Evangelism and Evangelicalism

I read an interesting post on the "Call and Response" blog from the Faith and Leadership program at Duke Divinity School. Louis Weeks wrote about the accessibility and usefulness of the term Evangelical among Presbyterians and mainstream Protestants. He took note of what he sees a changes in the way that many Protestants view the word.

To some extent, he is describing a certain blurriness of the previously demarcated border between more conservative and more liberal Protestants, Presbyterians in particular. I agree that this concept is in flux among Protestants (and among some of a new generation of Catholics, too), so I offered my own thoughts on the way that Baptists (should I say baptists?) have use and understood the terms evangelism and evangelicalism during my lifetime. Here is what I had to say.

Growing up among Baptists, there was ambivalence about the term evangelical because it implied certain views of church and state which depart from the free church tradition. They liked the term evangelistic, however, and pressed us all to learn to tell our testimony and the plan of salvation whenever the grace of God presented the opportunity.

Yet in both uses of the term, one describing a verbal witness seeking a verbal response (evangelism) and the other describing adherence to a version of Reformed confession with a biblicist or fundamentalist flavor, seem to me to be theological misdirections.

What is evangelism? We all know to answer that it is sharing the good news. The next question which arises must be, "What is the good news?" I would offer that like much of modern North American theology, the concept of evangelism has been domesticated and perverted by modern Western culture.

As John Perkins noticed in the 60s and 70s, most churches he encountered had a very narrow view of "the gospel." One thing that was certain in the dominant streams of theology, especially among many evangelicals, was that the gospel was NOT about the social conditions of human existence. Jim Crow and widespread poverty were something else, perhaps related to missions, but not to the gospel. The "real" work of the church was the gospel of personal forgiveness and eternal life.

This is only a piece of the gospel. Perkins says we must bear the whole gospel to the whole person and the whole community. To see this holistic picture, I recommend looking to the Gospels to see what Jesus was talking about when he used the word "euangelion." Luke 4 is one of the key examples: good news for the poor, liberty for the oppressed, a path to wholeness for the marginalized lame, blind, and vulnerable, and a troubling challenge to the injustices of the day. This kind of good news makes clear that God is at work for the good of humanity whom God loves, in this life and the next.

We need to recover these words for the church, but we need a richer, biblical understanding of them or recovering them will merely perpetuate the shortcomings of the domesticated, malformed churches of the age of the modern nation-state.

Carter's RACE 4: Foucault, Modern Political Thought, the Jews, and Race

As stated in earlier posts, I am taking a slow pace through the arguments by J. Kameron Carter concerning the emergence of the modern racialized world. Carter has done many of us a great favor by taking time to read some of the lesser known writings of key figures of modern thought.

Perhaps you were not the kind of student I was, but I found myself barely keeping my head above water in the vast sea of writing which had some relevance to my dissertation research. Now and then, I would see an insight in someone’s thought, and hope to find the one essay or book I could read that would allow me to mine what I needed either (a) to add strength to my argument or (b) to show that I was not so dense as to have completely ignored someone important. I didn’t drown, but there was so much more that was missing. In addition, I was thankful for certain books of grand scope which helped me to organize and schematize large portions of the field I was studying. Carter’s book is that kind of book, and I am glad that I now get to join him in this conversation.

One writer I tried to understand through a few brief writings and lots of conversations with colleagues is Michel Foucault. Although it seemed obvious to me that I was influenced by is ideas, I did not try to make him a primary conversation partner. Carter, on the other hand, has carefully examined not only well-known texts, but also some lesser known speeches and essays which shed important light on the growth of modern racialized rationality and social structures.

Carter draws on Foucault to build a case for the centrality of the Jews for the emergence of race. The Jews, as the archetypal writers of counterhistorical narrative, help to shape the modern vision of history as not merely the accomplishments of the victors, but also of the struggles of the oppressed for liberation. In recognizing this significant contribution, Foucault and Carter see the way that modern understandings of race emerge from this consciousness of a distinct people that the Jewish covenant and scriptures bring into existence.

Modern Europeans, influenced by the Reformation as a movement of protest echoing the prophetic voice of the Jews, come to see their relationship to other peoples of the world in a racial frame. Fascinated by their own ways in contrast to the ways of others, and inclined to see themselves and their ways as superior to others, Europeans transform their adopted religion of Christianity into a messianic soteriology and eschatology of whiteness in history. Western Civilization claims triumphantly the meek and lowly Crucified One and his followers as a community called to elevate the rest of the world to its potentiality, by persuasion, force, or extermination. The Jews, as the exemplars of a peculiar people who gave birth to the vision of a liberative counterhistory, must ironically be eliminated in one way or another in order for whiteness to complete its salvific mission in history.

As I struggled to understand the ways the modernity’s churches have departed from their calling in order to serve false saviors and idols, I remained painfully unaware of the implications of race for modern rationality. I lived in the midst of Christian failure to overcome the racialized ideologies of U. S. culture, but did not see the radical nature of the problem. I knew that “racisms is a faith,” but I thought it to be something that could be pointed out and overcome through a process of clarifying teaching from the New Testament. I saw it as an intellectual error made favorable by an oppressive economic structure, and therefore a residue of the past that was being left behind, albeit far too slowly.

What I did not see was the way that modern politics, economics, and everything else has been structured by the invention of whiteness and a racialized world surrounding it. There were many texts that should have pointed me in that direction, but for the most part I had not read them. I did not receive the message from the books I had read from Latin American theologians, even though they were often addressing these matters.

Carter's RACE 3: Cavanaugh, Baptists, and Practices

In note 74 on p 393-94 of Race: A Theological Account, J. Kameron Carter helps me identify what seems to me a shortcoming in William Cavanaugh’s turn to the sacrament as the practice of formation leading out of the dilemmas of the modern nation-state in his remarkable and powerful book, Torture and Eucharist. In reading Cavanaugh, certain aspects of his RCC sensibilities concerning the Eucharist did not quite settle well with me to me and remained alien from my own formation as a Baptist. I wondered whether I would be able to appropriate his arguments about the sacrament, or whether I would need to substitute a different account of counterhegemonic practices of the church.

Yet I also have been grateful for the ways that Cavanaugh was describing an alternative to one of the great losses of the Baptist tradition. Too often Baptists have settled into acceptance of a Zwinglian memorial view of the sacraments and the reduction of sacraments to ordinances.

Luis Rivera helps give some perspective this problematic in his counterhistory of the conquest of the Americas with its imposition of Christianity through forced baptisms (A Violent Evangelism). Part of what the Baptists a century after Columbus and Cortez were unhappy about was the way that state hegemony had become intertwined with ecclesial hierarchy to discipline bodies through control of the sacraments. The sacramental practice often seemed alienated from its covenantal institution and embodiment in the living Christ. Thus, the Baptists were demanding a restoration of the sacrament in new covenantal practice dissociated from such blatant state hegemony. In their own ways, they also failed to see the ways their vision of baptism and the Supper would be coopted by the powers and authorities. So my reservations about Cavanaugh's account were no less reservations about what my own tradition ultimately also failed to analyze and understand in its own practices.

The Baptists often lacked an adequate understanding of the full political nature of the church, and thus quickly followed, perhaps afar off, the magisterial vision of the divided body and mind and the two regimes, two kingdoms, etc. Acknowledging these shortcomings and the corrective offered by Cavanaugh, I still think there is room for, even need for, an account of other sacramental ecclesial practices, as suggested by Jim McClendon’s hermeneutical device of word, worship, work, and witness in Doctrine. I find Cavanaugh’s argument to suggest, or at least be receptive to, such an account of ecclesial practices, not unique to Roman Catholicism in the production of bodies (politic).

Cavanaugh’s effort to reconstitute the unity of body and mind, of religion and politics, in the sacrament is in the right direction. However, Carter points out that Cavanaugh does not apply his excellent critical skills to the ways that the sacraments become tools of hegemonic power in colonialism. I must confess that I also missed these critical features of modernity in my earlier research and writing. Carter affirms that racial and colonialist reasoning are central to the constitution of modernity. He extends the work of scholars like Cavanaugh in trying to provide an account which incorporates this problematic of race, politics, and theology, the genealogy of their interrelationship in modernity, and ultimately a Christological critique of modern racialized theopolitics.

Carter's RACE 2: The Racialized Jew

With apologies once again to Dr. Carter if I have misunderstood his argument, I am attempting to articulate some of what I am learning and thinking about as I read his new book.

In his critique of Cornel West and analysis of Michel Foucault (in Race: A Theological Account), J. Kameron Carter raises a matter of particular concern for professional theologians. There is a tendency in the profession of theology to be overly confident of the power of language. Thus, the critique of modernity, and if Carter is right, the critique of racialized understandings and structuring of bodies (politic), can emphasize the discursive structures of racial reasoning without adequate attention to the nondiscursive structuring, the production and reproduction of racialized bodies (politic), the “dynamics of relationships of force” (48).

This problem, it would seem to me, shines a light on the difficulty for white theologians to identify the effects of whiteness on theological theory and practice. Thus we find ongoing attempts at therapy through language to eliminate racism and racialized thinking. The most naïve form would attempt to create terminology to substitute for racialized language in a kind of idealistic method of changing the reality by changing its name. While this has some therapeutic value, it cannot in and of itself uproot and dismantle the power relations and structures of production which are the inherent logic and grammar of a racialized theopolitics. Next, Carter will interrogate Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics as a more material analysis than West offered.

West, it would seem, probes the emergence of a discourse of biblical interpretation and other intellectual productions which deployed elements of the new scientific vision, Cartesian philosophy of mastery, and the normative gaze of classical aesthetics. The discursive structures “circumscribe how people of African descent come to be situated in the modern imagination” (49). The shortcoming of West’s excellent work, according to Carter, is that it can provide explanation for the conditions of the possibility of the emergence of white supremacy, but it does not explain why white supremacy was the actual result. He implies a level of contingency, which he then fails to name; thus, a hint of inevitability or necessity hangs in the air. Foucault goes on to recognize the moment of anxiety over the racialized Jew in modern Europe which elicits a pseudotheological articulation of a notion of the white nation around which an entire hierarchical construction of race comes into being. The biopolitics of the nation appears in the dialectical relationship of decentralized individualism with centralized administration and surveillance, such that the people themselves police nationhood in their own racialized, individualized, modernized, pseudotheologized bodies.