Multiple Consciousness: Challenging the Sloth of White Theology

Early in his book The Politics of Jesús: A Hispanic Political Theology, Miguel A. De La Torre, Cuban professor of social ethics at Iliff School of Theology, tells the story of of being pulled over on a drive to New York City for being "under the influence" of being Hispanic. Similarly, when he was younger, a teen working at Burger King, he was stopped and frisked while walking home after his night shift. Both were examples of ethnic profiling.

Neither encounter ended badly, and De La Torre remembers having a rather complex reaction to the events, puzzled to have been stopped but also thankful to the police for keeping his community and streets safe. It was only much later in his life that he realized his own perspective on those encounters, and therefore his self-understanding, were deeply shaped by forces outside of him. "My mind was so colonized that I did not, I could not, see how my identity was being constructed through the gaze of those in authority" (22).

All members of oppressed communities share this in common, to some degree or another: they know how to think out of their own cultural consciousness, and they have learned, been taught, have had forced upon them, the consciousness of the dominant culture also. They exercise at the very least a double consciousness.

De La Torre offers this example: "Religion scholars of color are required to master the theological and ethical analysis of Euroamericans in order to be awarded a coveted PhD, while no one from the dominant culture needs to learn anything about the Hispanic margins to earn that same degree. One can argue therefore that Latino/as (along with all who are marginalized) hold an epistemological privilege over and against Euroamericans. This does not mean they are smarter or holier, just that they master the world of the dominant culture and their own marginalized spaces. Hence, their understanding of Jesus is much broader, richer, thicker, and more complex than those who only master the official Eurocentric canon. The multiple consciousness possessed by the disenfranchised generally makes their perspectives closer to any type of 'truth' that the opinions and views of those who benefit from how society is structured" (17)

I remember vividly sitting in the seminary library memorizing Hebrew vocabulary with classmates from places like Madagascar and India. Not only had these students learned at the very least two languages in addition to their heart language (such as their regional dialect, plus the national language and English to study in the United States); they also needed to learn all the languages required by the Eurocentric canon, which in almost all cases includes German and French. Plus the biblical languages.

The other languages they had already learned did not "count." But more significantly, I as a white student born in the United States was not required to learn any of the languages my international student classmates had learned to earn the degrees they were earning.

This is an example of the extent to which our culture still quietly but surely oppresses those on the margins.

Noticing this teaches me something, if I will listen. Nobody will require me to do anything about it. This is the leisure and freedom inherent to being born into the dominant culture. Significantly, I was not required to read anything at all from the liberation theology canon while in seminary, though I was required to read 'white' systematic theology and the Lutheran confessional documents. But it would be the height of dominant culture privilege to blame my own seminary for not getting the academic training and personal experience I need to overcome my own white fragility. I mean seriously, I have libraries and can travel.

I can take responsibility to do something about any lacunae in my training myself. And I should. I have no excuse not to. I can avoid what I might call white sloth, the sin most endemic to white supremacy.

The form of this responsibility is straightforward--seek multiple consciousness. Listen long and hard enough to inhabit, inasmuch as possible, the perspective of the disenfranchised from their own perspective. Not to colonize it. Not to change it. But instead to learn, as best I can, how to accompany disenfranchised communities in their shared life living in the way of Jesús.

This is why I'm reading De La Torre's book right now. It's why I try to read lots of theologians, be they Palestinian, or African-American, or women, or gender queer. Because as a white male, it will take lots of work, even more work than the disenfranchised, who gain multiple consciousness as a matter of course in their regular lives, for me to be able to think from the perspective of those who are not white and male.

Of course, the more typical way white males attempt to buttress their consciousness is by doubling down on what they already know. The dominant culture enjoys nothing more than attempting to make their single consciousness so thick that they can assume it is the perspective of the whole world. If you want proof, look no further than Donald Trump.

But those on the margins can see this for what it really is--a kind of weak-minded timidity, so thin as to be almost transparent. All the bluster is a flimsy facade.

What I love about De La Torre's new book is its focus on Jesús as Hispanic. Nothing can prepare a white reader for an awareness of how white their Jesus is than reading this book. By the time you finish the book, you are exposed to a Jesús who was colonized, lived the migrant experience, grew up in the barrio, was poor, and, in my favorite new term from the book, an ajiaco. This term, a kind of soup, which ethnographer Fernando Ortiz first used to describe the Cuban diverse experience, will stay with me.

Notice that in the gospels, Jesús frequently speaks in a language outside the dominant language of empire. The gospels quote this often. He speaks Aramaic most frequently, and in a way similar to Spanglish or other bilingual communities, the gospels periodically quote this Aramaic mixed with the Greek.

Here's a funny thing. When lectors read these texts in worship, these short phrases, the Aramaic, are the terms most frequently dropped or avoided by readers. I doubt anyone does this maliciously, they're probably just uncomfortable with pronunciation, but it does illustrate the point. Those who speak the dominant language, those who have ever only learned one language, are deeply uncomfortable allowing their tongues to speak "not their language."

And yet Jesús does. As the living word, his words cannot be contained by Greek, or Latin, or English. Jesús will always sound like the people he is.

Here's a subtle distinction: if you are troubled by the loud protestations of minority communities about their plight under the structures of empire... and notice that even "loud" as an adjective there serves notice of an assumed bias... let me suggest this. You don't have to immediately jump across the aisle and agree with them. But if you are a member of, enjoy the privileges of, the dominant culture, in order to stand on the same ground as the disenfranchised, to be able to speak with any kind of comparable epistemic integrity, you at least have to try and learn one more language. Just one more. Stop wasting breath attempting to inflate the one language you speak into a balloon large enough to dupe you into thinking its the language of the whole world.

Instead, join that great One Jesús in the beauty of bilingüe. Because stubborn shouting in the silos of fortified dominance is a trap, bondage, in comparison to the freedom of many languages, crossing borders, accompañamiento.

A great Reformation scholar died prematurely. He left an unfinished Luther biography. Then this happened.

A new portrait of Luther by acclaimed painter Brad Holland

Although much has been written about the "resilient reformer" and great man of history, it is still difficult to recommend one definitive biography of Martin Luther in English. In part, this is because Luther is distant enough from us historically as to be strange when presented in all his idiosyncrasy. Until the arrival of Timothy Lull and Derek Nelson's new biography, my go-to recommendation was typically Heiko Obermann's Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. Obermann's biography stands out and succeeds as a biography by making Luther distant from our own time and place, especially our peculiar forms of heroism, and is sufficient to allow Luther to stand on his own terms.

The great danger of Luther biographies is the Erik Erikson problem. Erikson attempted to use "young man Luther" as a foil for his developmental psychology and psychoanalytic thought. The result has been an unfortunate cottage industry of biographies and monographs all attempting to explain Luther's life, theology, and culture in light of his psychological makeup. In part, this new biography is a successful attempt to dig out of the morass of this psychologizing.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Lull's analysis of Luther's end of life. Luther was not well for approximately the last quarter of his, having suffered from kidney stones, among other ailments. Much of Luther's preaching and theological output of this period is read in light of the supposed effects of this illness.



So Lull begins the biography with a story from the end. Luther left Wittenberg briefly about six months before his death, and wrote a letter to his wife, Katharina von Bora, promising never to return. This behavior could have been explained away in terms of psychology. But Lull reads it differently. First, he notices that Luther preached a sermon during this trip that was clearly still fresh and humorous and theologically rich. Clearly not the product of a declining mind. Furthermore, Luther is finishing up his major work on Genesis through this period, a portion of Luther's authorship that has become, over time, one of the lodestones for understanding his reading of Scripture.

After this opening end of life chapter, Lull and Nelson proceed chronologically through Luther's life, with an intense focus on Luther as public theologian and Wittenberg pastor. For those who have read other Luther biographies, or seen Luther movies, or are familiar with the significant touchstones for Luther's significant life, this book will not disappoint. It covers familiar territory, but frequently with a refreshing spin.

A couple of examples. First, early in the book Lull notes that perhaps Luther's commitment to his promise--to become a monk if he survived a terrible thunder storm that caught him on his way home to Erfurt--is not unlike his own understanding theologically of God as one who makes and keeps promises. It's a simple insight, but profound. Promise is a leitmotif both in Luther's vocational call and in his theological worldview.

Or consider this quote on Luther's experience of Anfechtungen:

Luther continued to have these attacks all his life with irregular frequency and intensity. His 'breakthrough' on justification by faith did not mean an end to Anfechtungen. Rather, it meant that he had something, or rather someone--the person of Christ--to hold over against these shattering and life-dissolving experiences. And because many in his time had experienced a measure of the doubts and fears that Luther experienced, he was soon regarded as a great soul doctor, a spiritual director to a generation that had trouble believing the formal church teaching on the grace of God, given their own doubts and the church's far from grace-centered practiced (38).

There is a particular poignancy to this biography even beyond its subject matter. The first author, Timothy Lull, beloved seminary president and Luther scholar, died tragically and prematurely in 2003, leaving behind him many unfinished projects. One of those, this Luther biography, has now been taken up and completed by the very able Derek Nelson. Lull assembled a number of popular works on Luther, including the incredibly popular Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings.

The team of Reformers in Wittenberg, among them Melanchthon, Bugenhagen (whose sermons have also recently been published by Augsburg Fortress), George Major, Amsdorf, Jonas, and many others, regularly had each other's backs, assisted one another in their work. In this sense, Derek Nelson is continuing a pattern he and Lull and many of us have learned from the Reformers--to lean on one another and continue each other's projects.

Finally, a longer quote from the close of the book, that gives a sense of Lull and Nelson's approach to Luther as a whole.

As Luther's heart grew cold about Wittenberg and all that the small city represented to hm, the achievements and failures of his years there weighed heavily on his mind. Morals were low; morale was lower. And yet Luther found the means to work through this crisis as well. Because he was unusually silent about his thoughts, we cannot piece together his sources of resilience. As this book has argued, however, the likeliest place to turn is not Luther's psychology, but his theology. His doctrine of sin led him to low expectations for communities. In this respect, he was the furthest thing from naive. And yet his doctrine of grace led him to high hopes for what God might do through such imperfect people. These were the binoculars through which Luther saw the world, and resolving the two lenses into one image was difficult. Or, to alter the metaphor slightly, perhaps just before his death Luther's view of the world came through a kaleidoscope, which, when just a quarter turn off, shows a mess. With a slight adjustment, beauty comes through again. As a reformer, Luther was a man without a plan. As a theologian, Luther trusted in God's plan, no matter the detours and apparent dead-ends.  

A thesis of this book has been that the best way to understand Luther is by grasping his resilience. Luther's genius comes from the fact that, rather than seeing crises that came upon him as interruptions distracting him from his real calling, he saw these crises--imprisonments, facing death, the lose of Magdalena, and so on--as opportunities. Luther used those very setbacks as occasions for revising his work. Each of these very negative experiences motivated him to a high level of achievement, especially given that he feared he had little time left to work. In each case, these staggering interruptions were the inspiration for some of his most remarkable work rather than a distraction from brilliant work already underway.

There is a reason scholars pay as much attention to Luther's life as Luther's thought. As much as any person of any time, his teaching (his sermons, his lectures, his letters) are of apiece with his life. Who he is is what he says, and what he says is who he is, to a remarkable degree. We will always needs new Luther biographies. For the time-being, this is the the biography to read. And it is more than enough.
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Let me add one more thing. An infamous aspect of Luther's authorship are his screeds against his opponents, most notably against the Jews, for which Lutherans work to apologize, but also against the Pope and church leaders, some of which were appropriate if overly inflammatory by today's academic standards.

One thing I encourage readers to do if they ever pick up Luther is to attempt to insert in place of "the pope" whatever thing is in power that needs addressing in our current system. In today's world, when we read Luther, perhaps what we should do is insert "white supremacy and fragility" in place of "the pope." That or "the market." These are two targets that need more of Luther's style of humorous and pointed deflation.

Essential Resources for Moving the Racial Justice Conversation Forward

Race Forward

A conversation on race and faith leading to advocacy and action

Sundays, 10 a.m., beginning September 13th

As our nation and culture struggles mightily with issues of race relations, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church hosts a year-long congregational and community conversation on race and faith, leading to advocacy and action.

The Presiding Bishop of the ELCA, Elizabeth Eaton, has invited everyone in our denomination to participate in a live web-cast conversation on the complexity and implications of racism on August 6th at 8 p.m. (CDT): (http://elca.org/webcast?utm_campaign=home%20page&utm_source=elca.org&utm_medium=banner)

The Pew Forum recently released a study on racial diversity in religious denominations, and our own denomination is listed at the very bottom, as perhaps the most predominately white denomination in the country. This fact alone illustrates the importance of an intentional conversation on race and faith in our church (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/27/the-most-and-least-racially-diverse-u-s-religious-groups/).

Prior to the beginning of the class, consider reading some of the works in the included bibliography. During the year, consider reading one or more of the books (from which we will be reading brief excerpts) with your small group or book group.  Attend a community event on race, such as the Nightbird Books discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates' book (https://www.facebook.com/events/737166059725678/).

Finally, if you can't attend on Sunday mornings (perhaps you are graciously volunteering to teach Sunday school or have another conflict), we will be recording each of the Sunday morning events and streaming them for folks to listen to later. If there is sufficient interest, people can also organize their own small group gatherings to discuss these resources on their own at a time that works for them.

The fall schedule:

September 13th: The ELCA Race, Ethnicity and Culture social statement

September 20th: Guest panel from the Cisneros Foundation

September 27th:  Discuss  excerpts from On the Run by Elizabeth Goffman or Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me

October 4th: How can we do more than just talk? (individually)

October 11th: Guest panel with multicultural leaders in Fayetteville

October 18th: The ELCA Criminal Justice social statement

October 25th: Discuss excerpts from The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone

November 1st: How can we do more than just talk? (congregationally)

November 8th: ELCA Social Message on Community Violence

November 15th: Guest panel with police officers/prosecuting attorneys

November 22nd: Discuss excerpts from Redeeming a Prison Society by Amy Levad

November 29th: How can we do more than just talk? (communally)

December 4-6th: Focus weekend with Jennifer Harvey, author of Dear White Christians

December 13th: Summary conversation reviewing what we have learned

December 20th: Christmas break

Schedule will resume in the winter, spring with new topics such as Islamophobia, Latino ministries, and more.

Bibliography:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

https://medium.com/@kesterbrewin/the-gift-is-sometimes-poison-6622328dd9af

https://www.raceforward.org

https://www.elca.org/Faith/Faith-and-Society/Social-Statements

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/magazine/our-demand-is-simple-stop-killing-us.html?_r=0

Race: A Theological Account by J. Kameron Carter

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone

Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance by Reggie Williams

Name Your Link

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Elizabeth Goffman

Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Reconciliation by Jennifer Harvey

Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration  by Amy Levad

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas

Sister Citizen, Melissa V Harris Perry

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

What do we have here?

Sometimes I think the particular post-modernity I inhabit comes after a specific modernity, both of which can be summarized in this way. Modernity asked the question, 

What does this mean?

Post-modernity asks, What is here?

Here's what I mean (see what I did there?). Quite a lot of the way we think about the world, at least those of us shaped by the trajectory of modernity, has to do with belief. Although as I have just said, this is on the way out, the echoes of the modern project are resonant among us, perhaps especially in the church. 

So we have, for example, creeds and confessions and statements of belief. My own upbringing in the faith included study of Luther's Small catechism, which famously begins each section with the question, "What does this mean?"

But Luther's catechism, in German, asks a much more basic question, not specific to epistemology or semantics. The question Luther asks is this: Was ist das? What is this/that?

This is a question of there-ness, that-ness, quiddity, thing-ness. Colloquially, after a portion of the creed or the Lord's Prayer or the 10 commandments is quoted, what Luther asks is basically, What do we have here?

Why does this matter? Well, for those who have fully made the shift to a post-modern mentality--and there are by all reckonings increasing numbers of them in Western society--it simply doesn't cut it anymore to assert what one believes dogmatically. Pure acceptance, assent to a set of propositions, if it ever was a "thing," is less and less a thing. 

Instead, what we have are growing numbers of us who are interested in the world, what presents itself to us, but we aren't interested in playing any kinds of propositional language games divorced from reality. Instead, we are quite a bit more interested in stating what actually gives itself to us, whatever is right around us.

There is good reason for Christians who like creeds and such to consider this shift. One good reason is its avoidance of the ditch modernity falls into of minding the god of the gaps. Pure articulations of belief detached from descriptions of what is, what is there, tend to restrict and contract over time. Belief in the modern era got down to the level where something as big as salvation could be assured through a statement of assent to a very narrow dogmatic assertion, such as: "I have accepted Christ as my personal savior." 

I have very little against a brief claim such as this spoken by individual believers. It's not a bad thing to say. But when assent to a specific and very narrow proposition takes on soteriological significance, we can be fairly sure the god of that particular gap has been squeezed into a rather small crevasse indeed, with the rest of the universe capaciously resonating around the expansive edge.

But if we make a shift from epistemological claims--this means...--to ways of speaking that open us up to examination of what is here, what is there, we end up with a very different way of speaking, one I find more consonant with how I understand Christian faith in post-modernity to operate.

First of all, it allows language to become generative. Consider this quote from Mario Livio, interviewed by Krista Tippett in On Being:

I mean, there is another aspect of it, which people found always fascinating, and I find fascinating, which is — you know, mathematicians — really pure mathematicians they like to do things with absolutely no application whatsoever in mind. You know they develop all kinds of mathematical theories and they don't think that this will ever have any application. Sometimes they are even proud of the fact that it has no applications. And yet, you know, decades or sometime centuries later, it is found that those mathematical theories provide precisely the explanations needed for some physical phenomena, you know, and so on. How, how is this possible?

It is my sense that most of us who are theologians, and so many Christians, tend to think of theological reflection, or faithful confession, more along the lines of Livio's understanding of the work of mathematicians. It isn't that we use language to get a solid grasp on what we believe. The early church didn't write the creeds in order to be able to say, "There, that settles it." Rather, the creeds have some kind of proleptic sense to them, they articulate, often in ways we can't see clearly now, things that come clear centuries or even millennia later. So that even today creeds written 2000 years ago have power not because they demand precise assent by those who confess them, but rather because they bring to light something new in the phenomena of faith in this living present of which even those who wrote the creeds were at that time unaware.

I also like to think that theologians of a variety of stripes invest quite a lot of time, like mathematicians, doing things with absolutely no application, simply because the play of such work is its own reward. It is its own kind of joy. It does not need to "drive results."

Livio also remarks, in the same interview:

Until 1998 we didn't know that this dark energy exists. And now, you know, we know it's the dominant form of energy of our universe [as much as 70%]. So whenever you think that you've reached some sort of a — that you cannot go beyond, OK, this is all that there is to know, and so on, somehow we discover that there is yet something even more mysterious that hides behind all of that.

In this sense, then, scientists and theologians share quite a lot more than we often assume, because both operate along these lines, that whenever you've reached some sort of a--that you cannot go beyond... somehow we discover that there is yet something even more mysterious that hides behind all of that. If God is the god of this particular gap, it is a rather large gap indeed, a gap that makes up a majority of what is. 

Recently, I was at a dissertation defense by a philosophy student. During the course of the defense, one of the readers and the student got into a kind of debate around the definition of idolatry. Basically, the professor thought idolatry had a somewhat narrow definition. It was the worship of false gods, like idols or the like. The student tended towards a more complex view of idolatry, one I share, which is that basically everything is idolatry that is not worship of the One God.

During the course of this discussion, it became clear that no one in the room had thought through as clearly as possible what exactly idolatry is. We needed a pause, a chance to ask, "What do we have here? What is this?"

I walked away from the defense considering my own definition of idolatry, one that has gained a certain level of complexity over the years precisely because my view of God has become more complex. I would say today that God is beyond God, God hides behind God, because most of the time our use of the word God, our assumptions of who God is, are themselves not yet who God really is. So they are ever and always idolatrous. I tend to think this is why many of the monotheistic faiths include warnings away from idolatry. So the Muslim prayer, "There is no god but God," or the Jewish-Christian, "You shall have no other gods before you..."

Easy enough to say. Fairly narrow if we are simply talking about propositional assent. But actually a complex enough assertion that it has required every living monotheistic faith centuries of reflection simply to clear away some of the cloudiness around what this actually means, and we haven't landed with anything like complete clarity.

In that same dissertation discussion, two self-professed non-Christians in the group asked the student really interesting questions. First, they asked, "What's so bad about creeds?" Second, they asked, "I'm not a Christian, but what do I need to do to become one?" To my mind, this indicated the extent to which, once we move beyond modernist assumptions about the function of creeds and beliefs, in a post-modern context, one option is to re-open questions and ways of proclaiming that seemed to have died in the drift away from modernism. It's as if old language games breathe new life.

That is just about the best way to describe how Luther's fundamental question works. Scientists, faculty, non-believers, believers, Christians, atheists, all ask, over and over, "Was ist das?" What is this? We share this question in common with the whole world. What is this right in front of our face.

And in the mutual discovery of this, it becomes necessary to share whatever we have at our disposal that might assist in answering such questions, even if those resources seem less than immediately applicable. For my money, for example, the doctrine of the Incarnation may have quite a lot more to offer us concerning dark matter than is currently discernible. It may take a few more centuries to line that out. In the meantime, I've got this theological game I'd like to play. Want to join?