriptive truth, seems to me akin to Ibram Kendi’s use of the terms “racism” and “racist” to designate those who decline to support his political policies. That is to say, it tars those who support traditional Western theological education with a term loaded with negative moral implications. Those who support traditional Western theological education, consciously or unconsciously, support whiteness. And surely no one who supports whiteness, with its oblique connection to white supremacy and white privilege, can be a good person.

What I longed to hear but did not was a critique of “whiteness” from a deeply Christian perspective, a stance of profound humility, repentance, faith, hope, and love rooted in the crucified and risen Jesus, empowered by the life-giving Holy Spirit, and directed to the God who is and shall be all in all. I did not see a vision of unity vivid enough, power enough, or profound enough to create Jennings’s desired community of belonging…a vision in which “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). For sure, the unity spoken of by Paul is not that of universal conformity to the ideal of the white male, self-sufficient, isolated, and masterful. Nor is it a unity created by everyone agreeing to accept everyone’s natural and self-chosen identity. It is the unity forged between Jesus Christ and everyone who by giving themselves to Christ are given a new identity as images of Christ who is the Image of God.

Race, Gender, Identity…Oh My

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I can already hear you saying to yourself, “Really? You’re going to talk about race, gender, and Identity? Are you crazy? I thought you avoided discussing politics on your blog?” I hear you, and I assure you I am not changing my policy. The problem is that moral issues often become politicized, so that political lines get drawn between partisans based on their stances on moral issues. Since Christianity cannot surrender its moral teaching to the secular order without denying that God is the author of the universal moral law, Christians cannot remain silent on moral issues even if those topics are also matters of partisan political disputes. My discussions of moral issues on this blog will remain apolitical in this sense: I will not argue on theological or rational grounds for a secular public policy. However I would be a faithless theologian, a thoughtless Christian, and a cowardly blogger if I surrendered morality to individual choice or political deliberation.

As I promised in my previous post “What A Year It Has Been,” I want to share my reflections on three books I read this year. Ibram Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why This Harms Everybody. I do not plan on doing full reviews of these books. Perhaps I will do that later. I want, rather, to set before you the central arguments of each and then reflect theologically on the issues raised.

Ibram Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

How To Be An Antiracist is a rhetorically brilliant book. The point of each chapter is woven in and around a compelling autobiographical story. The story draws the reader into the narrative that produces the knowledge claim of the chapter. This technique, I think, fuels the persuasive power of the book. However I found myself needing to disengage my emotions from Kendi’s enthralling story to examine his argument rationally.

The book aims to teach readers “how to be an antiracist.” In the minds of most people racism is one of the ugliest character traits imaginable and racist individuals are rightly discredited from public respectability. So, the average reader opens the book with the expectation of agreeing with the author. After all, how could a person who repudiates the ugly doctrine of racism not also wish to be an anti-racist? As you begin reading the introduction and the first chapter, however, you realize that you and Kendi are working with different definitions of racism. Most people think of racism as a conscious attitude of animus toward a particular racial group and a racist as an individual who harbors such attitudes. A person who does not harbor racial animus and attempts to treat all people regardless of race with equal dignity and fairness is not a racist. This is the common sense view.

Kendi includes the common understanding of racism and the racist character type within his definition of racism, but he expands his definition to include unconscious attitudes and seemingly innocent actions and inactions. For Kendi, racism is the hidden, implicit ideology that justifies the interlocking system of public policies and practices that creates and sustains inequity—that is, unequal possession of life’s (mostly material) goods—between racial groups. A racist is someone who by what they do or what they neglect to do supports this system of policies. An antiracist is someone who refuses to support and actively resists the racist system of policies.

In this way, Kendi shifts the locus of racism from self-conscious attitudes of individual racists to the unconscious system of values, policies, and practices that structures American society. These values and practices include the free market economy, meritocracy, color blindness, and mere equality before the law. All these values tend to perpetuate the status quo and, hence, are racist, according to Kendi’s definition. The evidence for systemic racism is the de facto inequity in income, housing, education, health care, and other measures of wellbeing between white people as a whole and people of color as a whole. Even if no one harbored conscious racist feelings or exhibited commonly identified racist behaviors, this lack would not disprove the racism of the system and those who participate in it. Your feelings of goodwill toward all people do not prove that you are not a racist. Only your active support for public policies that promote equity and your active resistance to policies that sustain inequity qualify you as an antiracist. There is no neutral ground such as might be designated by the term “not-racist.”

In Kendi’s lexicon, racism’s center of gravity has shifted from the moral core of the individual to a diffuse socio-political order. Yet he retains the emotionally loaded moral terms “racism” and “racist” to describe the character of this order. The effect is to make it grossly immoral not to support the political policies that Kendi thinks will best ameliorate the inequities among the races or to lend support to policies and values that Kendi thinks will perpetuate the status quo. Kendi is a bit coy about stating his antiracist political policies in clear terms, but I think we can infer from his criticisms of the free market economy, meritocracy, color blindness, and mere equality before the law that he would favor policies designed to achieve greater material equity among the races even if it means abandoning these principles.

Don’t miss this shift: policy differences arise not simply from different rational conclusions about what means will best achieve agreed upon goals but from profound differences in moral character. To support traditional liberal policies—free markets, merit-based reward systems, individualism, and so on—is a racist act, whereas to support policies designed to produce equity—equality of outcomes—is an antiracist act. The first is morally wrong and the second is morally right. The categories by which to evaluate public policy shift from sound or flawed reasoning to good or evil motives.

I will save my theological assessment of How To Be An Antiracist until I have summarize the other two books.

What A Year This Has Been!

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What a year this has been! Of course you don’t need me to tell you about the pandemic of politics or the politics of the pandemic! You’ve had to endure both. But I would like to share some thoughts from this year’s reading, writing, and experience.

As the year began I was putting the finishing touches on my book, The New Adam: What the Early Church Can Teach Evangelicals (and Liberals) About the Atonement. On May 31, after 5 ½ years of research and writing, I turned over my final draft to Cascade Press. I will tell you more about that book when it is published in early 2021. A day later, on my birthday (June 1), I began a blog series on Rethinking Church. That 30-essay series continued through the summer, and in the fall I revised and edited it into a little book, which will be published in early 2021 as Rethinking Church: A Guide for the Perplexed and Disillusioned (Keledei Publications).

As far as reading goes, I’ve continued my project of reading or re-reading some of the great authors of the past. Let me say a word about that project. Long ago I gave up the illusion that I (or anyone else) can keep up with all the books published in the area of theology. According to Cascade’s marketing questionnaire, “4,000 books enter the US market daily.” That is 1,460,000 a year! How many focus on religion and theology, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Given the impossibility of reading even one percent of them, I decided to be very selective. I read books I need to read for my research and writing. And as I said earlier, I read the greats. In the past year, I read or reread most of the well-known works of Immanuel Kant as well as The Kant Dictionary. I’m impressed with Kant’s critique of realism, that is, the idea that the ordered and meaningful world we know through our senses is identical to the world as it is in itself. There is no way we can know that; it’s an assumption based on the notion that our knowing powers and the world in itself are made for each other. In my thinking, confidence in this assumption requires something like the Creator of heaven and earth, that is, a universal and creative mind that embraces our minds and all things. I read some of Hegel’s works and The Hegel Dictionary. I should say, rather, I tried to read Hegel! If we agree with Hegel that everything actual is also rational, we would also be forced to agree with him that the world and its history would make perfect logical sense to the absolute Mind. What tempts me in this idea is that I believe that to God the Creator everything is transparent and clear, because God created everything. There is no obscurity. But I cannot follow Hegel in denying divine transcendence and thinking that the absolute Mind is in process of becoming self-conscious as our minds.

I read several books critiquing metaphysical materialism and advocating idealism or panpsychism, that is, the idea that every fragment of the actual world possess an element of consciousness or soul. There are lots of them out there. I am sympathetic with their critiques of materialism–Materialism makes absolutely no sense to me–but their alternative explanations trail off into fanciful speculation and reified metaphor. Since I cannot read all the original works of the great authors, I began reading the 2,200-page, two volume Great Ideas Syntopicon in the Great Books of the Western World series. I read articles on Matter, Duty, Eternity, Necessity and Contingency, Nature, Principle, One and Many, Education, Democracy, Change, Cause, Being, and others. I came across many familiar names, Plato, Parmenides, Aristotle, Aquinas, Boethius, Augustine, Locke, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, and so many more. Also, I read Gregory Nazianzus’s oration to the First Council of Constantinople in which he resigned as Patriarch of Constantinople. I will tell you more about Gregory and his oration at a later date.

As part of my professional obligations as a faculty member on a University faculty, I read three books I would not have chosen to read otherwise. As everyone knows, the long, hot summer of 2020 effectively began on May 25 with the death of George Floyd while being restrained by a Minneapolis police officer. Exacerbated by the already tense atmosphere produced by the pandemic and the presidential campaign, cities erupted in months of protest. Every celebrity, news personality, politician, business, and educational institution felt the need to condemn racism and police misconduct. In view of the discussions, commissions, faculty deliberations, and debates in which I needed to participate as a faculty member, I read Kindi, How To Be An Antiracist, Jennings, After Whiteness, and Pluckrose and Lindsey, Cynical Theories. In a future post I will give you my analysis and theological response to these three books.

What Are We Doing When We Pray?

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In times of crisis, after we think we have done everything humanly possible to cope with desperate situation, we often declare, “All we can do now is pray.” Now to be fair, when we say this we are not saying, “Let’s do nothing.” Praying is doing something. But what are we doing when we pray?

Cups of Cool Water

Consider four areas where we can do something good for others. (1) If someone has a physical need and we have the knowledge and means to help, we can render that help. We can give a cup of cool water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, seek justice for the oppressed, feed the hungry, or help the insolvent with medical bills. (2) For the unskilled and uneducated, we can teach, train, and equip them with knowledge or skills they can use to make a living. (3) We can do something for those experiencing emotional distress or trauma by supporting them with our presence, by listening, and by expressing love and concern. (4) In a person’s relationship to God, we can explain and share our faith.

Before we turn our attention to prayer let’s think about what we are doing when we help people in the above ways. Are these purely secular activities we accomplish by our own independent choice and power? No believer thinks this. We thank God for giving us opportunities, wisdom, and strength to do good for others. And we know our work would not be effective apart from God’s cooperating help.

Hence when contrasting the ordinary ways we help people with (merely) praying for them it is not accurate to say that in the former ways we do not depend on God’s help at all whereas in prayer we depend wholly on God’s help. Clearly we depend on God’s cooperation in both, in acts of physical help and in the act of prayer. But I must ask a further question: when we pray for another person, are we cooperating with God in helping others or are we merely asking God to help the other person independently of us? Let me ask this question in another way. Does praying for someone do something for them in the way giving them a cup of cool water does something for them?

Natural Action in a Natural Medium

We think we understand how giving a cup of cool water helps another person, that is, we have the wisdom and power to direct nature’s forces in a particular direction so as to quench a person’s thirst. However with regard to prayer we see no direct connection to the other person that allows us to touch them by praying—no medium like physical nature in which we both exist and can interact. So, we think of prayer as working solely by evoking God’s favorable response in some way. That is to say, praying is like dialing a 911 hotline to God hoping God will supply the needed aide. Our act of praying affects God directly but it touches the person for whom we are praying only indirectly.

This understanding of prayer is illustrated by our common practice of letting people know we are praying for them. We feel an urge to make direct contact with those for whom we pray, and we cannot imagine a way to do this other than by communicating this information to them in the ordinary way. It helps people emotionally to know that others love them and are petitioning God on their behalf. And there is nothing wrong with this desire. But telling someone you are praying for them is not the same act as helping them through your prayers.

Spiritual Action in a Spiritual Medium

To even the casual reader, prayer emerges as a major New Testament theme. Some prayers appeal directly to God for him to act. But others seem also to exert a kind of influence in the spiritual realm on behalf of others in a way similar to the way the act of giving a cup of cool water works in the natural realm. Paul tells the Ephesians that since our enemies are not “flesh and blood” but “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12), we cannot fight them with physical weapons. We need spiritual weapons to wage a spiritual war (Eph. 6:10-17). We do not just pray for God to defend us, we also fight, using faith, hope, righteousness, and the Word of God to engage the enemy. And at the end of Paul’s description of the Christian’s spiritual armor he urges his friends to pray for him and all God’s people:

“And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people. 19 Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should” (Eph 6:18-20).

For Paul, prayer is not only a weapon with which we can resist the enemy, it is also a tool with which we can help our brothers and sisters. How does this work? Paul says that we should pray “in the Spirit” (Eph 6:18). All who have God’s Spirit are present in the Spirit. And our spirits, which are in the Spirit, are present to all who are also in the Spirit. As we pray “in the Spirit” we touch each other in this spiritual medium as surely as we touch each other in the body through the medium of physical nature. When we pray in the Spirit for each other we stand together in the spiritual battle. We are really present to each other. Praying for each other is doing something for each other as surely as giving cups of cool water to each other is doing something.

Hence when I ask you to pray for me, I am not asking you merely to tell me that you are praying for me. Nor am I merely asking you to ask God to help me. I am asking you also to stand alongside me in the Spirit, to strengthen me, to encourage me, to fight with me, and to be present with me. And with God’s help, your presence will quench my thirsty spirit as much as your gift of cool water will help my thirsty body.

A Century of “Churching” the Half Converted: A Well-Deserved Obituary

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In the previous essay, I argued that modern American (and Western) society has been for quite some time unraveling the intimate bond between religious practice and personal morality forged by the prophets of ancient Israel, taught by Jesus, and maintained by the church. Whereas I am very concerned about the effects of this dissolution on American society—nothing short of its re-paganization with all the consequences thereunto appertaining—my concern in these essays is how readily the church is assimilating to this separation. The fact that this assimilation is happening to one degree or another is not in doubt. For me, understanding why it is happening and what we can do in response are the most pressing questions.

Why Now?

To answer this question I need to revisit a central argument I made in the summer 2020 series on Rethinking Church. After the persecutions of the early period ended (A.D. 313), the church in the Western world got used to peace, privilege, and power. The church in the United States of America, though not officially established as a state church, remained privileged and respected within the general society throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The church accepted and relished its implied responsibility to function as priest, conscience, and counsellor to society. It felt no great tension with the social consensus about what constituted the common good of the nation. After all, the church had been the tutor of Western society for nearly two millennia.

As society gradually disengaged morality from religion, it became harder and harder for the church to pursue its essential mission of witnessing to Christ while also serving as priest to society. The religious task of “converting the unconverted”—dominant in nineteenth-century revivalism—was gradually replaced in the second half of the Twentieth Century by the quasi-secular task of “churching the unchurched.” The church urged people to become actively involved in a church and attempted to influence general society to rise at least to the standard of moral decency. It could comfort itself with the thought that most people believe in God even if not everyone attends church regularly.

To achieve the goal of “churching” as many people as possible, churches sometimes “lowered the price of admission,” emphasized the worldly advantages of being church members, and in practice if not in theory treated members’ personal moral lives as private. As long as general society and the church shared certain basic moral standards that could pass—unless closely inspected—for biblical morality, it was not so obvious that “the churched” were more numerous in churches than “the converted.” However as American society gradually came to reject one Christian doctrine and moral teaching after another, it became harder for churches to ignore the distinction between the churched and the converted.

A Forced Choice

The church now faces a choice it cannot evade: will it continue to assimilate to the evolving secular culture in order to continue the project of churching the half converted at a discounted price or will it wholly renounce its supporting role to a rapidly re-paganizing culture and again take up the divinely-given task of witnessing to Christ? As the rhetorical form of the question implies, you know which alternative I recommend. For it is no longer possible to pretend that a truly Christian church can function as chaplain to a thoroughly pagan culture. We should have known this all along, because Jesus did not say, “Go into all the world and make people slightly better” but “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19).

The Idol in the Cathedral

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The church faces challenges in every age and in every place. They arise from outside and inside, from rulers and from the people. Some strike a sudden blow and others develop slowly. In the moment, it is hard to tell which threats are superficial and ephemeral and which are profound and enduring. What we think is our greatest challenge may turn out to have been a passing fad and an issue we hardly noticed may prove to have been an existential threat. Only with historical hindsight can we discern with any clarity the difference between the two. But we live now, and have no choice but to use the wisdom we have to deal with the challenges we face.

What are the challenges confronting us today and which one is the greatest? Perhaps there is more than one answer to this question. The church exists throughout the world, and circumstances differ greatly from place to place. The greatest challenge for the church in Nigeria may not be the most pressing problem for the church in Russia or Iran or Canada. I cannot answer for my brothers and sisters living in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. I live in the United States of America, and since I live in the State of California it is even somewhat venturesome to speak as an American Christian. For the church in the United States is quite diverse. Even the city of Los Angeles is dizzyingly multicultural. Nevertheless, I would like to share my perspective.

Separating Religion and Personal Morality

Contemporary American culture separates religion (or spirituality) from personal morality, and contemporary Christians seem to be assimilating to that separation at a rapid pace. In my view, this move is one of the most serious doctrinal errors, even heresies, of our time. It is not unusual to hear people express warm personal piety, talk about the love of God and the grace of the Holy Spirit, celebrate Advent and Easter, and speak about the resurrection and eternal life but find it impossible to utter words condemning personal sins having to do with sexual promiscuity, jealously, greed, cursing, selfish ambition, filthy language, litigiousness, adultery, abortion, divorce, factionalism, envy, malice, lying, drunkenness, and many more (See 1 Cor 6:7-20; Rom 1:18-32; Gal 5:19-21; Col 3:5-11). The list of texts of Scripture that churches are embarrassed to read in the public assembly grows yearly. Why am I so concerned about this? Why is this my number one heresy? To answer these questions I need to remind you of something the church used to know but has forgotten.

Ethical Monotheism and Idolatry

The religion of the Old Testament is often called “ethical monotheism.” In stark contrast to the Canaanite and other religions contemporary with ancient Israel, the prophets of Israel taught that there is only one God and that God is perfectly righteous, having no evil impulses. Israel’s God demanded that his people practice personal holiness, justice, and mercy as a religious duty. But Israel always lived on the edge of reversion to idolatry and pagan indulgence. The classic example of this defection is found in Exodus 32:2-6 (See also 1 Cor 10:1-6):

“He [Aaron] took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.”

The union of personal morality and religious practice became central to the faith of Israel and the Judaism contemporary with Jesus and so passed into Christianity. The New Testament’s critique of idolatry is nearly always at the same time a critique of the idolatrous separation between personal morality and religion. The first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is an excellent example of the connection between pagan idolatry and immorality: The pagans, says Paul, “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another” (Rom 1:23-24).

Invisible Idols

The pagan impulse to separate religion from personal morality is strong and ever present for the simple reason that, like water poured out, human beings always look for the easiest path and the broadest way. Self-indulgence is the natural ethics and idolatry is the natural religion of every human being. The advantage of idolatry is that we get to “have our cake and eat it too.” We can entice the supernatural powers to work for us at the bargain price of a few sacrifices and prayers while we pursue our bodily lusts and worldly ambitions. Idols do not care how we live our personal lives. They are lenient and indulgent and want us to be happy in our own way. After all, idols are imaginary gods we create in our own image.

Contemporary culture worships the idol of the autonomous Self, which must be given maximum freedom to pursue happiness in its own unique way and create its own authentic identity. Any attempt to impose on this self a moral code such as the one found in the New Testament is an outrageous sacrilege. Modern culture does not object to the idea of god as long as it is not the God of the Old or New Testament, the God for whom personal morality is a religious duty, the God who cares with whom you have sex, how you spend your money, what you think, and how you talk.

The Idol in the Cathedral

In my view, then, the church faces a stark choice with profound consequences. Will it remain faithful to the biblical view of God in which religion and personal morality are inextricably bound together or will it replace God with a pagan idol whose sole function is to sanctify our self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure?

To be continued…