Abstract
Ross Halbach and Kristopher Norris are two white men earnestly searching for the best way for white Christians to tackle the problem of whiteness as it manifests in the United States. Both write from a place of critical self-examination in response to black theologians they take as guides alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both also share a conclusion, advocating for the centrality of repentance and reparations. They could not, however, be more different in their interpretation of these terms and their route to their conclusion.
Willie Jennings, J. Kameron Carter and Brian Bantum are Halbach’s main interlocutors on race, while Norris wrestles with James Cone and womanist theologians. In both cases, these forays into race theory are anchored in the theology of Bonhoeffer, making the differences in their approaches more visible. The substantial divergences between the criticisms of white supremacy levied by Cone and the contiguous approaches of Jennings, Carter and Bantum are themselves worthy of comment, but the aim of this review is to ask the more modest question of how Halbach and Norris employ black theologians alongside Bonhoeffer to develop a diagnosis of, and response to, the problem of whiteness.
Halbach’s book opens with the lament that his whiteness is ‘existential banditry’ (p. x). The phrase encapsulates the tenor of his work: a steady self-examination that refuses to evade painful self-scrutiny. Halbach is not asking ‘how to overcome whiteness’ (p. 223). His question is how to discern where God is already at work and join him through repentance that anticipates surprise.
Halbach repudiates all attempts that aim to embrace diversity without repentance. He is worried about white people trying to frame the problem through a solution they can control and so evade repentance. For Halbach, Bonhoeffer’s theology accentuates a version of repentance that repudiates control and instead prepares the white Christian to be surprised (p. 32). In chapters 3–5, Halbach’s reading of Jennings, Carter and Bantum affirms their claim that, theologically speaking, supersessionism is the basic theological error that allowed white supremacy to parasitically take root during the modern colonial period. Though Halbach acknowledges the ways Bonhoeffer is hailed by some black theologians for his immersion in the black church and resistance to Nazism, he also thinks that Bonhoeffer’s supersessionist tendencies are both apparent and in need of repair. Halbach is not mesmerised by Bonhoeffer’s biography, but by his theology, and it is the latter that Halbach brings into critical conversation with Jennings, Carter and Bantum.
As Halbach sees it, Bonhoeffer’s key theological insight is the distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate (pp. 31–44). The ultimate is that which has been revealed in and promised through Christ. The penultimate is what happens in the church and the world as a response to the irruption of the ultimate into a broken world. The only possible responses are repentance or resistance, and Halbach names whiteness as a form of resistance to what the Spirit is already doing in the Church. Halbach thus reads Jennings, Carter and Bantum as providing a critical corrective for Bonhoeffer’s supersessionism, with Bonhoeffer offering in turn a repair for where they confuse the ultimate and the penultimate.
Bonhoeffer’s theology is brought into critical engagement with each of his three interlocutors. In chapter 3, Jennings, suggests Halbach, helpfully reinserts the story of Israel into Bonhoeffer’s narrative of salvation. In turn, Bonhoeffer clarifies that Jew and Gentile have already been joined and that whiteness is a resistance to that Spirit-led work (p. 132). In chapter 4, Carter reinserts Israel’s mediating role in Bonhoeffer’s account of Adam to Christ as the gathering of all peoples into Jesus’ Jewish flesh. Here Bonhoeffer helpfully draws emphasis away from penultimate flesh-markers as the litmus of inclusion with Christ (ironically a move paralleling the operation of theological whiteness). Instead, Bonhoeffer points toward imitation of Christ’s humiliation, a voluntary suffering for the other out of love, as the marker of true joining with Christ (p. 152). Finally, in chapter 5, Bantum and Bonhoeffer are contrasted without mutual repair to examine how ecclesiology can confront whiteness. Halbach disagrees with Bantum; the church’s performance of boundary-crossing is not what disrupts the world, nor distinguishes it from the world (pp. 191–93). Instead, the church is where Christians discern God’s disruption of a fallen world and responds accordingly—with Bonhoefferian resistance or repentance.
This is a complex, thorough work requiring a careful read. Halbach methodically and carefully examines arguments by Jennings, Carter and Bantum, affirming their strengths, and also challenging what he sees as their errors. Bold is the white man who simultaneously confronts whiteness while daring to critique these three. What this critical engagement reveals, however, is that he takes Jennings, Carter and Bantum seriously, valuing their insight enough to want to strengthen the gifts each offers the church. Neither the black nor white theologian is taken to be unimpeachable, allowing a mutual repair and challenge to emerge that honours both Bonhoeffer and Jennings, Carter and Bantum. The persistent affirmation of Bonhoeffer’s ultimate-penultimate distinction allows Halbach to hold onto God’s agency despite a broken, resistant church that has subscribed to whiteness. God preserves the church despite its resistance in order that it may respond (p. 11). Though Halbach questions a theology of reparations, he does end up prescribing reparations—not as a solution, but as a beginning—the beginning of repentance (pp. 227–29).
In his effort to prevent white people from seeking a way out of the conversation about race, Halbach is perhaps too suspicious about the category of ethnicity as a helpful marker in the conversation (pp. 72–87). He ends up closing the door for intersectional discussions around ethnic difference that are important for non-black-white binary conversation partners.
Where Halbach employs a slow, steady examination of the four theologians involved, Norris’s writing is like a polemical powder-keg that relentlessly indicts White Christianity. Norris’s moment of catalytic change happened through personally meeting Cone, whose black narrative and theology pierced Norris’s white perspective. With Cone as his guide, Norris sets out to find ‘how can white people become black’ (p. 102), which Cone presents as the solution to confronting white supremacy.
Norris explores two competing stories in Church: the white theology of the protestant church, with postliberal theologian Stanley Hauerwas as its standard-bearer, and the counter-narrative of the black church, with liberation theologian Cone as its representative. If Halbach understands the problem to be resistance to repentance by way of problem-solving attitudes, Norris sees the problem of whiteness as a white narrative that denies the black story (pp. 77–80).
In chapter 2, Norris strikingly roots the birth of white supremacy in an older and more intimate location than Jennings. Norris follows Kelly Brown Douglas’s claim: white supremacy was not an external parasite that attached itself to Christianity. Instead, white supremacy was birthed within the church and is a product of Christian supremacy, which embraced body-soul separating dualisms and abstractions from its earliest days (pp. 44–46). From here, the body could be assigned to the state and the soul to the church. That established a frame for colonisation, including a theologically defended colour- and power-blindness which masked the real effects race has on social, political and religious practice (pp. 28, 58). The inability to recognise and diagnose white supremacy is intrinsic to this white narrative.
In chapter 3, Hauerwas is presented as the epitome of the white narrative story today: detached, abstracted, and unable to find resources within itself to confront its uninterrogated whiteness. For Norris, it is the black narrative offered by Cone that offers precisely the resources and opportunity whiteness lacks.
In chapter 4, Norris accepts Cone’s premise that the only way out of the other-excluding white narrative is for whites to ‘become black’ (p. 102), a conversion in which white people deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness), and follow Christ (black ghetto) (p. 107). Against critiques that Cone has ontologised blackness, Norris emphasises the Cone who reads the symbol of blackness as standing for the oppressed (p. 101). White people who participate in the liberation of black (oppressed) brothers and sisters then can become black when they ‘share deeply in the passions, sorrows, and resilient hopes of their black brothers and sisters’ (p. 102). White Christians should pursue this narrative blackness.
Chapters 5–6 flesh out the particulars of such a pursuit. Having now deconstructed the tradition of theological whiteness he sees as embodied in Hauerwas, Norris’s constructive proposal begins from a proposed point of commonality between Cone, Hauerwas and Bonhoeffer. Norris follows Cone in assuming that Bonhoeffer’s biography vouchsafes his theology. Bonhoeffer’s white narrative was punctured by the black narrative he encountered in Abyssinian Baptist Church during his time in New York. The experience turned Bonhoeffer’s formerly abstract theology into an ethic of responsibility that white Christians can emulate. For Norris, a Bonhoefferian ethic of responsibility reveals a set of key practices that can help white Christians become black. Norris contends that Bonhoeffer, Cone and Hauerwas reject a conception of ethics as problem-solving and instead understand ethics as responding to Christ in the neighbour or community (p. 130). Norris affirms Hauerwas’s defence of formative practices, and positions himself as advancing this emphasis in three practices Norris sees as enacting an ethic of costly responsibility: remembrance (recognising whiteness and denying its power), repentance (confessing and turning away from white supremacy), and reparation (joining the movement for black liberation in submission and solidarity) (pp. 147–60).
Though Norris is compelling in his indictment of the white theological narrative which has failed to recognise the black story, it is unclear if his constructive response is theologically successful. Though he presents a set of practices as necessary for confronting white supremacy, the theological reasoning presented in defence of these three practices in particular is thin when compared to Halbach. Having indicted Hauerwas for his uninterrogated whiteness, it is puzzling that Norris then deploys Hauerwas’s notion of practices—a questionable move given Norris’s takedown of Hauerwas’s theology as a whole. Second, Norris employs a thin reading of Bonhoeffer’s theology. His privileging of Bonhoeffer’s biography places Norris in a weak position to critically examine Bonhoeffer’s ethic of responsibility. Staging any mutually reparative conversation is rendered impossible in relation to Cone and Hauerwas. Theologically speaking, Norris could have presented the practices of remembrance, repentance and reparation without appeal to Hauerwas or Bonhoeffer. Though Norris affirms that Cone, Hauerwas and Bonhoeffer reject problem-solving ethics, the account of practices offers such little space and detail for how God is at work in and through them that it is unclear how Norris has not himself offered a problem-solving response to the problem of whiteness. Norris needs the church as a physical context in which to confront white supremacy; Christian faith itself, however, seems non-essential. God’s agency is missing in these practices. It is unclear by Norris’s account how the Spirit can be at work in a broken and repentant church with such sordid early foundations.
In order to overcome white supremacy, white Christians must resist the temptation to try to fix the problem without repentance (Halbach) or inoculate the white self from the black story (Norris). Both ways of framing the problem are informative, and both men’s desire to honour black theologians is clear. However, Halbach’s approach offers a thicker theological account for confronting whiteness. Halbach matches his proposed response of repentance with an affirmation of God’s promise to the church, a naming of precise points where the church has resisted the Holy Spirit, and an anticipation of God’s movement in the church’s work of repentance.
Despite Norris’s heavy critique of Hauerwas’s theological system, I find that Norris’s own biography is what indicts Hauerwas: it was Norris the PhD student who put in the effort to visit and listen to Cone in person instead of the theologian Hauerwas, whose white narrative remains physically and theologically distant and unpunctured by Cone’s theological perspective. Though both Halbach and Norris reject interpersonal relational reconciliation as a solution to the problem of whiteness, their writing and biographies show the necessity of reconciling, reparative conversations and relationships when confronting whiteness, without which the church remains in unrepentance. Relationship of the Cone–Norris kind, like Halbach’s multiracial congregation, are needed to puncture the dominant white narrative and to resist white people assuming that liberation comes through information acquisition alone.
Finally, these proposals insist on reparations as a tangible way to offer repentance in the white-black relationship. The question both leave unasked is where an Asian American or a second-generation Latino would fit in such a paradigm. Both books share in the limitation of much of the theology of race discussion in the US today, and in so doing highlight the conceptual problems that remain to be tackled if the conversation is going to expand beyond that binary.