After Whiteness

An Education in Belonging

Willie James Jennings

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459761
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Educazione religiosa

On forming people who form communion

Theological education has always been about formation: first of people, then of communities, then of the world. If we continue to promote whiteness and its related ideas of masculinity and individualism in our educational work, it will remain diseased and thwart our efforts to heal the church and the world. But if theological education aims to form people who can gather others together through border-crossing pluralism and God-drenched communion, we can begin to cultivate the radical belonging that is at the heart of God's transformative work.

In this inaugural volume of the Theological Education between the Times series, Willie James Jennings shares the insights gained from his extensive experience in theological education, most notably as the dean of a major university's divinity school—where he remains one of the only African Americans to have ever served in that role. He reflects on the distortions hidden in plain sight within the world of education but holds onto abundant hope for what theological education can be and how it can position itself at the front of a massive cultural shift away from white, Western cultural hegemony. This must happen through the formation of what Jennings calls erotic souls within ourselves—erotic in the sense that denotes the power and energy of authentic connection with God and our fellow human beings.

After Whiteness is for anyone who has ever questioned why theological education still matters. It is a call for Christian intellectuals to exchange isolation for intimacy and embrace their place in the crowd—just like the crowd that followed Jesus and experienced his miracles. It is part memoir, part decolonial analysis, and part poetry—a multimodal discourse that deliberately transgresses boundaries, as Jennings hopes theological education will do, too. Lilly Fellows Program Book Award (2023)

1

Fragments

It all begins with him.

We were coming to the end of a search for a would-be faculty person for a junior position (that is, a position for someone just beginning their teaching career). The selection process came down to two candidates, both wonderfully qualified and talented: an African American woman and an Anglo-American man. Like so many educational institutions at this time in history, especially theological institutions, we were

committed to having a diverse faculty. (Beautiful words.)

So with at least one of these candidates, we had a possibility of enhancing the diversity of the faculty. As part of the selection process, a governing body of the faculty interviewed the candidates. As soon as the interview process was over for both candidates, I knew that the Anglo-American male candidate was getting this job.

I love to tell the story,

Of unseen things above,

Of the words that cannot be spoken,

Of locating the real but unmentionable loves¹

On the day of his interview, I saw something coalesce in front of me that I had only seen in delicate vignettes until then. What did I see? The young scholar who got that job was a brilliant scholar, but what he performed in his interview was something else.

His was a beautiful presence that played off his appearance, his comportment, and his way of speaking. A tall, dark-haired, baritone-voiced, perfectly groomed bearded man dressed like a professor in the middle of a celebrated career, he spoke with confidence and polished ease. His answers to the questions posed to him exhibited nothing new or particularly insightful, but he answered every question to the letter, as though he knew what would be asked, and his answers exhibited, if not years of reflection, then certainly precise thinking. To think of him as a stereotype would be to completely miss where I am going here, because in point of fact he was not the point.

The point was my colleagues in the room doing the interviewing. They were all white men with the exception of me, another African American man, and one British woman. What I saw in their faces and what I heard in their voices and later in their assessment of him as a candidate was a stunning revelation of a singular truth.

They looked at him longingly and lovingly, admiring his poise, his confidence, seeing in him what they longed to be, and seeing what they thought we the faculty thought the goal of our shared project of formation ought to be. This is not my projection onto their projections. This is what was said as they assessed the candidates.

He captured love in two intertwining ways: by what he said and by the way he embodied his words.

He inhabited a field that studied ancient texts, texts deeply woven into Christians’ life of faith. The field he inhabited, however, was and is at war. It is a western front with deep trenches that span centuries and continents and that trap many institutions of higher learning between two warring sides.

On the one side were scholars deeply committed to the scientific study of ancient religious texts (scriptures)—their history, composition, transmission, translation, and interpretation. These scholars carried forward a struggle and a hard-won battle to wrest control of religious and sacred texts from the arbitrary—from people who used words designated as God’s word to execute their will to power, their desire for possession, and to gain mind-bending obedience from religious subjects. But like a reform movement turned cult, these scholars banished all who understood theological interpretations as inherent to the scientific study of these ancient texts.

On the other side were scholars deeply committed to the theological interpretation of texts, their histories of use by people of faith and their living dance with Christian doctrine. These scholars carried forward the struggle and a hard-won battle to enliven the preaching and teaching of Scripture in churches. They understood that there is no science of the text without holy performance of it in the lives of God-lovers, most centrally Christians. So for these scholars, any who refuse this faith-work, any who deny the responsibility to aid people into a healthy church-centered interpretation of the faith through their Scriptures, are simply obstacles to be overcome. The scholars who inhabit these trenches, however, move in close proximity to exactly the kinds of people that their friends-enemies in those other trenches find to be the problem: scriptural ideologues.

The lines of his disciplinary field were drawn in difficult places for this candidate, but he transgressed those lines beautifully. Here was a young man who showed that he knew the ancient texts (canonical, noncanonical, and ancillary) and how to engage in their scientific study, but who also showed a deep understanding and commitment to the Scriptures of the church that were for the church. He showed wonderful theological sensitivities and sensibilities—very rare for a modern-day textualist. This was the official reason he got the job, which is true.

But this was not the deepest reason he got the job. You see, the African American woman also showed great skill in the scientific study of texts, and also had deep theological sensitivities and sensibilities. She transgressed those same lines, but she transgressed more. (I will return to her later.)

The white male candidate showed more than the black female candidate—more ability and more nuance. This was the official conclusion. But this was not actually the “more” he showed.

At one point in the interview, a colleague asked this candidate about his year and a half studying in a German university. The meaning of another secret was about to be revealed. “What did you learn?” the candidate was asked. This was a rhetorical question. The young man who went to Germany was already an accomplished student. He had already learned his craft. But in Germany he learned his form.

“My seminars in Germany were ‘no holds barred,’ vigorous debates about the highest technicalities and most important ideas of my field,” he said. (“No holds barred” is an interesting phrase. It describes a match in which wrestlers fight each other using any and every “hold,” even those that could kill, paralyze, or maim their opponent.) “I really saw what rigorous thinking looks like. It was wonderful.” My colleagues burst out in approving laughter, except for me and the other African American man. We knew what this meant.

His formation was complete. He had put together some of the fragments out of which the scholarly form would appear—knowledge of various texts, 1.5 years of study in Germany, knowledge of German language, theology, biblical languages, seminars, blue suit, brown wingtip shoes, slow speech, legs crossed, quiet confident comportment. This US-born and -raised scholar even spoke in the interview and during his public lecture with a slight German accent.

He showed himself to be a knower

aiming at mastery,

a mind striving for possession,

and a body in control.

He showed himself to be a brilliant performer of white self-sufficient

masculinity.

The black woman was told thanks but no thanks. Like the guy, she showed something more in her interview, but something not wanted. She wanted to talk about herself as integral to her work as a textualist, specifically about the racial condition of the West and how ancient texts and modern interpretations play in and against that condition. Right in front of our eyes at that interview she was making her life a bridge, a safe way across the battle lines of her field and into a new land that included the concerns of those warring sides. She too was putting together the fragments out of which the scholarly form would appear, knowledge of various texts, knowledge of German and French, biblical languages, knowledge of theology, and seminars.

They both were working with fragments,

but her fragment work flowed around her body

illuminating her field and who she was as a scholar working in it.

His fragment work coalesced around his body

concealing him inside white self-sufficient masculinist form

through which he was imagined as

one with his field,

homoousios,

of the same substance as his discipline.

Report Summary: The committee, after careful deliberations and vigorous, honest debate, could see the body of candidate B (for black woman)—but not as a bridge to anything important. But it did see the body of candidate A (the self-sufficient young man) as exactly the body it wanted to be and wanted every student in the school to resemble, intellectually speaking. How else are we speaking?

I felt the anger, the old anger that had been with me from the beginning. What beginning? I don’t know when it started. It has always seemed to have been with me, formed at the site of my blackness. And I felt the struggle, the old struggle to keep the anger from touching hatred. My faith—no, Jesus himself—was the wall that kept the anger safe from hatred. Anger yes, hatred no, because if anger touched hatred, I would be poisoned by death himself and become trapped in an addiction that few have been able to escape.

In truth, I too loved this young male candidate at the moment of his performance. I loved him in the precise sense that Pecola loved whiteness in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye.² I loved his finish, and I longed to be finished as well—polished like a new car with a powerful engine, one that would be carefully caressed and collectible. I loved how he could gather the love of my colleagues through his performance, and I wanted to gather that same love in a performance like his. There with my colleagues I was caught up in the purest form of intellectual eroticism I had ever experienced. But this was a tragic eroticism. I loved German, loved reading German philosophers and theologians, and loved the sound of the language, though I was never good at it. Like many of my American colleagues, I always looked longingly at anyone who had mastered German and Germany, becoming one with the intellectuals there, conversant with their moods and intellectual senses.

There was a sickness present at the moment of that interview. For this was profoundly distorted love. Distorted not in love for German or German thinkers, but something bound up inside that love. I had learned to love an intellectual form that performed white masculinist self-sufficiency, a way of being in the world that aspires to exhibit possession, mastery, and control of knowledge first, and of one’s self second, and if possible of one’s world. This was a performance and a destiny in plain sight.

A German university showed my now new colleague the way.

Germany wanted to be a coloni...