Race: A Theological Account

Christian Century, Dec 16, 2008

Race: A Theological Account. By J. Kameron Carter. Oxford University Press, 504 pp., $35.00.

Carter, a professor at Duke Divinity School, argues that Christians formed their identity early on by racializing the Jews and turning them into Semites, and that the practice of locating racially marked others has been central to Christian theology. Carter's work is not only deconstructive, however. He aims to find a "new theological imagination for the 21st century," which for Christians involves a recovery of Jewish roots. Carter also finds sources for an alternative logic in Gregory of Nyssa and in antebellum slave narratives that understand whiteness as a theological, not merely a cultural or a racial, construction.