The Body and the Blues of Systematic Theology: A Thank You to James Cone and the Wesleys Who Lean Toward Him: The Whiteness of the Whale
The Body and the Blues of Systematic Theology:
A Thank You to James Cone and the Wesleys Who Lean Toward Him:
The Whiteness of the Whale
Craig Keen
Bodies. Let us think bodies. Let us think not at bodies, as if we could rise to a lofty, disembodied position of safe neutrality and thence with weightless eyes, without history or passion, “fix [them] in a formulated phrase.” Rather, let us think in, through, with, by, and for bodies. Let us think as if bodies could never be counted out, brushed aside,“pinned and wriggling on the wall,” abstracted from a discourse, one, say, that attends to a soul just 19 months dead. Let us with the children of ancient Israel imagine that we are tasked to think not in the gray organs farthest in us from the earth and closest to the ether, but from the heart, not of impulse and sentiment, but from the pounding center of these muscles and blood and skin and bones, from the chest that heaves and aches when it is forced to make bricks without straw in Pharaoh’s Egypt or cuts, crushes, and boils sugarcane in early American Louisiana or lies in humiliation and terror under grunting, flushed, pale, heavy flesh in a Mississippi plantation bedroom or grieves in antebellum Virginia—the Mother of Presidents—grieves the loss of a daughter or son who’ll fetch top dollar from markets in the expanding western frontier or runs in Jim Crow Indiana on a moonless night from baying Klan bloodhounds or struggles in a police headlock in 21st century Staten Island. Bodies. Let us think bodies.
Let us think living bodies, bodies that will not stay down, bodies that get up again, when flung to the dust of the ground, get up . . . all but one last time—and even then, as darkness grows, hope once more to rise. These are bodies that birth babies, that plough fields, that read and write, that listen and speak, that cry and laugh, that think and sing. They are in this way social phenomena. Only a corpse is a truly individual, truly lonely, body—or rather no-body at all. To live is to become so entangled in the bodies of others that there emerges one more body, a social body, with a place and time, i.e., with a history. The particularity of that history is their world, my world, our world. In it we live and move and are and by the grace of God not only we.
The gospel declares an undisentanglably particular history to have been inhabited by God, a very particular history of the history of a particular people who knew what it means to toil, groan, and lament in poverty, sickness, and oppression. The Galilean peasant name “Jesus” marks that history, the history in which human, all too human, words and actions “become the Word and Action of God.” Here in this microtomic sliver of cosmic time, the gospel declares, “the divine has entered the human situation in Jesus and has issued God’s judgment against poverty, sickness, and oppression,” God’s judgment not only against Jesus’s unjust agony, not only against the unjust agony of “his people” (however we might want to characterize that phrase), but God’s judgment against the always concrete “poverty, sickness, and oppression” of every historic social body, especially of the never newsworthy ones.
We who know how to make money are tempted with calculation to seize the witness to God’s embrace of each and all in God’s embrace of Jesus. We understand the logic of particular-to-universal currency exchange. We understand that the big money is in the universals market. But Jesus as the performance of God’s justice, of God’s righteousness, will not yield to our lust to shuffle off this mortal coil of particularity. The work of Jesus is not universal, though it is catholic. That every particular human body is entailed in Jesus’s particular human body is not the rarefaction of back, face, hips, and hands, of today, tomorrow, and yesterday, but their salvation. An empire’s enshrining the universal market exchange value of a commodity, has nothing to do with the mercy of God in the Jesus who does not dissolve into an idea, the Jesus whom a little gathering of communicants might on a contingent, holy day testify to be God’s outworking of sinful flesh.
And how might such a historic, social body testify to the impinging future of this Jesus without his sinking at the periphery of their field of vision beneath the waves of a sea of abstractions?
A guitar string vibrates with sympathetic resonance, when its tuned pitch blasts out of the saxophone close by its side. Thelonious Monk improvises a solo run of notes at a peculiar, almost stumbling, rhythm following the blues opening of “Blue Monk.” A little church speaks of “the Black Christ” or “the black body of Jesus,” as it calls and responds theologically and carnally.
The task is to think Jesus otherwise than ideologically, otherwise than the instantiation—even “the chief exemplification”—of our private, perhaps speculative, perhaps partisan political, interests. The task is to think Jesus not with neutrality. Not by presuming to have no skin in the game. Not by looking toward, through, and away from the faces that populate this earthy world. Not by forgetting that theologians are bodies or that bodies work . . . and die. But just there, entangled bodily in the bodies with whom we labor, we are confronted, judged, and engaged by—and thus sent into—the coming of God, the coming, we might sing, of “God’s grace and freedom to be with the weak in troubled times.”
It is by testimony that one speaks of this Jesus: “If someone asks me, ‘Jim, how can you believe that? What is the evidence of its truth?’ My reply is . . . : Let me tell you a story about a man called Jesus . . . . I was told this story by my mother and father, and it was recited again and again at Macedonia A.M.E. Church in Bearden, Arkansas. They told this story as the truth of their lives, the foundation of their struggle. . . . Jesus is now my story, which sustains and holds me together in struggle.” “Do you believe God is love?” “Yes I believe God is love.” “I would have a hard time believing God is love, if I were a black man. I mean, those bodies swinging on the tree. Where was God? Where was God during the 400 years of slavery?” And then in gentle rebuke: “You are looking at it from the perspective of those who win. You have to see it from the perspective of those who have no power. In fact, God is love because it is that power in your life that lets you know that you can resist the definitions that other people are placing on you. . . . There is a spirit and a humanity that nobody can kill. As long as you know that, you can resist. . . .”
The revelation of this God is “the source of the distinction between the oppressed and the oppressor,” the beloved of God and the ideologue who would explain away every dehumanizing and future-foreclosing injustice as an unfortunate necessity in the rise, say, of Western Civilization and its conjoined twin “Globalization.”
The Word of God in Jesus, that particular first century Galilean peasant lynched in broad daylight just outside the gates of Jerusalem, is still the Word of God where the corpse of a black man, woman, or child is thrown into the ditch in modern America. To be black in white supremacist America is to be among God’s elect, God’s suffering elect. To be white in white supremacist America is to be among the judged and condemned who on their last days will have had all the goods they’ll ever have. “When we look at what whiteness has done to the minds of [people] in this country, we can see clearly what the New Testament meant when it spoke of the principalities and powers. To speak of Satan and his powers becomes not just a way of speaking but a fact of reality. When we can see a people who are being controlled by an ideology of whiteness, then we know what reconciliation must mean. The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).” “To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.”
Addendum
I stand here, six foot three. I’ve grown fat in my old age. I take up a lot of space. I have a “radio voice,” I have been told, deep and booming. I have very white chin whiskers and long silvery gray hair. I am easy to spot in a crowd. I am also of 100% European stock, almost entirely of the Western and Northern varieties—German, Swedish, Scots Irish, that kind of thing—my first American ancestors settling initially in New Sweden just after the 30 Years War. That is, I am quite Euro-featured, quite Euro-pale. When I’ve walked into a room, especially in the land of my birth, at any point since I came of age, a white man has walked into a room. It could have been otherwise. The category “white” is an invention with a first day of contingent history. There is nothing especially “white” about me. I am way more pink. But “white” is the word Western Civilization has laid on me and not only on me. Thus there is an America because of an ideology of mastery that has a self-constructed white heart. To say, “I am white,” is to say somebody else is not. And since “white” has meant from the very beginning what Herman Melville’s Ishmael, in Moby Dick’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” says it is—the gift of “ideal mastership over every dusky tribe”—to say, “I am white,” is to say that I am—by nature!—master over others, particularly those of a darkish hue, though, of course, none of us would ever admit to believing such a thing about ourselves, except perhaps under hypnosis.
And here we are in a session of the American Academy of Religion’s Wesleyan and Methodist Studies Unit on the theology of James Cone. I am grateful that Josiah Young is our moderator and that Theodore Walker, Jr., has with little warning agreed to respond, and I am grateful for what we have heard here today already, but the three of us at center stage are by all historic accounting white. None of us three consciously desire to be given “mastership” over anyone, and certainly not over the progeny of those America’s founders enslaved—those they kidnapped, trafficked, bought, sold, raped, bred, and worked to death, those betrayed by Jim Crow, old and new. In fact, we feel just a little resentful over the suggestion that we do. But, like it or not, when we stand up in this room to read our papers, one after the other, white people stand up. It doesn’t matter how woke we are, how much penance we have done, how much time we’ve spent in our work pulling the mask off the rotting countenance of racism. When we stand to read our papers, we are displayed for all to see as white. Consequently, when we read our papers, however eloquently written and passionately delivered, we speak with white voices.
That is why I almost walked away from this session. Not because of something virtuous in me, but rather, sadly, because of embarrassment. It is surely at least that—embarrassing—that we three are the ones standing up here to say what is to be gathered from James Cone’s work, work for which I will always in my bones be grateful. And forgive me for ending this paper in such a personal manner. I do not blame anyone for this panel. How could I? I submitted a proposal, after all, and likely with too little self-examination. It is nobody’s fault . . . and it is everybody’s fault. And yet, among the words James Hal Cone has written are words that call us, regardless of our embarrassment, regardless of how it will always seem, regardless of our anxiety and pointed fear, to answer the call of the gospel to “Wade in the water / Wade in the water, children / Wade in the water / God’s gonna trouble the water!” And his words bear witness to all of us, regardless of how we’ve been stamped, regardless of the baggage with which we have been burdened, that bear witness—no less powerfully than Curtis Mayfield’s words—to the future promised in the resurrected mutilated body of Jesus, “So, people get ready, there’s a train a-comin’ / You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board / All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’ / Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.”
