Abstract
There is a seismic theological shift underway as receptions of J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Willie Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010) come to the fore. In these two works, Carter and Jennings implicitly suggest that race, rather than being a secondary issue for theology, has become the determining framework in which modern theology is done. This implicit claim is made explicit and expanded upon in Andrew Draper’s A Theology of Race and Place. Draper carefully maps the implications of Carter’s and Jennings’s works onto the present landscape of Western theology. He argues that both a liberal relativism that dilutes tradition (seen in Carter’s treatment of the religious academy and Jennings’s engagement of cultural studies) and a conservative nostalgia that seeks to retrieve tradition (represented by the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and the Catholic sensibilities of Stanley Hauerwas) are beholden to whiteness. Carter and Jennings, Draper claims, move beyond these two racially primed options through a ‘radicalizing’ of tradition linked to the particularity of God’s election of Israel (p. 21). The key question Draper’s book poses, then, is how tradition is retained or ‘radicalized’ without inheriting the supersessionist tendencies of whiteness passed down with it. His answer is that tradition is lived out in the particularity of Israel as understood in terms of Carter’s conception of ‘miscegenation’ and Jennings’s proposal of an embodied ‘joining’. Thus, Draper’s ultimate aim is to offer an ecclesiology consonant with Carter’s and Jennings’s proposals but not provided clearly in the works of either.
The book breaks into three parts. In the first part, Draper presents Carter’s Race as a critique of the African American religious academy (chapter 1) and Carter’s teacher John Milbank (chapter 2). Chapter 1 summarizes Carter’s argument and methodology by focusing on how he distinguishes himself from the prominent figures he engages from the religious academy (Albert Raboteau, James Cone, and Charles Long). Because of the breadth and complexity of Carter’s own book, Draper’s contribution is to draw out the significant themes he sees guiding Carter’s argument and holding the work together. One such theme is Carter’s affinity with the Eastern iconography that he praises in Raboteau’s later works and features in his accounts of Eastern patristics. Draper argues that this affinity with the East offers Carter a ‘more dynamic conception of being than that of the Latin West’ (p. 38). It is this vibrant understanding of being that Carter employs to challenge the dialectical thought of Cone, which sets black and white against one another rather than recognizing that Black theology’s own deeper call is for a ‘miscegenation’ constituted by the particularity of Israel. Draper’s main intent in chapter 1, then, is to bring out Carter’s contention that the African American religious academy continues to imbibe a supersessionism inherited from a Western theology that relativizes the radical centrality of Israel.
Chapter 2 moves on to show how Carter’s work stands between Cone and Milbank. Draper maintains that Carter shares Milbank’s theological sensibilities about liberal secularism and his dissatisfaction with dialectics. Ultimately, Carter works within Milbank’s theological trajectory to subvert Milbank’s elitism. Milbank’s supersessionism offers the Anglo-Saxon world as the solution to liberal secularism, displacing the particularity of Jesus’ Jewish flesh. In this way, Carter shares Cone’s appreciation for the black church with its ability to read the Bible against the grain of society. This aligns Carter’s work, Draper theorizes, with a liberation ‘more typically Conian’ without giving up on a form of worship ‘more typically Milbankian’ (p. 117). By synthesizing Cone and Milbank through the lens of Israel’s particularity, Draper suggests that Carter pushes past both. In line with his overall argument, Draper concludes, ‘Christianity is a way of life that is continually “re-traditioned” as it is connected to the living Christ and the neighbor’ (p. 93).
The second part follows the same format as Part one by examining Jennings’s relationship to cultural studies (chapter 3) and his embedded critique of the virtue ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (chapter 4). Chapter 3 focuses on Jennings’s methodology for interpreting the events of the colonial era, and how this methodology sets Jennings apart from cultural studies. The main difference that Draper highlights is that, whereas cultural studies keeps one locked in silos by trying to come to terms with the historical records, Jennings presents a methodology of joining that seeks ‘to locate this record within the theological history of YHWH’ (p. 156). Draper proposes that Jennings’s The Christian Imagination is an act of joining itself, joining the church and the academy and bringing together stories from his own life with the historical records of colonialism. It is this methodology of joining that Draper understands as the hermeneutical center of his own thesis: ‘that joining opens doors for us to see, to read, to hear, and to “be” differently’ (p. 225).
In chapter 4, Draper discusses how Jennings’s methodology of joining challenges the virtue-based tradition exemplified by Stanley Hauerwas. Draper maintains that Jennings thinks of ethics primarily in a ‘Barthian modality of receptivity to the divine command’ (p. 232), while Hauerwas generally follows an Aristotelian-Thomist framework that is ‘resistant to the vulnerability of joining’ (p. 238). For Jennings, joining is necessary because the Gentiles are grafted into Israel. This joining requires an open responsiveness toward God’s particular working through Israel that virtue ethics occludes through its retrieval of the Western tradition. While community might play an important role for the virtue-based tradition, Draper argues that this tradition has downplayed God’s particular working through Israel, removing the necessity of joining seen in Jennings’s work. This is where Draper suggests Jennings and Hauerwas part ways. ‘Hauerwas calls Christianity a “new tradition”’, whereas Jennings sees tradition as an embodied joining found in the ‘continuation of YHWH’s work in the world’ (pp. 241–42).
In the third and final part, Draper’s interpretations of Carter and Jennings are constructively applied to offer his proposal of an ecclesiology of joining. As a conclusion to the book, Draper frames his ecclesial proposal by employing Carter’s against-the-grain scriptural approach to exegete two well-known biblical passages (the parable of the ‘good’ Samaritan from Luke 10 and Paul’s body image of the church from 1 Corinthians 12). This exegesis assists Draper in distinguishing his ecclesiology from those offered by a number of burgeoning theologians. Countering Brian Bantum’s and Luke Bretherton’s liturgical accounts of the church, Draper argues for an ecclesiology that interprets the church’s liturgical practices through the insights discovered in the embodied act of joining, standing in continuation with YHWH’s work in the world. In relation to this understanding of the church, he expresses that, in his own church, it is the ‘post-service meal’ that ‘remains one of the most important practices for discipling people out of racialized (and “economized”) identity and into Gentilic identity as mutual participants in the miscegenated body of the Jewish Jesus’ (p. 289). Draper’s ecclesiology accents how tradition is not something static that can be retrieved or simply liturgically repeated, allowing racial confines to remain. Instead, the church joins in the reality of God’s work through Israel as the place of discovery.
The conclusion of Draper’s A Theology of Race and Place signifies both the book’s contribution to theological race studies and the promise it offers for further research. The contribution is found in his detailed measuring of the consequence of Carter’s and Jennings’s colossal proposals for Western theology and their bearing on the Christian church. As such, the book helps to chart the moving tides of theology brought about by their works and relates these shifts to the church.
The book’s promise of more relates to Draper’s aim of showing how Carter’s and Jennings’s proposals fund an ecclesiology of joining. The ecclesiology Draper proposes remains largely unformulated (maybe purposively) and gives minimal regard to how one understands God’s working in existing ecclesial traditions. The issue of tradition raised by Draper concerns not only Israel as a people with a place but Israel’s existence in creaturely time in light of God’s eternity. The question of time is broadly absent in Carter’s and Jennings’s works, and this is reflected in Draper’s constructive ecclesiology. The church, for Draper, is thought of spatially in relation to Israel but less so in terms of Israel’s existence in creaturely time.
Draper shows an awareness of the question of time and eternity in his uneasiness with what he calls Carter’s proclamation of the ‘death of dialectic’ (p. 50). But, after raising the question, Draper offers no additional critique or comments. Instead, he largely dismisses the question of creaturely time by later contending that ‘time is to be understood as constituted by place’ (p. 302). Draper makes this argument based on how the church calendar is always connected to a place through the seasons of planting and harvesting, but such an understanding of place only has meaning through the function of memory in relation to creaturely time. I would contend that exploring race requires a mutual attendance to place and time, without either being made the controlling category. I would further venture that framing his book in this way might have allowed Draper to provide a more collaborative project rather than a broadly one-directional critique. Such a collaborative approach aligns more clearly with Draper’s espoused methodology of joining and safeguards against simplified critiques that hide the subtle powers of race.
Thinking through the connection between creaturely time and God’s eternity requires more detailed attention to be given to the church’s liturgical practices than that provided by Draper. These are practices that the Jewish Jesus introduced to his Jewish disciples in connection to the Passover and Israel’s cultic rhythms. I worry that Draper’s work inadvertently undermines these already given practices, thereby displacing a component of how God graciously intervenes in time to challenge the church’s racial enclosures. In short, A Theology of Race and Place highlights the need for further work on a theology of race and time.
These are some questions that Draper’s A Theology of Race and Place raises, and it is his ability to bring such questions to a head that makes his book an important text for anyone considering the question of race in relation to the church.