CHRISTOLOGY, OR REDEEMING WHITENESS: A Response to James Perkinson's Appropriation of Black Theology

Theology Today, Jan 2004 by Carter, J Kameron

THE DIFFICULTY OF NAMING THE PROBLEM

Professor Perkinson's essay, "Like a Thief in the Night: Black Theology and White Church in the Third Millennium," embraces black liberation theology as a means of awakening whites-especially, he says, those who are male and Christian-to the way in which whiteness continues to leverage power and secure privilege in contemporary life. He is particularly concerned with how religious sensibilities continue to broker white power and privilege in the age of late modern capital.1 Black Theology's interpretation of black existence commends itself to him as a medicinal balm for this malady. In this respect, it is a redemptive gift of "prophetic bombast" for the white church and for whiteness as such because it unmasks the idolatrous ways in which whiteness functions in modernity. Black Theology, therefore, for Perkinson, is anything but a mere memory to be consigned to the twilight of the twentieth century. Rather, it is, in the Gramscian sense, counterhegemonic. Hence, it and its questions doggedly accompany us into the morning dawn of the third millennium. A central burden of Perkinson's essay, then, is to identify what is still at stake in the refusal of those categorized as "white" to come to terms with the message and enduring significance of Black Theology and, particularly, with its revaluation of the value of white and black humanity alike. What finally is at stake, says Perkinson, is this: "the identity of God," "the practicality of freedom," and the theological discernment of "the reality of 'America.'" Hence, it would be perilous, he insists, and I think rightly so, to ignore this theological program, which puts these issues on the proverbial table. Yet ignoring it, avers Perkinson, is precisely what has been done. Consequently, Black Theology's voice of redemption looms as a harbinger of judgment against "the intransigence of the white church." This is the prophetic jagged-edge of Perkinson's essay to his white audience. For this audience has yet, in any true sense, to be redeemed-to undergo a white "baptism" by fire "into the social and existential experience of those . . . for whom death is most precipitous and life most precarious." Such is the claim, in broad strokes, of Perkinson's essayistic jeremiad.

My response does not take issue with its ultimate aim: to call the white church to a deeper faithfulness to its Lord, which would entail "being . . . reconstituted in a . . . form of power" other than that of the "the power of whiteness." Indeed, as an end, I affirm it without reservation. Nor will I take issue with his plea for white people to become "more than just white." Again, as an end, I affirm it without stipulation as well. And, finally, I will not take issue with Perkinson's endeavor to employ a theological reading of the meaning of black existence in North America, both historically and contemporarily, as a means of theologically discerning the meaning of America and decoupling it from its white supremacist and hegemonic moorings. This, too, I laud. I will argue, instead, that on each of these points Perkinson's vision requires an understanding of what it means to be a Christian, along with an understanding of the theological task that is transparent to that meaning, that his essay, in fact, does not have. Hence, his argument does not lead, as he wishes (and I along with him), to "[t]he reality of what is," a reality that is a different way of being in the world and that is indexed through "a different form of power." Behind the limitations of his argument lies a failure to reckon with the theological limitations in the model of black theological reflection he appropriates. Thus, not reckoning with those limitations, he unwittingly-but in his own way, to be sure-reproduces them. In defending this claim, I will pay particular attention to Perkinson's black Christology and the black ecclesiology or communal possibilities attending it. For together, as he sees it, they yield a black soteriology intent on redeeming whiteness.

Before launching formally into my assessment, however, let me attempt to head off potential misunderstandings by clarifying what I take to be the true issue of concern here. The issue of concern is only secondarily Black Theology itself. For Black Theology is an intellectual program intent on the explication, in principally Christian theological terms, of the meaning of black existence.2 This is the shock wave that Black Theology presented to the theological and, indeed, the intellectual world in its moment of arising. Its radical claim was this: As is the case with creation in its totality, so also black existence is a word of God. This claim, I think, could arguably be construed as an important retrieval of an aspect of the classical theological tradition in patristic theology and in thirteenth-century medieval theology. For black existence, in its historical unfolding in the New World, is one of the many words of creation that, in its own inflections, intones God's eternal art (ars aeternae).3 In this respect, black existence, as part and parcel of creation, is, as Gregory of Nyssa said, a "prism" or "mirror of the Infinite."4 Such is one of the implications of James Cone's creative use of the Barthian theology in which he steeped himself and that he deployed to powerful effect in the late-1960s heat of "Jim Crow" racism to interpret Black Power theologically.5 Hence, the real issue, I contend, is that of the execution of Black Theology's groundbreaking task of uncovering the meanings-purportedly theological-of black existence. My claim is that Black Theology, drawing on the many resources at its disposal, admirably began this groundbreaking task precisely in its effort to dislodge white supremacy and, thereby, to rename America theologically. Yet, I also claim that, precisely as a theological task intent on yielding theological meanings from New World blackness, the effort quickly stalled. A central question of this response essay is, Why? Looking at why Perkinson's essay theologically stalls in a similar way provides an occasion to engage this question with respect not only to Black Theology, but also much of modern theology as such.