Gentile Christian Critical Race Theorists Should Know Their Place
I have been engaged in Critical Race Theory for a while now. Even though I could consider myself a late comer to this game, I could also reasonably argue that from elementary school through high school and onto college, I had been doing CTR informally. J. Kameron Carter’s RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT radically changed the way I did both theology and race theory. Willie Jennings’ text has added to that transformation.
For Jennings, race theory is just not about studying how skin and stereotypes have been constructed, but also how place [i.e., land] has been stripped from the formations of our identity, and for what purpose (Jennings, page 63). This I think is crucial for the heart of Jennings’ argument, which is protest against “the deformities of Christian intimacy” (9-10). Willie Jennings unmasks Enlightenment universalism as a docetic venture (that is, a gaze that denigrates our material realities) while problematizing “post-modern” contextualization as adoptionist in nature (that is, an insular project incapable of speaking to or inviting outsiders). On contextualization/relativity if you will, if one argues as the 19th century bishop Colenso of South African (as well as other Protestant liberals yesterday and today) argued that God has been with everyone, they just don’t know it approach to religion [ala the anonymous Christianity of Karl Rahner], then what they are really doing is living in an entirely “nationalist intellectual enterprise” (Jennings 166-167). Self-reliance on the national level apart from YHWH is what Jennings refers to as Gentile arrogance.
This arrogance arrives in the Colonialist moment that removed land as a possible site of transformation since it is eliminated as a signifier of our identity (page 248). Jenning’s constructive proposal is one that advocates a Gentile humility, where Israel is not an ethnic group like all ethnic groups striving for political salvation, but as a hermeneutical key, with YHWH fuctioning as “an epistemological crisis” (254). Gentiles are excluded, Jennings implies, from moralizing against YHWH’s crusading activity in the Ancient Near East. Even by postulating that Christians are to imitate these Wars of the Holy One is a supersessionist position, for the church or the nation-state has replaced YHWH and Israel (whose lives are tied together).
For Jennings, “Thus, the question for the living Israel is not, how do you form faith people, what does it mean to form faithful people, given the complex social situations for our theological pedagogies?” (285). In this light, one must understand ideas such as Zionism (and I would include black separatism as well) as reactionary responses to the colonial moment.
A post-racial future for Jennings must not mean a further commodification of space [land] at the expense of skin-color [biology] & cultural practices [social constructs] continuing to up-end place (289). This would also assume that assimilationist projects are sites within the processes to re-create human beings as commodities, objects to be thingified.
After critically engaging this text, reading, and asking question after question, I think I can accept the direction of where Jennings’ and Carter’s similar projects are going, with a few qualifications, and without the Barthianism–if you continue to quote Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Von Balthasar, and T.F. Torrance throughout your works, in my book, you are a Barthian.
My one question to Jennings would be this: Why should we start with the Medieval context as where Christian supersessionism and therefore, the fall to the Colonial Moment began? If this is the case, as Jennings has argued, I don’t see a difference between Jennings’ Protestant account of history [he's a baptist like me 
] and other Protestant accounts that point to the “Dark Ages” of the Middle Ages in between early Christianity and the Enlightenment. I would say that certainly anti-Judaism has its roots earlier than this era, in fact, leading up the 2nd century in [greek-speaking] Alexandria in Roman Egypt, Jews were banned from being full citizens. Is there something in Greek philosophy or the Graeco-roman pantheon that is hostile to the philosophy of Moses, Ezekiel, and Solomon? My point is that these developments precede the Middle Ages and are begging us to take another look at these items.
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