Adoption and Postmodern Tribalism

 

Perhaps you have been following the story about President Donald Trump’s recent choice for the Supreme Court in the United States of America.  And perhaps you have heard the opposition to his pick of Amy Coney Barrett because of her adoption of black, Haitian children.  How can this be a bad thing?  To understand this reasoning, one has to understand the changing worldview in the West from Modernity to early Postmodernity to late Postmodern tribalism.  We need to understand that all the talk about ‘Postmodernity’ is unhelpful if we do not recognize the changes from early to late Postmodernity.

 Modernity could say, 'All lives matter' because of its belief in nature and science and truth--essentially still agreeing with pre-Modernity and religious faith on such issues as objective truth and the fundamental reality of nature/Creation.  Modernity did not always oppose racism and could even end up with Apartheid and eugenics!  But an opposition to racism during Modernity was also possible.  And it could lead to adopting black children into white families or interracial marriage.  

 In early Postmodernity, the celebration of diversity, the notion that truth could be constructed and was relative, and the inclusion of the marginalized could still oppose racism by adopting black children into white families and by supporting interracial marriage.  

 But late Postmodernity is tribal, and one of the aspects of this is critical race theory--a combination of Marxist social theory stemming from the early 20th century and Postmodernity's rejection of objective truths--an objective truth such as that race is subordinate to the fact that all are human beings.  Under this construct, one must say, 'Black lives matter.'  

 Marxist critical theory is a long struggle through the institutions of culture.  Like Marxist political and economic thought, critical theory interprets society in terms of power: the domination of one group over another.  In its racial articulation—critical race theory—it involves a struggle against 'whiteness'.  Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and Willie James Jennings' After Whiteness are examples of this iconoclasm: the destruction of ‘whiteness’ in all its cultural dimensions.  Claiming not to be about actual 'whiteness,' just the culture of whites, it fails to make any sensible distinction and, as a racialist theory, is, inevitably, racist.  But, as a Marxist theory, it is also coercive and violent: more than statues are being torn down.  Critical race theory combines critical theory from Marx with Postmodernity.  The tribalism of late Postmodernity produces a racialist interpretation of society.  The Marxist element contributes violent struggle and oppression, from cancelling culture to street violence to fake news to denunciations to the flouting of laws and decency.  As a Postmodern Marxism, it unapologetically alters everything to support the great struggle, deconstructing history, education, religion, law, etc.--all the pillars that establish culture.  Moreover, in its critical race theory form, it treats ‘white culture' as a homogeneous hegemony to be toppled, including the Christianity that is intertwined with such a construct.  Once melted together into ‘whiteness’ and ‘Christianity’, it is then a single entity to be torn down.  

We can now answer the question.  How can a good thing, adoption, become a bad thing simply when the person adopting is white--and Christian--and the person adopted is black?  In this new age of Postmodern tribalism, with its critical race theory, the adoption of a black child from Haiti by a white American Christian would be seen as a further domination by whites, an example of ‘whiteness’.  Given the assumptions, given the tools of interpretation from critical race theory, it all makes sense.  Yet in this very logical result, the hideousness of the assumptions and theory and the destructive cruelty of Postmodern tribalism are revealed for what they are.

Identity Ecclesiology: Regarding Willie James Jennings’ ‘Can ‘White’ People be Saved?’, and a Positive Alternative in a Biblical Theology and Ethic of Unity

 Introduction

In a previous discussion, I suggested that our Western tribalism[1] in late Postmodernity has entered Christian studies in the form of ‘identity ecclesiology’.[2]  The notion of the ‘multicultural church’ refashions Christian identity around racial categories.  Rather than removing ethnic classifications from our concept and practice of Christian community, this notion—like racism itself—reintroduces them.  There is, however, a much more sinister notion of identity ecclesiology than multiculturalism.  The latter, at least, does not denounce some ethnicity or ethnically related identity.  It might celebrate ethnic diversity per se rather than focus identity in Christ, but it cannot be said to be itself racist.  The new form of identity ecclesiology, vociferously denying the accusation, is itself racist.[3]  One author pressing this view is Willie James Jennings in his ‘Can White People be Saved?  Reflections on the Relationship of Missions and Whiteness.’[4]

Language Games and Speech Acts

Jennings, as some others in the book in which the article is found, creates a category of ‘whiteness’ that is socio-political.  In a more recent work, Jennings offers this definition of ‘whiteness’:

[‘Whiteness’] does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning-making.[5]

In other words, ‘whiteness’ becomes a socio-political term that can be expanded historically, pedagogically, historically, philosophically, and culturally.  Yet it is, after all, both in its literal meaning and in the socio-political sense a racial term, and Jennings’ protestations against taking it as such seem not only hollow but inconsistent as he explores the European identity of his ‘white’ antagonist.  Speaking of Western pedagogy, for example, Jennings says,

theological education vacillates between a pedagogical imagination calibrated to form white self-sufficient men and a related pedagogical imagination calibrated to forming a Christian racial and cultural homogeneity that yet performs the nationalist vision of that same white self-sufficient man.[6]

So, Jennings simply cannot avoid the identification of the literal meaning of ‘white’ with the symbolic meaning he gives to the term in his own personal language.  Moreover, everything about the extended meaning is negative: self-sufficiency, male, ‘Christian racial’, ‘cultural homogeneity’, ‘nationalist vision’, ‘white’.  Instead of avoiding a racial definition of a term of race and colour, he compounds the racial term with every dimension of the identity of a generic ‘white’ race (collapsing all white identities into a single concept).

This personal meaning given to the word ‘whiteness’ reminds me of Humpty-Dumpty’s refusal to use words the way in which they would be taken by any native speaker of the language (Through the Looking Glass).  When Alice questions the private meaning Humpty-Dumpty gives to the public word ‘glory’, he retorts, ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’  He adds, ‘The question is … which is to be master—that’s all.’  While Ludwig Wittgenstein sensibly argued against private languages (Philosophical Investigations) in 1953 because language must follow rules that are publicly accessible, something more sinister is going on in Jennings’ use of ‘whiteness’.  It is more helpful to turn to speech-act theory to understand his language game.  While words have meaning, they are also used to do things.[7] 

Jennings does not explain why he misuses the word ‘whiteness’, but its misuse is meant to do something.  His initial comment is that asking the question, ‘Can White people be saved?’ will be deeply offensive to some.  He later adds that people feel guilt or become angry.  (In Speech-Act theory, his illocutionary act is offensiveness, and his perlocutionary acts are the production of guilt and anger.)  So, why do this?  It hardly strikes one that we are dealing with the ‘meekness and gentleness of Christ’ (2 Corinthians 10.1) or Christian virtue (1 Corinthians 4.21; Galatians 5.23; 6.1; Ephesians 4.2; 1 Timothy 6.11; 2 Timothy 2.25; 1 Peter 3.15).  However, Jennings uses offensive speech because, he says, we are engaged in many struggles.  Deconstruction involves undermining existing hegemonies—as critical theory insists.  Jennings does not mention critical theory or critical race theory, but his entire essay provides an example of this Marxist analysis.[8]  Indeed, this is not unlike Liberation theology, with its Marxist analysis of socio-economic conditions in terms of rich and poor.  The common denominator is to use groups for the analysis of society and individuals.  People are reduced to whatever grouping they fit or are made to fit.  Critical race theory examines the world in terms of racial groups and in terms of which groups are understood to hold oppressive power over other groups, and an emancipatory social analysis is explored in one way or another.

The first struggle Jennings identifies is that against ‘aggressive nationalism’.  He immediately explains this as ‘the fusion of Christianity and whiteness,’ a fusion he hopes to end.  This fusion, he continues, includes several other struggles: racism, white supremacy, ‘some aspects of sexism’, patriarchy, and exploitation of the planet.  Reminiscent of Marxist analysis, Jennings seeks to locate social activism in ‘the struggle’ and interprets various struggles in terms of ‘the struggle’.  He believes he has reached deeper insight into the struggle as a combination of Christianity and whiteness.  They are ‘two mutual (sic) interpenetrating realities, the one always performing itself inside the other.’

Why Reject Jennings’ Private Language of ‘Whiteness’?

There are several, crucial reasons to reject Jennings’ private language of ‘whiteness’.  First, it locates sin parochially by focusing on race and then focusing further on a particular race—or colour.  The force of this is of the same sort as the Pharisee who prayed, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men….’  The tax collector, however, prayed, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ (Luke 18.11-13).  Sin, however, is universal, rusting the entire metal of the human condition.  A Biblical analysis of emancipation begins with everyone in exile for their sins, not just one group.

Second, Jennings’ choice of ‘whiteness’ for a particular social injustice focusses on a natural characteristic (people are born ‘white’) while making of it a voluntary choice for which people—individuals and groups—are culpable.  People, including white people, are told to give up their ‘whiteness’.  They may be born into ‘white’ culture, but they are expected to deconstruct it.  This intentional confusion of nature and culture has the effect of stagnating identity in ways that go well beyond the typical missiological discussion of how the Gospel can translate into any culture.[9]  It requires the demise of ‘white’ culture.  While it may be that some cultures fail and should be discarded (something of a Lord of the Flies argument), identifying a culture with a natural characteristic (‘whiteness’) and denigrating it has the ring of eugenics about it.  Why were Jews targeted in Nazi Germany?  They were both a culture and an ethnic group—nature and culture were combined and condemned, and individuals were identified with the group.  Jennings has managed to cast the problem of racism in stark terms by combining nature and culture.

Third, Jennings’ focus on social injustice itself marginalizes Christ and the Church.  When social justice is discussed without Christ as Lord, it devolves into a balancing of equalities and freedoms between groups.  It has a measure of justice, but it is disseminated in group identities rather than centralized under our Sovereign and the new identity we have in Christ.  Social justice without the Church is pursued socio-politically in one way or another, such as in racialist ways.  In Marxism, freedom of the people is pursued by the exercise of totalitarian measures.  In the name of the great struggle, inordinate evils are unleashed to right the wrongs of social structures by force.  One might think of the murder of thousands of Kulaks in Ukraine in the time of Josef Stalin—persons who owned too much property when collectivization of the farms was Stalin’s goal.  Concern for social injustice—perceived or real—can lead to an activism that is immensely unjust.  Read Plato’s Republic.  Socrates pursues a line of argument that would establish a just state.  It is, however, anything but a utopia.  The Church offers an alternative social reality that involves justice apart from, even despite, socio-political realities.  This is not to say that the Church can ignore society.  Rather, it is to say that the focus of any Christian discussion of social justice must be a focus directed first at the Church.

History

Some clarity as to what all this means comes when Jennings attempts to give historical, cultural, and missional analyses.  One problem with Marxist historical analysis is that it is, as social groupings themselves, too simplistic.  We might recall the Hegelian roots of Marxism, with its repeated, linear progression from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.  Even so, Jennings’ simplistic understanding of European history in terms of whiteness reaches a new level of simplistic analysis.  It is equally erroneous, and to answer him point by point would require a lengthy history lesson.  He begins his ethnic bigotry by saying that the ‘early Europeans’ ‘self-designated’ (an obvious anachronism) or developed their identity without the benefit of the voice and vision of people in the New World.  One wonders if he has ever read ancient Greek and Roman historians or geographers.  There is in such works an ethnic interest and awareness that defies a monolithic understanding.  This includes interest in the historical, cultural, geographic, religious, moral, physical, and legal differences between ethnicities.  There was no ‘European’ identity—no singular ‘voice and vision’—but a consideration of Phrygian, Thracian, Germanic, Lacedaemonian, Jewish, etc. distinctions.  There was also interest in north African, black African (south of Egypt—today Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea), and Indian identities.  While people who would later be designated ‘Europeans’ did not, of course, identify themselves with respect to people of the New World, they certainly did not ‘self-designate’.  Moreover, slavery in the Graeco-Roman world was not at all based on race.

Without any reference to the centuries he has in mind, Jennings locates the next ‘horror’ of European historical development in their grouping different clans and tribes in terms of race.  At some point, this did occur—although not without diverse views on the matter and much, much later.  Clarity is important—making sweeping statements about a race is racialist, and viewing this racial analysis negatively is racist.  Jennings is guilty of the very thing he criticizes.

In fact, the history of the North Atlantic slave trade clarifies some of Jennings’ misinterpretation.  As the Portuguese entered the slave trade—initiating a practice for seafaring colonial powers—it did so as part of its general involvement in global trade.  It engaged the developed West African kingdoms in trade—kingdoms, particularly the Songhai Empire in now Mali and Niger, that already practiced slavery.  When Mansa Musa (c. 1280-c. 1337) made his pilgrimage to Mecca, he was accompanied by 12,000 slaves.[10]  The slave trade in West Africa—and other parts of Africa—had continued throughout the centuries of Islam’s presence.  European merchants did not show up to start slavery from Africa but to engage in a pre-existing slave-trade that blew into a massive industry as the need for plantation labour grew in the New World.

Moreover, it was not race that characterized slavery for some time but religion.  Islam, for example, held that a Muslim could not enslave another Muslim.  Christians took the same sort of view, and the initial discussion had to do with enslaving indigenous people of the New World—not black Africans.  This discussion of whether to enslave one’s own or not dates right back to practices in ancient Greece.

Jennings also misreports the settlement of America in a singular, negative narrative.  He says that indigenous peoples were ‘forced to think of themselves in disorienting ways, to think of themselves away from land and away from animals and into racial encasement, that is, into races.’  There are several ways in which this is frightfully simplistic, but it is also in some cases false.  Roger Williams disputed the treatment of Amerindians by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and fled out of their jurisdiction to establish a settlement in Rhode Island that had honourable treaties with the natives and that forbad slavery.  James Oglethorpe, an opponent of slavery, founded the settlement in Savannah.  In both cases, economic pressures redirected the slave-free colonies into a practice of slavery.  The debate among Christians, however, continued until the end of slavery.  Jennings’ racialist view and his simplistic history fail to tell the truth about Western history.  Instead, we get a facile view of ‘whiteness’ that encourages rather than discourages racism.

The history of the North American slave trade soon focussed on black Africans and allowed Europeans to hold Christian black slaves.  Even so, this history cannot be told as a single voice and vision, to use Jennings’ own phrase.  The actual history of European involvement in the slave trade entails the Church reacting either positively or negatively to trade practices.  Eventually, Christian voices that opposed the slave trade won the argument against slavery in the 19th century, with the United States settling the matter by war.

Even this overview is, of course, far too simplistic a history. Yet the point is that a racialist, monolithic history of the European peoples such as offered by Jennings is fraught with error.  His history of Europe involves a categorical denigration of Europeans and their history.  It also fails to tell the truth about European Christianity (a very mixed history, to be sure).  Inasmuch as he means to provide a social, cultural, and historical view of ‘whiteness’, he would also have to compare and contrast this category of his with other categories (equally simplistic, one might suppose).  What of ‘African’ or ‘Asian’ or ‘Amerindian’ socio-ethnic constructs?

Missions and Earth Care

Jennings also offers a criticism of missions—or European missions.  He envisions an encounter of Christianity with other cultures that will appreciate non-Christian worldviews.  This subject is at the heart of missiology, of course, and discussion of contextualization, enculturation, or translation of the Christian message involves a variety of views on Church and culture.[11]

Jennings’ opposition to traditional Christian missionary work involves critiquing its challenge of animism.  He frowns on the very designation.  This raises questions of what he actually understands the Christian worldview to be, let alone the Gospel itself.  He says,

As the taking of land and animals was being done, European Christians challenged to its core the vision shared by many Native peoples that both their identities and their sense of well-being formed and flourished through constant interaction with specific places and animals….  The place was in them, and they were within the animals, sharing life and vision, joined together as family.  Such a vision for most missionaries was demonically inspired confusion, later in time to be called by others animism, and still later to be called cultural primitivism.

Understandably, Jennings seems to oppose a human-centred view that subjugates rather than cares for creation.  However, for him, ‘whitness’ is all about domination.  His view comes across as an appreciative syncretism of animism and Christianity.  Moreover, he seems to understand traditional religions as earth-protecting and earth-appreciating religions in which the supernatural is not even a factor.  He says nothing of the fear and oppression in and the real evil of demonic forces on African and Asian peoples in their traditional religions.  In this, he has a very ‘Western’, i.e., non-spiritual view of the world himself.

At least Jennings does not fall into the paternalistic view in some naïve missionary discussions that see culture as static or only positive (as long as it is not Western!).  He even allows that the ‘transformation’ of culture is ‘not inherently evil’.  He has little to say about this, however.

A Definition of ‘Whiteness’

Jennings defines ‘whiteness’ as a ‘deformed building project’.  As such, it is not supposed to be a racial concept.  Yet it is because he has in mind Europeans and their socio-cultural history.  It is not socio-cultural history as opposed to race but this along with the white ‘race’.  (While he criticizes Whites for defining the world in terms of White and Black, this lies at the heart of his own critical theory.)  In this, Jennings’ interpretation manages to be both racist (‘whiteness’) and racialist (a racist interpretations of white, ethnic populations through history). He says we have to ‘understand how whiteness informs the intellectual, artistic, economic, and geographic stage on which vision and voice are realized and performed.’  He says, toward the end of his essay, that whiteness is not white biology.  It is a positivist view of social history, an evolution to a mature eutopia, that is actually a devolution through abusive power and exploitation that destroys.  He says,

Whiteness is an invitation to a form of agency and a subjectivity that imagines life progressing toward what is in fact a diseased understanding of maturity, a maturity that invites us to evaluate the entire world by how far along it is toward this goal.

Jennings’ discussion continues a little further at this point, although the concept of ‘whiteness’ has by this time already been defined along the lines of abusive power, privilege, and exploitation—and it has been connected with white Europeans from the beginning of a European history.  His view, then, is a racialist Liberation theology, not unlike Black Theology of several decades ago.[12]

Finally, Jennings discusses the ‘feeling’ of ‘whiteness’.  He means by this that what we have feels normal.  This seems to be a version of Marx’s ‘opiate of the people’.  He calls for ‘resistance’.  Specifically, he calls to resist losing life in a place, being designated racially (which he actually does!), being commodified, a global system of exchange, debt, and money, and ‘relentless systems of education and evaluation that [support] these things’.  Such a call to resistance is vague enough to be filled in later with various agendas and activism in the name of social justice.  He does, however, give further discussion to ‘place’, which turns out to be an opposition to segregation, which affects work, money, education, etc.  He understands the call to redress this situation to involve Christian communities, and in this he at least does not defer to government and its use of power to change society.  A focus on intentional communities of Christ offers something positive in the article, even if it likely does so by remaining rather vaguely discussed.

A Better Way: A Biblical and Theological Basis for Christian Unity

Earlier, I suggested that a Christocentric and ecclesial focus is fundamental for a Christian discussion of social justice.  There is much to say along these lines, but all that can be said in this space is that such a discussion would be quite the opposite of social justice discussed under the category of Jennings’ ‘whiteness’.  I can, however, outline a Biblical and theological basis for unity.  Note that the Biblical virtue of unity is far preferable to raising diversity up as a virtue.

Unity is a repeated virtue in the New Testament, expressed with such related virtues as love, patience, kindness, humility, gentleness, etc., and fostered by practices such as compassion, forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation/peace-making, etc.  Biblically, unity builds on rather than balances virtues of purity or holiness and righteousness (e.g., 1 Corinthians 5.7-8; 2 Corinthians 6.14).  Therefore, unity results or derives from life in Christ and through the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6.11).  It can be explored as a Trinitarian virtue.  It follows that unity is not a virtue that stands apart from Christian life, as though other religions or societies would mean the same thing as Christians do when speaking of ‘unity’.  As a Christian virtue, unity stands apart from other renditions of unity.

Postmodernity, with its opposition to totalizing metanarratives and replacement of objective truth with local constructions of truth, raised diversity to the status of a cardinal virtue.  With inclusion as an ancillary cardinal virtue, it has privileged previously marginalized convictions, ethics, and practices, and socially it has identified marginalized communities—most notably sexual and racial, but increasingly religious and atheist—that must now be given new, privileged status.  Yet Postmodernity has evolved from this initial understanding that made diversity a cardinal virtue to formulate a new metanarrative of Western tribalism.  There is an early and a late version of Postmodernity.

Marginalized convictions and groups have been raised to privileged status over against what came before, to the point that history, laws, and institutions must now be radically altered—cancelled—to reflect a new power and control.  The pattern is predictable, having been witnessed again and again in revolutions of the past.  First, the revolution pulls in disaffected groups; then it coalesces around certain groups and excludes others.  Diversity turns out to be a useful tool in the initial stage of the struggle; it is then limited as unacceptable ideas, people, and groups are excluded cancelled, or guillotined.  The diversity-affirming ‘intercultural studies’ department (replacing ‘mission studies’) of early Postmodern seminaries now becomes the culture-cancelling department studying critical (race) theory, intersectionality, post-colonialism, and other socio-political, emancipatory ideologies of late Postmodernity.  Evangelism to the nations becomes study of diverse peoples becomes the privileging of certain groups and cancelling of others.  ‘Bearing the name of God to the nations’ becomes ‘appreciative dialogue between peoples, religions, and cultures’ becomes the struggle against ‘whiteness’.  Even Jennings’ term implies the tribalism of late Postmodernity.  Like postcolonial rule, it has overthrown one master with the joyful enthusiasm of the excluded only to become the new oppressor—corrupt, violent, and oppressive.  Lacking a theological understanding of the human condition and God’s salvation, it turns to explanations from the social sciences, such as Marxist critical theory.

A Biblical correction of this is not to be found in some attempt to show Christianity as supportive of the Postmodern, post-Christian struggle by expressing support for the secular notions of ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusion’.  A Biblical correction means replacing ‘diversity’ with ‘unity’ and understanding ‘unity’ Biblically and theologically.  Instead of viewing sin and salvation through the lenses of cultural Marxism, such as Jennings’ own racialism, a Christian view offers a view of universal sin and a socio-political alternative to all human constructs in the Kingdom of God.  Thus, a Biblical understanding of ‘unity’ is the preferred alternative to Jennings’ guilt and anger producing, culture-cancelling struggle against ‘whiteness’.  Eight Biblical and theological bases for a Christian understanding of unity might be outlined as a positive alternative.

First, monotheism rather than polytheism leads to a unity among the various groups of humanity.  The central tenet of Biblical faith, that God is one (Deuteronomy 6.4), is cited by Paul in Romans 3.27-30 to show that monotheism involves a unity among the peoples of the earth.  God created Jews and Gentiles—all the nations.  Therefore, no group can boast over another in their righteousness.

Second, that all human beings are created in the image of God is a fundamental reason for the Christian view of unity among peoples.  Jennings’ concerns about certain views about race and their related practices in European history might well have been discussed along these lines, rather than isolating ‘whiteness’ as the issue.

Third, the Biblical view of sin is that it rests upon all humanity.  Psalm 143.2 says, ‘No one living is righteous before you.’  Paul, citing Psalm 14, says, ‘None is righteous, no, not one’ (Romans 3.10).

It therefore follows, fourthly, that salvation comes to all humanity in the same way.  The passage cited earlier, Romans 3.27-30, also makes this point.  There is not a salvation plan for Jews and a separate plan for Gentiles.  Moreover, the plan of salvation is God’s plan, not a plan for how human groups can compete against each other to obtain God’s salvation.  We are all saved through faith in what God has done on our behalf to save us.

Thus, fifth, our understanding of salvation is universally applicable to all people.  For example, Paul says,

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people …. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2.1-4).

From this missional concern of God for all people, sixth, the actual mission of God’s people—from the time of Abraham to the Church—is outwardly focussed.  God’s choice of Israel from among the nations is a choice of a priestly servant for the nations (cf. Exodus 19.5-6).  It is a mission to restore all people, not just one tribe, tongue, people, or nation.  If the story of the introduction of diversity among the nations at the time of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) was a result of divine judgement, the story of mission to the nations is one of unity among the nations.  The Christian virtue is unity, not diversity.  It is not, however, unity apart from unity in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Church’s mission is to go to the peoples of the earth and baptize in the name of the Triune God of Christian faith (Matthew 28.18-20).  Similarly, the unity of the Church is drawn around the Son’s unity with the Father (John 17; it is not simply social unity or inclusion), or is expressed as a unity of the Spirit in one faith (Ephesians 4.3-6).  It might also be called a Christocentric unity: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3.28).

Seventh, God’s work of grace is not only forgiving; it is also transforming.  I have elsewhere noted examples of racist views in South Africa during Apartheid: some whites even held to the view that blacks were not really human and could not, therefore, be saved.  Coming to Christian faith—when it was the true faith—transformed this view.  So also, a hatred of whites by blacks—and there was plenty of mistreatment, not just structural racialism during Apartheid, to cause this—could be overcome through Christ and in the Church.[13]  The overcoming of hate and dissension takes place through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s transforming power.  Paul says,

Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life (Titus 3.1-7).

Eighth, the Church is a new humanity.  It is not a privileging of one tribe over others, such as Israel over the other nations.  It is certainly not a privileging of some tribes over a failed ‘white’ tribe, as Jennings would have it (whether literally—which he cannot avoid—or figuratively—which he advocates).  Christianity is, certainly, opposed to racism, which should be defined as seeing individuals totally or primarily in terms of their racial groups rather than as the individuals they are and the persons they are before God.  Instead, we are called to see people as ‘new creations’ (2 Corinthians 5.17) and as united ‘in Christ’ despite ethnic, sexual (male and female), and socio-economic diversity (Galatians 3.28).  Believers are gathered in unity through the blood of Christ despite their racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity, as we read in Revelation 7.9-14—a text that has often been wrongly coopted to press multiculturalism rather than unity in Christ.  In this Christocentric and ecclesial identity of believers, there is an implicit and necessary critique of ‘the world’—its history, culture, and identity.

Conclusion

At each point in the above outline of a Biblical theology for and ethic of unity in Christ, Jennings’ distorted discussion of social justice in terms of opposing ‘whiteness’ fails.  One does not need to turn to critical race theory, which is evident in his arguments even though he does not mention it, to offer a Christian alternative.  Holy Scripture provides a far more robust analysis of the situation and a real solution.  Jennings’ view appears to be drawn from the waters of Marxist critical race theory, adding to all the failures of Liberation theology a racialism that ends up in disunity.  It trashes the history of the Church in Europe, distorting and rewriting it in a way that services his deconstruction of ‘whiteness’ and his radical socio-political struggle in the name of social justice. His analysis is flawed in its understanding of the facts of history, in its categories for analysis, in its failure to be Biblical and theological, and in its proving to be, in the end, a racist identity ecclesiology.



[1] Rollin G. Grams, ‘Some Characteristics of the West’s Postmodern Tribalism,’ (July 14, 2020); online at: https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/2020/07/some-characteristics-of-wests.html.

[2] Rollin G. Grams, ‘The Rise of Identity Ecclesiology,’ (May 10, 2019); available at: https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-rise-of-identity-ecclesiology.html.  Also see ‘Is Diversity a Christian Virtue?’ (October 28, 2019); available at: https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/2019/10/is-diversity-christian-virtue.html. The focus of my critique of identity ecclesiology is on Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

[3] Note my further discussion in ‘Racism, and an Ecclesial and Missional Perspective’ (July 18, 2020): available at https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/2020/07/racism-and-ecclesial-and-missionary.html.

[4] Willie James Jennings, ‘Can White People be Saved?  Reflections on the Relationship of Missions and Whiteness,’ in Can ‘White’ People be Saved?  Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, ed. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2018).

[5] Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), in ‘Prologue: Secrets’.

[6] Ibid.

[7] J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

[8] This is also a point made by Neil Shevni about most of the contributions in Can ‘White’ People be Saved? In his review.  See Shevni’s ‘A Short Review of Sechrest’s Can ‘White’ People be Saved?; online at: https://shenviapologetics.com/a-short-review-of-sechrests-can-white-people-be-saved/ (accessed 26 September, 2020).

[9] Cf. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, rev. 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009); Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996); Richard L. Haney, Mapping Mission as Translation with Reference to Michael Polanyi’s Heuristic Philosophy (PhD Dissertation, Middlesex University, 2014).  Jennings is aware of Sanneh’s and Walls’ work on translation, but also critical of it.  He agrees with their point about the Gospel’s translateablity on the one hand, but then says that this also unleashes ‘horrors’ for the culture receiving the Gospel (After Whiteness, ‘Prologue: Secrets’).

[10] John Doleman de Graft-Johnson, ‘Mūsā I of Mali,’ Encyclopedia of Britannica; online at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Musa-I-of-Mali (accessed 27 September, 2020).

[11] See footnote 7.

[12] Cf. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990; originally pub. 1970).

[13] Rollin G. Grams, Stewards of Grace: A Reflective, Mission Biography of Eugene and Phyllis Grams in South Africa, 1951-1962 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010). 

The Misuse of Matthew 18.15-17 for Conflict Management, Airing Personal Grievances, and Institutional Control

Introduction  

In Matthew 18.15-17, Jesus says,

15 If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector (ESV).

Is this passage about conflict management, airing personal grievances, and ultimately about institutional control, or is it about addressing sin, pastoral care of sinners, and a Christian community's purity?

The Text is about Dealing with Sin, Not about Conflict Resolution

This passage is used, rightly, to address a progressive approach to deal with a sinner’s sin in the church, mentioned in verse 17.  The progression presents an ethic of care for the sinner in which care is taken to seek the sinner’s restitution rather than condemnation, if at all possible.  By first approaching the sinner individually, gossip and overly zealous judgement is avoided.  By approaching him or her with two or three witnesses, proof rather than opinion is given priority, and a further opportunity to bring restoration is offered.  By seeking a judgement of the entire church, factional views are avoided.  More will be said later about the ethics of this passage.

Each step of the disciplinary action has Old Testament precedent.  The role of the OT at each stage, not just with the two or three witnesses,[1] needs to be recognized for a proper interpretation of the passage.  The Old Testament passages have to do with giving a personal warning to a person of his or her sin, establishing the fact that he or she has sinned in a legal context, and bringing communal restoration to the unclean person seeking to be cleansed or communal ostracism if the person does not.  Note that these texts are not about conflict resolution.  They are about stages of confronting a sinner with sin, preferably to bring restoration but also, if ultimately necessary, judgement.

1.     Individual Stage

The first step of the disciplinary process is to go to the person rather ignore a sin.  Jesus’ statement establishes that the one wronged should go alone to address the sin with the sinful person.  Similarly, God tells Ezekiel to warn a wicked person that he or she might repent and not die in his or her iniquity.  If Ezekiel does not do so, the sinner’s blood will be on him (Ezekiel 33.8-9).  This passage continues to say that the righteousness of a person will not save him or her when he or she sins, but a repentant sinner will not fall by his or her wickedness when he or she turns away from it (v. 12).

A textual problem arises in Matthew 18.15.  Did the original reading say ‘sins’ or ‘sins against you’ (ἁμαρτήσῃ [εἰς σὲ])?  As noted in the translation given above, the ESV reads ‘If your brother sins against you….’  The KJV, NRSV, NLT,  among other translations, also have ‘against you.’  The NIV, however, has ‘If your brother or sister sins...’ (without ‘against you’).  The meaning of the passage turns on whether we include ‘with you’ or not.  Is the passage about confronting a sinner with his sin or about how to address someone who has sinned against you?  The former reading has more to do with the pastoral care of a sinner, steps in church discipline, and attempts to restore a sinner.  The latter reading would include a concern for how to address personal grievances and conflict.  My understanding of the passage and my view on the textual issue lead me to understand the passage to be about the pastoral care of a sinner and not about personal conflict.  In fact, the issue is clearly stated as being about sin, and the matter of resolving differences is quite foreign to the context.  Yet the passage is regularly cited as a Biblical way to handle conflict.

The above reference to Ezekiel 33.8-9 as a background text to Matthew 18.15 would tip the scales in favour of reading Jesus’ statement as a statement about dealing with sin. The comment before that had to do with how to deal with one’s own sin:

And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.  9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire (Matthew 18.8-9).

Matthew 18.10-14 then turns to dealing with the sin of others with the parable of the Lost Sheep.  One is to go after the lost sheep instead of despising it as God rejoices over a restored sinner and does not want one to perish.  Following the parable is our passage, Matthew 18.15-17, which, in context, clarifies how to go after a lost sheep, i.e., a sinner.  The context does not suggest conflict management or personal grievance.

Also, the parallel in Luke 17.3 says, ‘If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him….’  There is no ‘against you’ in the text.  Finally, a passage in the Holiness Code seems to explain the concern at this stage of dealing with an individual’s sin:

You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD. 17 “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD (Leviticus 19.16-18).

Paul also offers this advice to the Galatians--probably based directly on Leviticus but also perhaps coming through Jesus' teaching (since v. 2 speaks further of fulfilling the law of Christ--i.e., loving one's neighbour as oneself [Lev. 19.18; Mt. 22.39]):

My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted (Galatians 6.1).

The textual problem in Matthew 18.15 must also be considered for the interpretation that Jesus is telling one to go after the sinner, not, more specifically, one who sinned against him.  The majority of manuscripts, including some (early) uncials, provide the longer reading of ‘sinned against you’.  However, we do not count manuscripts but evaluate them according to their strengths, paying attention to the excellence of individual manuscripts and to the explanation that accounts for the various readings.  In this case, two early, excellent Egyptian uncials lack the ‘against you’ (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus). 

Scholars are divided on which reading is likely.  For example, Craig Evans accepts the ‘against you’ reading without discussion of the textual evidence.  While he notes two passages in Proverbs that, he believes, support a general statement (3.12 and 25.9), he also notes T Gad 6.3: ‘Love, therefore, one another from the heart; and if one sin against you, cast forth the poison of hate and speak peaceably to him, and in your soul hold no guile, and if he confess and repent, forgive him.[2]  Thus, there is Jewish support for a word about forgiving personal grievances.  However, the Testament of Gad is not speaking about dealing with sin on the person’s part, only about forgiveness, and so fits better as a parallel for Peter’s question in v. 21.  On the other hand, Richard France suggested following the shorter reading, finding that the ‘personal grievance’ reading introduced in v. 21 is premature at this stage of the text.[3]

Explanations about how either the ‘against you’ (εἰς σε) or its omission might have arisen in the text both consider what scribes copying manuscripts might have heard being read to them.  The previous verb, ἁμαρτήσῃ, has a similar final sound to εἰς σε.  One could imagine one scribe omitting this or another adding it for the same reason.  Bruce Metzger explained that the decision of the United Bible Societies’ committee included considering v. 21’s similar εἰς σε.  Peter asks, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me (εἰς ἐμὲ), and I forgive him?’  A copyist may have intentionally added ‘against you’ in the earlier verse 15 to fit with this further discussion of dealing with a sinner.  Equally, they noted, a copyist may have wished to broaden the text so it dealt not only with sin against one but sin in general.[4]  Thus, while the committee included 'against you' in the Greek text, they gave the certainty of the reading a low mark.  The current Greek text omits it.

Having considered the evidence and suggestions, I would, as already noted, follow the shorter reading as the Greek text is now rendered.  The strong, early manuscript evidence, the previous parable, and the other literary evidence tilt the argument in this direction for me.  On this reading, the passage is not about conflict management or personal grievances but about confronting a person who has sinned.

2.     A Second or Third Witness Stage

Then, following Jewish legal practice, other witnesses are to be called in if the person refuses to listen.  A charge against someone could not be established by one witness alone: it had to be established by two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17.6; 19.15).  This principle of justice was, for example, applied to murder (Numbers 35.30; Deuteronomy 17.6), but, as France notes, it was also applied to cases more generally (as in John 8.17; 2 Cor. 13.1; 1 Tim. 5.19; Heb. 10.28).[5]

3.     The Whole Church Stage

Finally, the entire church is to admonish a person over his or her sin.  Numbers 19.16-22 instructs the people of Israel how an unclean person is to be restored.  He may have become unclean by touching a dead person or human bone, and so he must become clean again.  If the man does not cleanse himself, he is ‘to be cut off from the midst of the assembly, since he has defiled the sanctuary of the Lord’ (Numbers 19.20).  This passage is similar to the instruction of Jesus in Matthew 18.17: it is about restoring a person or, if the person will not become clean, being cut off completely (ἐξολεθρευθήσεται) from the assembly (Greek: συναγωγῆς; Hebrew: qāhāl).  Paul applies this teaching to the case of a man sexually involved with his father’s wife (1 Corinthians 5).  The purity of the community requires a communal excommunication of a person who refuses to change his sinful ways.

The Misuse of This Text in Institutions

Having argued that this passage is not about conflict management but about the process of confronting a person who has sinned, another misuse of the text needs to be addressed.  The passage is not a text for how to resolve conflict in an institution where power, office, and work are involved.  That this passage is regularly cited by Christian organizations and institutions is troublesome.

The problem in using the text in this way is mainly when the passage is used as a way to engage a person in authority.  A manager, for example, might say that the Biblical way to resolve issues in the institution is to come to him with any complaints.  What this means is a person whose very job is at stake is directed to come personally to the person in power to confront him.  In Jesus’ directions, precisely the opposite relational dynamic is in view.  The person with power in the church context is the person who goes after the sinner to tell him he has sinned.  The sinner does not have power in the relationship.  Furthermore, the passage urges the person who has seen the sinner’s sin to go to him and not leave the situation unaddressed because, as the previous parable stated, God does not want anyone to perish and rejoices over a restored sinner.  The passage, far from being about conflict management or resolving differences, is about caring enough for others to point out their sins, and not doing so as a challenge to persons in authority but despite one’s own authority—for not being the sinner—in the relationship.

As I have elsewhere argued, Matthew 17.24-20.28 is actually an extended teaching on discipleship that teaches how Jesus’ disciples are to ‘become little’ or humble themselves in different ways.[6]  The chapter begins with Jesus’ saying that the disciples need to become like little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (18.3).  The shepherd is not to abandon the sinner but is to care enough for him to go after him (18.10-14) to point out his sin in order to try to restore him and so gain a brother (18.15).  When this passage is read in reference to conflict management and resolving personal grievances, it is turned into a very different sort of teaching.  The person going to talk to the other person does not go out of care to restore a sinner so much as in fear about whether a conflict can be resolved.  If he is urged on the basis of this verse to go to a superior in an institution, he goes with the heavy burden of voicing his grievances in the institution to a superior.  The already humble person in the relationship is humbled further in such a scenario.

Authoritarian managers, in particular, want to stop gossip which, of course, happens especially in abusive situations.  They also want to eliminate complaints, just as totalitarian regimes always oppose free speech.  Matthew 18.15 regularly gets dredged up in such situations in Christian organizations as a proof-text to stop people from speaking to one another, processing workplace problems, and figuring out together what needs to be done.  Gossip is, of course, a problem when speech is not used to try to rectify situations and does not have restoration of sinners as an objective (cf. 2 Corinthians 12.20).  That said, Matthew 18.15 is not about this, and it is certainly not a text to use to shut down speech, curtail grievances, and deal with conflict.  It is, as already argued, a passage about how an equal—a ‘brother’—should care enough for a sinner (someone now with less power in the relationship) to speak to him about his sin in the hope of restoring him to fellowship.  Yet it initiates a process that has the purity of the community in view as well, such that the sinner might be expelled from the assembly of believers if he does not repent.  No manager, pulling out Matthew 18.15, thinks that he should be fired if he does not repent when workers come to him about a grievance because such leaders think the passage gives them a way to control speech and conflict in the workplace.

Conclusion

Matthew 18.15-17 is so often treated as a passage about the management of grievances and conflict that reading the text as a way to address sin, to care for sinners, and to keep the Christian community pure must seem to be a surprising challenge.  This is, however, precisely what the passage says.  The passage is actually abused when it is used by persons in authority in Christian organizations to try to control speech and make workers reveal their grievances to the management.  The passage is turned into a burdensome passage that controls speech in the workplace.  Indeed, it is not a text putting a person in the lower position in a relationship in a further bind of going to an authority to confess complaints.



[1] R. T. France, e.g., only notes Deuteronomy 19.15 as background (for the witnesses).  The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).

[2] Craig Evans, Matthew (New Cambridge Bible Commentary; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 334.

[3] Ibid., p. 689.

[4] Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary of the Greek New Testament (London: UBS, 1971), p. 15.

[5] Ibid., p. 693.

[6] Rollin G. Grams, ‘Issues Facing Missions Today 22: The Disciples are not ‘Leaders’ but ‘Little Ones’ in Matthew’s Gospel; online at https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/2014/09/issues-facing-missions-today-22.html.

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