Loosening the Grip 5

As a Jewish believer in Jesus, daughter of a Holocaust refugee, my response to your last paragraph is, "Amen!"

That'll put a pit in your stomach. Wow. There's a lot there.

Not to diminish at all the seriousness of the racial issues alone, but there's more than just racial segregation and elevation there that definitely played itself out theologically and beyond: gnosticism; dispensationalism; darwinism; segregation of Jesus' words from his (supernatural healing) actions; elevation of 'timeless principles' over narratives, of the epistles over the gospels, of Paul over Jesus, of propositional over pentacostal; etc. I see so much of Kant in the whole church today.

I need to re-read this chapter, as I spotted this comment from above:
"...According to Kant, this ought to be replaced by..."

"Ought"? I won't be surprised if this is Kant, but, the force of moral obligation landed with high impact just now. How incredibly sad and horrible if Kant made these shifts on his version of morality rather than from biblical sources of morality. Perhaps he really thought he was getting informed by such.

And, assuming Carter's reading of Kant makes good correspondence with the other historical presentations, I'd agree with "T": so much of Kant penetrates the church today in ways that are simply frightening.

A good example of not taking into account (or diminishing a portion of) the "whole counsel of God" because it does not fit into an idol that has been created (in this case, rationalism).

What is important here, but can be glossed over,is the centrality of the political and sociocultural context which led to the distortion of Christian theology, philosophy (and praxis!). In this case the rise of European colonial and cultural hegemony and the conception that this was destiny and ,thus,they embodied humanity come of age and the perfection of the race,was grounded in the Enlightenment ideals. There are other manifestations of this which are of more "orthodox" heritage,so to speak. America has its own Christian nattionalism in which American ideals become Christian and this is tied to conceptions of blood and soil.This is representative of a good part of the political theology of Evangelical Protestantism, just as we once saw it with the theology of the Dutch Reformed Churh of the Afrikaaners.

The commonality,along with the Gnostics,is that the group has to marginalize the Jesus of NT, the Jewish Jesus who is part of the history of YHWH and the people of YHWH and put themselves in that place as the chosen people,that is, "chosen race" and go from there. Reflections of this belief system we hear indirectly in the political discource of the present presidential race,esp.in the rhetoric of Gov. Palin, right before our eyes.

Oops! I meant "shuddering" news :) above (#10).

Wow - I continue to be amazed about the subconscious/inherited frameworks that guide my worldview. I graduated seminary 17 years ago, and have been working hard to understand what has framed my Western Churchianity that is not necessarily commitment to scripture. Language is so important, and the complexity of what is meant by our words is so much greater than we imagine. Here is another example. I will be sitting with this for a few days to process the meaning.

That is what is GOLD about this space Scot. Thx Boaz!

Carter is working to deconstruct the structure of modernism; he reveals how the foundational thoughts of Kant have contributed to horrific rationalizations of evil praxis.
Boaz Johnson noted: "This necessitates a cleansing of the New Testament and Christian theology from everything Old Testamentish- i.e. 'everything sensuous, heteronymous, and bound to the empirical.' According to Kant, this ought to be replaced by the non-sensuous, autonomous, and transcendent. As a result of this, Christian theology becomes Aufklarung theology and Christ becomes an Aufklarung Christ. This gives hope to human species that it can achieve the white ideal." [end quote]
In both racism and sexism, the pretense of discrimination is that "the other" embodies something /other/ than the image of God (biblical terms); and therefore, the "ideal" may be detached from the physical actions of how humans usurp one another (per Emmanuel Levinas). The modern and educational paradigms assume we can know the ideal (God) apart from living lives that value every human; i.e., the gnostic mind can be detached from the physically embodied and righteous praxis toward other humans. Once the ideal is gnostically detached and becomes free-floating, it can be re-attached according to human subjective standards, as Kant did in re: white race and German/Prussian ethnicity. (I'd surmise he was a sexist, too, but that's not central to Carter's thesis! LOL) The incarnate God in Jesus Christ is the NO! of God to this hierarchicalism which debases any other human on any grounds.

T, John and others. That is what is also great about this community. Willingness to say 'I had no idea'. And move into inquiry around implications together.

I have become conscious recently though that my bachelor of science, and greaduate work in theology left out crucial studies of philosophers who have shaped our lives, culture, government structures/policies AND theology.

If anything; this should serve as a warning to the Church not to listen to non Christian philosophers and liberal theologians like Kant and Schleiermacher. Instead today we are listening to the likes of McLaren and Foucault and it's not modernism that's all the rage but Post-Modernism. Talk about failing to learn from history. I know I should be tearing my robes and proclaiming how I really am a racist but I just never realized it until I read this blog, but I'm not! and in the words of another poster, the whole thing is a bunch of hooey. White supremacy is not inherent to Christian theology today and I will not be shamed into saying it is by the guilt of the Holocaust or Slavery. This smacks of manipulation by playing on liberal white guilt.

By the time Kant wrote, there was already a great deal of racially motivated mischief going on (slavery, colonialism, Jewish pogroms, etc). So I'm wondering to what extent Kant was foundational and to what extent he was refining and justifying prevailing ideas.

Good point Rebeccat.

I'm wondering if Dr Carter is ever going to get to dealing with the only true racist that there is, and who also happens to be at the root of enmity toward all of the Human race, but especially to the Jew: Satan.

And the Church lady says: "Isn't that special?"

Rebbecat# 21 wrote:

"By the time Kant wrote, there was already a great deal of racially motivated mischief going on (slavery, colonialism, Jewish pogroms, etc). So I’m wondering to what extent Kant was foundational and to what extent he was refining and justifying prevailing ideas."

In the Prologue (p.5) Carter outlines what he is doing in this chapter (2):

"It is here that I focus on moden racial reasoning's initial maturation into something of a coherent outlook or its congealing into what can be called a racial-anthropological theory that is at the same time a Weltanschauung. This moment of inital discursive maturity is realized in the Kantian vision...My claim is that this vision of modernity as the social process of Enlighenment is both a racial vision and a particular kind of theological vision."

And in reference to his not analyzing the initial period of Eupropean colonialism, he says:

"[W]hat I engage here is a moment within initial maturing of modernity's racial-theological vision of the human. I do not discuss the early colonialist vision that took hold about three hundred years prior to the Kantian, especially Protestant, Enlightenment-racial view in the late eighteenth century. The earlier moment had a Roman Catholic, essentially Southern Europen infancy...The Kantian racial-cosmopolitan vision, which was also a theological vision predicated on the extirpation of Jewish flesh, is unintelligible apart from these prior events. Stated differently, the Kantian outlook is only the discursive maturing of the racial colonialism inaugurated in the mid-to-late fifteeth century. And again it must be said that in the middle of it all was theological discourse, mainly of a Thomistic-Aristotelian sort,coupled with the discourse of canon and civil law,which also functioned in relationship to theology. I was unable to engage these important pre-Enlightenment matters here without ballooning even further an already big book. Their theological consideration must therefore await another,not to far off, day." p.5f.

Again, the issue that Carter is engaging is the emergence of the ideology and worldview (Weltanschauung) of white supremecy in the modern era,not racism in its common parlance. Carter is presently at work researching and writing concerning the roots of modernity and the racial imagination in the Middle Ages.