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J. Kameron Carter's Race: A Theological Account breaks new ground in contemporary theology; Carter's contention is that the problem of race is first and foremost a theological problem. Indeed in some sense, the problem of race is modern theology's greatest contemporary challenge. Carter goes beyond the familiar platitudes about white racism, unveiling a promising post-colonial trajectory for contemporary Christian theology.
He tackles this problem directly through a theological meditation on Jesus' Jewish flesh. Reflecting on Jesus' Jewishness exposes the whiteness of modernity and hails a new creation where all people are reconciled and redeemed, regardless of their race and ethnicity. This truth emerges in its clearest form in the slave narratives of prophetic black Christians in antebellum America. It was by reflecting on the human life of Jesus the Jew that Africans in the Americas were able to find meaning in their suffering under the oppressive regime of slavery and segregation.
In part 1, Carter provides a theological account of modernity in which he establishes the practice of the racism of the West as fundamentally a Christian invention. The racialization of persons of African descent as "black," Carter argues, was based on the racialization of the "Jew," which has its roots in Christianity's origins as a Jewish sect, often finding its identity in opposition to Judaism. In part 2, Carter engages African American religious studies, focusing on the work of the historian Albert J. Raboteau, theologian James H. Cone, and philosopher Charles H. Long. Carter finds all three of these approaches to black religion inadequate in dealing with the theological distinctiveness of Christian theology, and he builds on Raboteau and Cone to develop his own constructive Afro-Christian theological vision in part 3 of the volume.
Carter frames his deconstruction of the racial logic of modernity with an epigraph from Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited:
How different might have been the story of the last two thousand years on this planet grown old from suffering if the link between Jesus and Israel had never been severed … . [For] theChristian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, … the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine.
From here Carter moves to a critique of Immanuel Kant's estrangement of Jesus from Judaism, suggesting that the problem of racism is fundamentally a problem of supersessionism—an interpretation of the New Testament that sees God's relationship with Christians as replacing God's covenant with the Jews. Carter strategically aligns the black freedom struggle with the history of the Jews, opening up a new chapter in the study of African American religion.
While Al Raboteau's Slave Religion and James Cone's books on black theology emerged around the same time, in the late 20th century African American religious history and black theology rarely converged; Carter ambitiously synthesizes the two discourses. In Slave Religion, Raboteau considers how antebellum black Christianity negotiated its African heritage through evangelical forms of faith. The encounter was a dynamic process of mutual critique and influence. When African Americans converted to Christianity they also began to convert white Christianity, redirecting it toward a more prophetic end—the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
Carter reads Raboteau's most recent writings as expressions of a deeply Eastern Orthodox sensibility. Raboteau's "iconic" reading of history views the sufferings and struggles of black Christianity as an icon of the invisible God: "Black existence and black faith relate to the eternal Logos as an icon relates to that which it represents. In this way, the invisible becomes visible even as it retains its invisible depth, a depth rooted in a freedom (for God the Creator), which cannot be policed and thus enslaved." An iconic interpretation of slave religion discloses that "It is the poor slave, one might say, who is closest to God and so reveals God." The courageous struggle of Christian slaves weaving together fragments of their existence into a story of wholeness is illuminated by the self-emptying love of Jesus the Jew, who takes on the form of poor and enslaved flesh in order to redeem all of God's children.
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