The mode of doing identity through difference (Jew versus Gentile, free versus slave, male versus female) is, according to Paul, set aside in Christ. At one level the provenance and end of these categories is uncomplicated (oppression, discrimination, inequality, are to end) but at another level, considering all that is included in Paul’s categories (ethnicity, religion, biology, social class, economics, culture, behavior, gender, sex, etc.), setting aside these categories entirely will not be possible and negotiating around them so as to make Christ the prime identity will be no easy task. Most every element of what is normally considered as constituting humanness will have to be reconstituted, deconstructed, reoriented, recreated, and so, a great deal of Paul’s effort will be spent in explaining how oneness in Christ is to be implemented. Jews and Gentiles will have to renegotiate nearly every element of their life – how and what to eat and the role of ethnic and religious identity. Men and women cannot simply continue to identify themselves through the gender and sex roles of the surrounding culture. Slaves and free will have to undergo a radical reevaluation in their relationship, as now they are of the same family in the body of Christ.
Identity will no longer be through oppositional difference but will be “in Christ.” However, what needs to be obliterated and what needs to be preserved and reconstituted would seem to work out differently in each of the opposed pairs. “Master Christians” and “slave Christians” resonates very differently than “male Christians” and “female Christians.” The slave/master relationship is undone in that in Christ all become the slaves, or at least the servants, of one another. The same principle, of relinquishing self-interest, applies in gender roles but Paul specifically warns the Corinthians against a unisexuality. So, there are some things which need to be obliterated – there are no master Christians – while there are other things that are changed up and yet preserved. Jewishness, for example, is preserved but changed. It is not simply assimilated into the dominate Gentile mode but neither does it maintain its segregated stance. Clearly all must relinquish the self-interest which is the prime force in privileging one half of the pair.
The precise thing that is obliterated between the opposed pairs is the “hostility” or the alienating force or the principalities and powers which divide and darken. The dualisms that divide – Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female/, or most recently and most clearly white/black, all gain meaning (political, religious, ethnic, or gendered meaning) through an interdependent difference. The difference cannot be absolute or there would be no point of comparison, but to describe the difference as necessarily inhering in the pairs creates an instability. There is no essence in either of the parts; there are no masters without slaves, no men without women, no Jews without Gentiles, no white without black.
James Baldwin captures this in his description of the American invention of whiteness. He claims, in fact, that there is no white community. Whiteness is a false construct created by shedding Irish, Italian, German, English, and Jewish identity but this becomes a unified identity over and against what it is not. “No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” It became a white country on the basis of what was done to “red,” “brown,” and black humanity. “White men—from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.” America became white on the basis of subjugation of people of color. “No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie.”[1]
Whiteness describes a relationship of power. To the degree that people depend upon this power, to the degree they live off this power, to the degree that this power defines, to that degree their identity is dependent on the genocidal form out of which this identity emerges. This genocidal hermeneutic, in Willie Jennings description, continues to center “the good, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the noble” around whiteness, creating a regime of whiteness. This whiteness “disciplines fantasies of becoming (becoming human, mature, cultured, civilized, authoritative,)” such that whiteness continues to colonize through these ongoing effects. Jennings refers to it as Caucasia’s capital.[2]
He raises the question, “Can white people be saved?” The question, as he explains does not pertain to the efficacy of salvation in regard to a category of people. The point is that whiteness is a way of being in the world that stands opposed to the Christian way of being in the world. Whiteness, he explains, is “a deformed building project aimed at bringing the world to its full maturity.” It is conceived as part of the idea of progress as Europeans colonize(d) the world. This new world is not allowed a voice but is named in reference to the colonizers. “These Europeans answered the question without the voice or vision of the peoples of the new worlds. They self-designated.” And they designated a vast variety of peoples in reference to their self-designation. They began to “suture different peoples, clans, and tribes into racial categories. They, the Europeans, were white, and the others were almost white, not quite white, or nonwhite, or almost black, not quite black, or black.” Metaphorical and literal genocide began with denying these “non-white” people a voice, so that whiteness was projected into their world as an order of meaning, very often in the name of Christ and missions. “Death expanded its reach by designating peoples and the earth in reductive categories, isolating lives into fragments in order to make them useful, turning everything into commodities.” Christian conversion became an event toward whiteness “as a formation toward maturity.”[3]
So, whiteness does not pertain to birth or biology but it refers to a particular form of agency and subjectivity by which progress is gauged. To merge Christian with whiteness is to reverse the valuation system of the former: being an owner rather than owned, being a citizen of the first world rather than a stranger, and gauging the departure from darkness by being seen as white. Whiteness can be equated with ownership and having a voice, whereas to be non-white amounts to literally being owned or being material in the production process. To be a citizen of Caucasia meant taming the wilderness, subjugating native inhabitants, and by this means establishing an identity in the new nation. Citizenship in nationalism is a pure construct, not grounded in the land but taking ownership and control of the land, rather than being integrated into the land and its controls. The labor of whites took on a different order of meaning than the labor of blacks in that it was a labor of ownership and control to establish whiteness and citizenship. Native and black, in Jennings description, were perceived as “closer to nature and its raw condition of unproductivity.”[4] In this understanding, whiteness is a condition of lostness: one is lost due to a misplaced notion of ownership and control, a misplaced citizenship, and a misplaced value system.
In a similar but differently articulated vein, James Cone maintains that God is not the God of all people as he is against the oppressor and is the God of the oppressed. He concludes, “So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States, is actually the racist Antichrist.” This “false Christianity . . . of the oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.” In other words, to claim to be a white Christian is to miss the oppressive genealogy of this identity.
In Paul’s depiction, the principalities and powers exercise this alienating force through the dualisms that divide. The full weight of the Christian Gospel is aimed at defeating this division, this mystery that has us entrapped. The mystery of division is one we naturally inhabit in the way we organize ourselves in dualistic identities. The mystery divides and confounds our thinking. It is a mystery concerning the relationship between creation and Creator in which the one (the created order) is idolatrously pitted against the other. The idolater self-designates, imagining all else is relative to his created image, and imagining oneself as his own father-creator. Paul depicts passage from out of this mindset as the opening of this obscurity that darkens every mind. The passage from “once hidden” to “now revealed” marks a new historical consciousness.
According to Ephesians, it pertains to “things in heaven” and “things on earth” and to God’s predetermined purposes for all things. No longer should we posit a gap between God and creation, heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile. Christ has bridged the gap. Paul will refer to the broad sweep of history in Romans 9-11 as the unfolding of this mystery and he will refer to the breaking down of the “dividing wall” between Jews and Gentiles as pertaining to a fulfilled cosmic order previously hidden (Eph 2:14). People are reconstituted as a singular family in which their personhood involves a new consciousness – holistic and personal. Given this insight, all divisions are exposed as a false order of identity.
To be Christian is to break out of the division of whiteness as an identity, a value system, or a form of citizenship. Perhaps all we can expect is to gradually learn to be something other than white, something on the order of citizens of a different sort of kingdom. This begins, in Paul’s description, through a different order of embodiment – finding ourselves embodied in Christ. This is not an abstraction but a real-world connection to other people as a means to receiving grace and gifts of the Spirit. This is not identity by segregation but a preservation of unity provided by Christ. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4).
To be Christian is to give up on ownership and first-world citizenship so as to identify with a different citizenry, dispossessed and poor in this world. The space Christians are to occupy is neither coveted nor contested as it is outside the city, where doing life together is the singular economy and value. As Jennings puts it, we must be saved “from being or becoming white people.” As we relinquish white capital we can begin to enjoy “the gifts from on high.” “But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Eph 4:7). This is capital enough.
[1] James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies,” https://bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/bannekerinstitute/files/on_being_white.and_other_lies_baldwin_0.pdf
[2] Willie Jennings, “Caucasia’s Capital: The Ordinary Presence of Whiteness,” https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/faculty/Jennings-Caucasias-Capital.pdf
[3] Willie Jennings, “European Christian missionaries and their false sense of progress” in The Christian Century, (October 31,2018). https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/european-christian-missionaries-and-their-false-sense-progress
[4] Ibid.
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