J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account breaks new ground in contemporary theology; Carter’s contention is that the problem of race is first and foremost a theological problem. Indeed in some sense, the problem of race is modern theology’s greatest contemporary challenge. Carter goes beyond the familiar platitudes about white racism, unveiling a promising post-colonial trajectory for contemporary Christian theology.
He tackles this problem directly through a theological meditation on Jesus’ Jewish flesh. Reflecting on Jesus’ Jewishness exposes the whiteness of modernity and hails a new creation where all people are reconciled and redeemed, regardless of their race and ethnicity. This truth emerges in its clearest form in the slave narratives of prophetic black Christians in antebellum America. It was by reflecting on the human life of Jesus the Jew that Africans in the Americas were able to find meaning in their suffering under the oppressive regime of slavery and segregation.
In part 1, Carter provides a theological account of modernity in which he establishes the practice of the racism of the West as fundamentally a Christian invention. The racialization of persons of African descent as “black,” Carter argues, was based on the racialization of the “Jew,” which has its roots in Christianity’s origins as a Jewish sect, often finding its identity in opposition to Judaism. In part 2, Carter engages African American religious studies, focusing on the work of the historian Albert J. Raboteau, theologian James H. Cone, and philosopher Charles H. Long. Carter finds all three of these approaches to black religion inadequate in dealing with the theological distinctiveness of Christian theology, and he builds on Raboteau and Cone to develop his own constructive Afro-Christian theological vision in part 3 of the volume.
Carter frames his deconstruction of the racial logic of modernity with an epigraph from Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited:
How different might have been the story of the last two thousand years on this planet grown old from suffering if the link between Jesus and Israel had never been severed … . [For] theChristian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, … the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine.
From here Carter moves to a critique of Immanuel Kant’s estrangement of Jesus from Judaism, suggesting that the problem of racism is fundamentally a problem of supersessionism—an interpretation of the New Testament that sees God’s relationship with Christians as replacing God’s covenant with the Jews. Carter strategically aligns the black freedom struggle with the history of the Jews, opening up a new chapter in the study of African American religion.
While Al Raboteau’s Slave Religion and James Cone’s books on black theology emerged around the same time, in the late 20th century African American religious history and black theology rarely converged; Carter ambitiously synthesizes the two discourses. In Slave Religion, Raboteau considers how antebellum black Christianity negotiated its African heritage through evangelical forms of faith. The encounter was a dynamic process of mutual critique and influence. When African Americans converted to Christianity they also began to convert white Christianity, redirecting it toward a more prophetic end—the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
Carter reads Raboteau’s most recent writings as expressions of a deeply Eastern Orthodox sensibility. Raboteau’s “iconic” reading of history views the sufferings and struggles of black Christianity as an icon of the invisible God: “Black existence and black faith relate to the eternal Logos as an icon relates to that which it represents. In this way, the invisible becomes visible even as it retains its invisible depth, a depth rooted in a freedom (for God the Creator), which cannot be policed and thus enslaved.” An iconic interpretation of slave religion discloses that “It is the poor slave, one might say, who is closest to God and so reveals God.” The courageous struggle of Christian slaves weaving together fragments of their existence into a story of wholeness is illuminated by the self-emptying love of Jesus the Jew, who takes on the form of poor and enslaved flesh in order to redeem all of God’s children.
While Carter appreciates the historiography of Raboteau’s later writings, it is the early work of James Cone, particularly his Barthian Christocentrism and emphasis on Jesus’ Jewishness, that resonates with Carter’s Christology. Carter agrees with Cone (pace Balthasar) that Barth’s theology is ultimately inadequate for interpreting black religion, pointing to the abstract character of Barth’s thought and a “supersessionism that lies dormant in the deep structure of his Christology.” Focusing on Barth’s early writings, Carter misses moments in his later work where he more fully elaborates the contours of the revelation of the triune God within the space-time manifold of human history. Barth argues for the indissoluble unity between Israel and the church based on the one covenant of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Barth’s concern with God’s triune action in the travail of history is manifest in the phrase “Jesus is Victor,” the watchword of the Blumhardts—the elder Johann Christoph (1805-1880) and his son Christoph Friedrich (1842-1919), German pietists. As Christian T. Collins Winn argues, Barth was inspired by the elder Blumhardt’s participation in an exorcism of demons on December 28, 1843, in Möttlingen, Germany. Barth interprets this exorcism as expressing the concrete dimension of Christology as Jesus continues to confront the “powers and principalities” of this world. Both Cone and Carter have done a great service for the Barthian tradition in connecting it to black Christianity in the Americas. To further this theological collaboration, perhaps we should consider black Christianity as a form of trans-Atlantic pietism, and begin to explore the affinities between black Christian thinkers like Rebecca Protten and Jarena Lee and pietist thinkers like Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf and the Blumhardts. Then 21st-century Protestant theology will be nurtured by both prophetic black Christianity and radical pietist streams of theology.
While appreciating the young Cone’s Barthian christocentrism, Carter rejects Cone’s later embrace of Paul Tillich’s liberal existential theology. From Carter’s vantage, understanding Jesus merely as a religious symbol of the power of being over nonbeing leaves Cone’s project stranded without transcendence, without a full Christology and plagued with a problematic conception of “ontological blackness” (Victor Anderson). For Carter it is the particularity of Jesus’ incarnate and risen Jewish (non-racial) flesh that redeems humanity and restores the cosmos.
Carter moves beyond Raboteau and Cone to map out a new vision for a prophetic, intercultural Christian theology. Seeking an alternative to modernity, he turns to Byzantine theology, offering fresh readings of Irenaeus as an anti-Gnostic intellectual, Gregory of Nyssa as an abolitionist intellectual, and Maximus the Confessor as an anticolonialist intellectual. Carter reads the classical theological tradition for the ways in which it is always providing a counter-politics to the politics of a racialized modernity that undergirds the modern nation-state. For example, Gregory of Nyssa argues that “Christ’s life as it reaches its apex in Easter restores the image-status of all persons, affirming and positioning all persons in the person of the eternal Christ, the Son of the Trinity, so as to set them free.” For Gregory, to enslave another human being—who is made in God’s image—is completely out of the question.
Too often, “paleo-orthodox” and “radical orthodox” appeals to the authority of tradition in Western religious and political culture continue to enact theological whiteness. In contrast, Carter subverts appeals to “tradition” as a way of securing theological orthodoxy without engaging the ethical contradictions of a religion that forged modernity through cultural genocide, slavery, and colonial expansionism. For Carter, the prophetic black Christianity that came of age in the modern era has unveiled the greatest insight of the ancient catholic faith: the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has revealed Godself in the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, so that all God’s children, be they Jew or Gentile, black or white or any shade in between, may know God’s forgiveness, and in God’s mercy work together to build the beloved community. Christian theology in the 21st century, he argues, must reach back into the prophetic black Christian experience in order to unearth the fragments of the ancient Christian past, following the contours of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to whom this tradition points—a ressourcement that Carter models with his readings of Briton Hammon’s 1760 Narrative, Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, and the writings of Jarena Lee.
Carter’s bold vision stands as a challenge to black and white theological projects alike. He calls black theologians to drop essentialist notions of blackness in order to center their racial critique in what is distinctively Christian about their Christian identity. Carter calls white theologians to confession and repentance; by identifying the idol of whiteness in Christian modernity, white theologians can begin to relinquish their power and privilege through a deep engagement with a prophetic stream of black Christianity that has been rendered invisible in traditional theology. Carter presents a table at which blacks and whites can join Hispanic, Asian, and Native American theologians to begin to cultivate a theology of reconciliation that is at once anti-racist and robustly Christian. Carter’s book has already spurred a rush of interest in Christology and race in many different theological circles. Because of its provocation, its clarity, and its comprehensiveness, Race: A Theological Account will be a seminal text in Christian theological discourse for many years to come.
Peter Goodwin Heltzel is the author of Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race and American Politics (Yale Univ. Press). He teaches theology at New York Theological Seminary.
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