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Race
This page intentionally left blank
Race
A Theological Account

j. kameron carter

1
2008
1
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Copyright Ó 2008 by J. Kameron Carter

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, J. Kameron, 1967–
Race : a theological account / J. Kameron Carter.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978- 0-19-515279-1
1. Race—Religious aspects—Christianity.
2. Racism—Religious aspects—Christianity.
3. Race relations—Religious aspects—
Christianity. 4. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984.
I. Title.
BT734.C37 2008
270.089—dc22 2007036919

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments

I am happy to thank a number of friends and colleagues who have

offered advice, criticism, and support over the long evolution of this
book, which first began as a dissertation at the University of Virginia
and since then has been literally rewritten, as they say, from the
ground up.
I begin with a word of thanks to my dissertation committee
in the religious studies department at Virginia under whose guid-
ance I wrote the first version of what is now this book: Eugene F.
Rogers Jr. (now at University of North Carolina–Greensboro), Peter
V. Ochs, John Milbank (now at the University of Nottingham),
and my external committee member and now colleague, Willie James
Jennings (Duke Divinity School). Rather than press me into the
mold of their questions, they helped me begin thinking about what
was theological about my questions. I have come to appreciate how
rare a practice this is and so have come to appreciate Gene, Peter,
John, and Willie all the more. Others at Virginia who have been
particularly supportive of me in the writing of this work are Charles
Marsh, Chuck Mathewes, and the Fellows at Virginia’s Institute
for Advanced Studies in Culture. Of special mention are the director
of the institute, James Davison Hunter, and Jennifer Geddes, now
the editor of its journal, The Hedgehog Review. I owe the members
of the Duodecim Theological Society a debt of gratitude for their
supportive and critical engagements with parts of the book.
My time as a Fellow at the John Hope Franklin Center for
Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University dur-
ing the 2002–2003 academic year was especially important for my
vi acknowledgments

thinking more deeply into the themes of my dissertation and their ultimate
transformation to yield this book. Convened by Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke;
English) and Charlie Piot (Duke; anthropology), ‘‘Race, Justice, and the Pol-
itics of Memory’’—the title of the year-long seminar—took me to a new level
of conversation on the modern problem of race. Particularly illuminating were
conversations with Fellows Grant Farrad (Duke; literature), Ian Baucom
(Duke; English), and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Harvard; African Amer-
ican studies, history).
Fellowships through the Association of Theological Schools’ Lilly Theo-
logical Research Fellowships Program and the Woodrow Wilson–Mellon
Foundation’s Career Enhancement Program during the 2004–2005 academic
year afforded me time off from teaching and administrative duties at Duke
Divinity School to rethink and begin to rewrite the work. But it was a fel-
lowship from the National Humanities Center in the 2006–2007 academic
year that helped me to the finish line (to say nothing of beginning preliminary
research and writing on two other projects). It would have taken far longer
were it not for the gracious support of these agencies, and of Dean L. Gregory
Jones of Duke Divinity School, who allowed me the time off to complete this
work. Gratitude is also certainly due to the several research assistants I have
had in the process of writing this book.
I have already mentioned a number of my Duke colleagues whose con-
versations with me around my work have been critical, supportive, and
helpful. I must call attention to three of them who have offered guidance and
been uniquely keen interlocutors: Mel Peters in religion, Ken Surin in liter-
ature, and Romand Coles in political science. Each of them read chunks of my
work and offered constructive criticism. My debt to them, and especially to
Ken who has been an intellectual mentor, is great. In the Divinity School,
Stanley Hauerwas has engaged my work and, in ways both direct and indirect,
has helped me crystallize what I was going after in this book. Amy Laura Hall
has been incredibly supportive of this work and me. Lauren Winner, a friend
from graduate school and now a colleague, has provided an ear for my ideas
and taken time to read various chapters of this book. Her powerful pen came
to my literary rescue on more than one occasion. There are traces in this book
of our conversations on how to theologically conceive the relationship between
Judaism and Christianity and on the significance of this relationship for
Christian spirituality. I would certainly be remiss not to mention the stellar
cast of black faculty at Duke Divinity School. They have spiritually, intellec-
tually, and sometimes even personally sustained me through the process of
getting to the end of this work, helping it to be the best work it could possibly
be. They are Tammy Williams, William C. Turner Jr., Esther Acolatse, Em-
manuel Katongole, Richard Payne, and again Willie James Jennings. I must
also say that this book is better as a result of the intellectually stimulating and
deeply enriching conversations I have had with Willie during the writing.
 acknowledgments vii

A theologian of the first rank and, more important, a friend of the highest
order, Willie saw this project in its first form as a dissertation and has watched
its metamorphosis. Indeed, he has talked me through more than a few im-
passes in the transformation process. My thanks go to him.
Many outside of Duke have been of immense help, and four in particular
stand out: Jonathan Hess of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for
our conversations at Foster’s over lunch, along with subsequent e-mail ex-
changes; Michael Mack of the University of Nottingham for support of my
work; Robert Bernasconi of the University of Memphis for telephone con-
versations on Kant, continental philosophy, and race; and, finally, feminist
scholar in Jewish studies Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth), whose work fell into
my hands at just the right time. Conversations with her were critical as I
worked to craft some of my arguments.
Because of the masterful editing skills of Anne Weston (Duke Divinity
School), this book is far, far better than it otherwise would have been. I also
want to extend words of appreciation to Cynthia Read and her team at
Oxford—especially Meechal Hoffman and Linda Donnelly—in working with
me to see this book through to its present form.
I must record my gratitude to my in-laws, the Reverend Dr. Eddie B. Lane
(whom I also call ‘‘the Pastor’’) and Mrs. Betty J. Lane. Mrs. Lane’s prayers that
I see this project to completion and the Pastor’s regular reminders to me
through the arduous rewriting and rethinking process of the significance of
what I was going after in this work were important beyond words.
I am grateful to my daughters, Kennedi Gabrielle and Madison Victoria,
for reminding me so often that life is bigger than this big book. Thanks for
insisting that I tickle and wrestle with and read to you and work with you on
those dreaded multiplication tables and . . . This book is dedicated with love,
affection, and appreciation to my friend and dear spouse, Felicia Cheryl Lane-
Carter. You make music in my life and have helped me take ‘‘giant steps,’’ the
latest of which is this book.
With all the support, criticism, and advice behind this book, it should be
perfect. But, more than anyone else, I know it is not: I alone am accountable
for the errors, foibles, and oversights that have stubbornly remained.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Abbreviations, xi
Prologue
The Argument at a Glance, 3
Prelude on Christology and Race
Irenaeus as Anti-Gnostic Intellectual, 11

PART I: Dramatizing Race

A Theological Account of Modernity

1. The Drama of Race

Toward a Theological Account of Modernity, 39

2. The Great Drama of Religion

Modernity, the Jews, and the Theopolitics
of Race, 79

PART II: Engaging Race

The Field of African American
Religious Studies

3. Historicizing Race
Albert J. Raboteau, Religious History,
and the Ambiguities of Blackness, 125
x contents

4. Theologizing Race
James H. Cone, Liberation, and the Theological
Meaning of Blackness, 157
5. Signifying Race
Charles H. Long and the Opacity of Blackness, 195
Interlude on Christology and Race
Gregory of Nyssa as Abolitionist Intellectual, 229

PART III: Redirecting Race

Outlines of a Theological Program

6. The Birth of Christ

A Theological Reading of Briton Hammon’s
1760 Narrative, 255
7. The Death of Christ
A Theological Reading of Frederick Douglass’s
1845 Narrative, 285
8. The Spirit of Christ
A Theological Reading of the Writings
of Jarena Lee, 313
Postlude on Christology and Race
Maximus the Confessor as Anticolonialist
Intellectual, 343

Epilogue
The Discourse of Theology
in the Twenty-First Century, 371
Notes, 381
Index, 469
Abbreviations

Adversus haeresus

AH Adversus haeresus
AH-A The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1: The Apostolic Fathers,
Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts
and James Donaldson (New York: Eerdmans,
1960); complete translation
AH-G Irenaeus of Lyons, ed. Robert M. Grant (New York:
Routledge, 1996); selective translation
Dem. On the Apostolic Preaching (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997). A translation
of Epideixis tou apostolikou k^erygmatos.
SC Sources chrétiennes, ed. Benoit Pruche (Paris:
Editions du Cerf, 1947); Latin-Greek-French
critical edition, in five multipart volumes under
the title Irenaeus: Contre les hérésies, correspond-
ing to the five books of Adversus haeresus

Abbreviations are followed by volume number, part number, and page

number: for example, AH-A I.6.35.

Gregory of Nyssa

AR De Anima et Resurrectione (On the Soul and the Res-

urrection)
xii abbreviations

CE Contra Eunomium (Against Eunomius)

CO Catechetica Oratio (Catechetical Orations)
DHO De Hominis Opificio (On the Creation of the Human Being)
GNO Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. Werner Jaeger (Berlin: E. J. Brill,
1921–)
HE ‘‘Homilies on Ecclesiastes’’; references are to the translation
in Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English
Version with Supporting Studies, ed. Stuart G. Hall (New
York: de Gruyter, 1993)
HP In Sanctum Pascha (Discourse on the Holy Pasch); references
are to the translation in The Easter Sermons of Gregory of
Nyssa: Translation and Commentary, vol. 9, ed. Andreas
Spira and Christoph Klock (Cambridge, Mass.: Philadel-
phia Patristic Foundation, 1981)
LP The Lord’s Prayer; references are to the translation in
Gregory of Nyssa: The Lord’s Prayer; the Beatitudes, ed.
Hilda C. Graef (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1954)
NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series, 14 vols., ed.
Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1978–1979)
PG Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Graeca, 162 vols. (Paris:
Jacques Paul Migne, 1857–66)

Abbreviations are followed by volume number (where applicable), page

number, and quadrant of the page (particularly, for NPNF and PG): for ex-
ample, PG 37.976A.

Immanuel Kant

AA Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: G.

Reimer, 1910–)
KA Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert
B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006)
KC Correspondence, trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999)
KCJ Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987)
KCPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998)
 abbreviations xiii

KDHR ‘‘Of the Different Human Races,’’ in Robert Bernasconi

and Tommy L. Lott, eds., The Idea of Race (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 2000)
KE ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,’’
in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eight-
eenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
KG Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), in Steven
M. Cahn, ed., Classics of Western Philosophy
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977)
KJL Lectures on Logic [the Jäsche edition], trans. and ed. J. Mi-
chael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992)
KMM Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
KRRT Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W.
Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996)
Abbreviations are followed by volume number (where applicable) and then
page number: for example, AA VI.56; KRRT, 256. In the case of KCPR, I follow
the convention of referring to the first (A) and second (B) editions, 1781 and
1787, respectively, then the page number: for example, KCPR, 590–604;
A642/B67–A668/B696.

Maximus the Confessor

Ad Thal Quaestiones ad Thalassium de scriptura sacra. Responses to

theological inquiries by a Libyan presbyter named
Thalassius: the various responses are numbered; transla-
tions of some of them appear in LMC.
Amb. Ambiguorum liber de variis difficilibus locis Gregorii theologi.
The various ‘‘Difficulties’’ (Ambigua) regarding the faith
that Maximus sought to solve: these are numbered;
translations of some of them appear in LMC and CMJC.
CCSG Corpus Christianorum: Series Graeca.
CL Capita de charitate (Centuries on Love)
CM Mystagogia (The Church’s Mystagogy)
CMJC On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from
St. Maximos the Confessor, ed. Paul M. Blowers and
xiv abbreviations

Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s

Seminary Press, 2003).
CTE Capita theologiae et oeconomiae (Chapters on Theology and the
Divine Economy)
Ep. 2 Epistle 2, Maximus the Confessor’s letter to John the
Cubicularius, written circa 626 ce
LMC Maximus the Confessor, ed. Andrew Louth (New York: Routle-
dge, 1996)
MCSW Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, ed. George C. Berthold
(Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1985); includes Commentary on the
Our Father
PG Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Graeca, 162 vols.; volumes 90
and 91 collect Maximus’s works

I follow the standard way of documenting references to PG: volume number,

page number, and then quadrant of the page. For example, 91.705A. I have
modified English translations from LMC and MCSW as needed.
Race
This page intentionally left blank
Prologue
The Argument at a Glance

Why is there a need for yet another book on race, and why is it needed
now? Let me answer the first part of the question this way. One can
readily enough find useful and informative engagements with the
modern problem of race from a number of disciplinary perspectives.
One can find them from such socioscientific disciplines as sociol-
ogy, political science, and economics and such hard-science disci-
plines as biology and genetics, to say nothing of the engagements
with race from within the varied disciplines of the humanities: phi-
losophy and history, as well as literary, religious, feminist, cultural,
and (post)colonial studies. Yet one is hard-pressed to find an ade-
quate theological account of the modern problem of race. This is all
the more surprising given that modern racial discourse and practice
have their genesis inside Christian theological discourse and mis-
siological practice, which themselves were tied to the practice of em-
pire in the advance of Western civilization. But it is precisely an ac-
count of this problem that is sorely lacking.
Race: A Theological Account is an initial installment in filling this
significant lacuna in modern knowledge about how the discourse
of theology aided and abetted the processes by which ‘‘man’’ came
to be viewed as a modern, racial being. Moreover (and this is the
flip side of what I have just noted), this book is an inquiry into
the subtle, inner transformation that theology itself underwent in
giving itself over to the discursive enterprise of helping to racially
constitute the modern world as we have come to know it. In what
way is modern racial discourse theological in character? What
happened to theology as a discourse that allowed it to become a
4 prologue: the argument at a glance

racial discourse? And, finally, is there another way of imagining the discursive
enterprise of theology, given its complicity in constructing the racialized world
and everything that has followed in its wake? This book is driven by—indeed,
haunted by—these questions, and I seek to begin to answer them.
My fundamental contention is that modernity’s racial imagination has its
genesis in the theological problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its
Jewish roots. This severance was carried out in two distinct but integrated steps.
First, Jews were cast as a race group in contrast to Western Christians, who with
the important assistance of the discourses of Christian theology and philoso-
phy, were also subtly and simultaneously cast as a race group. The Jews were
the mirror in which the European and eventually the Euro-American Occident
could religiously and thus racially conceive itself through the difference of
Orientalism. In this way, Western culture began to articulate itself as Christian
culture (and vice versa), but now—and this is the new moment—through the
medium of a racial imagination. Second, having racialized Jews as a people of
the Orient and thus Judaism as a ‘‘religion’’ of the East, Jews were then deemed
inferior to Christians of the Occident or the West. Hence, the racial imagination
(the first step) proved as well to be a racist imagination of white supremacy (the
second step). Within the gulf enacted between Christianity and the Jews, the
racial, which proves to be a racist, imagination was forged.
In an intellectual and post–civil rights moment in which it is now ac-
ceptable and expected (and rightly so) that one be against the second racist
step, in this book I theologically argue against both steps, which I summarize
under the shorthand phrase ‘‘the theological problem of whiteness.’’ Having
identified this problem as its first objective, which I carry out principally in part
I, my second objective is executing a new theological imagination for the
twenty-first century, one that sutures the gap between Christianity and its
Jewish roots and thereby reimagines Christian (intellectual) identity. This
latter task I carry out principally in parts II and III and in the surrounding
apparatus of the prelude, interlude, and postlude. In the remainder of this
prologue, I provide a little more detail in how this book unfolds.
In part I (‘‘Dramatizing Race’’), I take the initial steps in developing a
critical theological methodology to theorize the modern problem of race. More
specifically, positioned between the work of Cornel West and Michel Foucault,
chapter 1 represents a theological engagement with contemporary critical race
studies. Foucault’s work proves particularly useful to my argument, inasmuch
as his interest in the question of the invention of ‘‘homo sexualis’’ led him to
the question of how it came to pass that the human being was viewed as the
bearer of race and then to the question of what was religious or quasi-theo-
logical about the invention of modern ‘‘man’’ as a racial being. Foucault brings
me to the threshold of an answer to this question, but to actually answer it,
I need to go beyond him. In chapter 2’s analysis of Immanuel Kant’s ra-
cial theory, I establish how theology came to aid and abet—indeed, how as a
 prologue: the argument at a glance 5

discourse it came to provide—the inner architecture of modern racial reason-

ing. I point to how whiteness came to function as a substitute for the Christian
doctrine of creation, thus producing a reality into which all else must enter.
How theology came to underwrite this racial work has everything to do with the
modern quest to sever Christianity from its Jewish roots.
In part I, perhaps more than anywhere else in this book, I am acutely
aware of my argument’s limitations, recognizing where in subsequent re-
search, which I am already hard at work on, it will need further development.
In chapter 1, I engage the work of Cornel West and Michel Foucault as part of
my effort to show that modernity’s racial imagination is religious in nature.
Foucault takes me the farthest here, for he espied the connection between
modernity’s racial imagination and the transformation of Jews into ‘‘semites.’’1
If there is a limitation in Foucault’s thought on this point it is that he knew not
what theological sense to make of the semites’ moment of arising. That is to
say, he inadequately theorized the Jews’ modern-semitic birth. And because
this problem was insufficiently defined as a problem, it remained insufficiently
addressed in his work.
Having come, then, only to the vestibule in chapter 1, in chapter 2 I dare to
enter into the edifice of the problem. It is here that I focus on modern 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 initial, discursive maturity is
realized in the Kantian racial vision, which, as I show in chapter 2, is part and
parcel of Kant’s general, philosophical vision of the social process or political
economy of Enlightenment (Auf klärung). My claim is that this vision of mo-
dernity as the social process of Enlightenment is both a racial vision and a
particular kind of theological vision. Indeed, Enlightenment as Kant envisions
it is the mutual encoding of the racial and the theological so as to yield the
cosmopolitical.
It is worth reiterating that what 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 just about three centuries prior to the
Kantian, essentially Protestant, Enlightenment–racial vision in the late eigh-
teenth century. This earlier moment had a Roman Catholic, essentially South-
ern European, infancy. Constituting a ‘‘dark Atlantic’’ triangulated between
Europe, the west coast of Africa, and the Americas, this colonialist vision is
symbolically positioned and historically datable between 1442, the year the
Portuguese first loaded their vessels with the human cargo of African slaves to
be exported back to Europe, and 1492, the year Christopher Columbus came
upon ‘‘the Indies’’ and commenced his ‘‘India’’ and ‘‘Jerusalem’’ mission and
the conquest of the Americas (with other European competitors soon to follow).2
The Kantian racial-cosmopolitical vision, which was also a theological vision
predicated on the extirpation of Jewish flesh, is unintelligible apart from these
6 prologue: the argument at a glance

prior events. Stated differently, the Kantian outlook is only the discursive ma-
turing of the racial colonialism inaugurated in the mid-to-late fifteenth century.
And again it must be said that in the middle of it all was theological discourse,
mainly of a Thomist–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 too far off, day.
In parts II and III of this book—‘‘Engaging Race’’ and ‘‘Redirecting Race,’’
respectively—I take on the question of what it would mean to think within a
different theological imagination so as to disrupt the racial logic of the modern
body politic. More specifically, chapters 3–5 read the black religious academy in
the dawning moments of its wider acceptance in the modern religious studies
and theological guild in the late 1960s and 1970s as trying to diagnose and
intellectually disrupt the very problem I am going after in part I. This is the
theological problem of race generally and more specifically the problem of
whiteness itself as the core theological problem of our times. In effect, these
chapters consider the black religious academy’s early attempts to religiously
theorize the modern problem of race. But they also consider why the black
religious academy has yet to really plumb the theological depths of modernity’s
racial problematic, the problematic of whiteness as a theological phenomenon
and how theology came to function differently in becoming a racial discourse.
It is the task on the one hand of part III and on the other of the prelude–
interlude–postlude to do just this. Part III does it by providing a theological
reading of four texts that literarily witness to the theological sensibility em-
bodied in New World Afro-Christian faith in antebellum North America:
Briton Hammon’s 1760 Narrative of his life (chapter 6), Frederick Douglass’s
canonical 1845 Narrative (chapter 7), and Jarena Lee’s 1836 and 1849 spiritual
Narrative and Journal (chapter 8). My reading of these texts surfaces the in-
tuitive grasp these writers had into what was theological about the modern
problem of race generally and the theological constitution of whiteness in
particular. Against this false or what at times I call pseudotheological imagi-
nation, these texts struggle to inaugurate a different theological imagination.
The chapters making up part III foreground this theological sensibility and
examine how it was deployed to write the black body out of its modern racial
quandary.
Individually and collectively, these texts reengage the way in which Chris-
tology, that area within the theological curriculum that investigates the person
and work of Jesus the Christ, was problematically deployed to found the
modern racial imagination. For at the genealogical taproot of modern racial
reasoning is the process by which Christ was abstracted from Jesus, and thus
from his Jewish body, thereby severing Christianity from its Jewish roots.
Jewish flesh in this moment underwent a religious conversion: it was con-
 prologue: the argument at a glance 7

verted into racial flesh, positioned within a hierarchy of racial-anthropological

essences, and lodged within a now racialized chain of being. In making Christ
non-Jewish in this moment, he was made a figure of the Occident. He became
white, even if Jesus as a historical figure remained Jewish or racially a figure of
the Orient. Theology’s participation in this process is what makes it modern.
Indeed, theology assisted in bringing about modernity precisely in aiding and
abetting this process.
Though not speaking in the register of theology, Hammon’s, Douglass’s,
and Lee’s narratives are animated by a deep theological imagination, one
that—precisely in moving in the direction of envisioning Jesus as the Christ
and Christ’s flesh as Jewish covenantal flesh and not racial-colonial flesh—
moved to theologically overcome the modern problem of race. In short, the
Christological sensibility at work in the texts I discuss in part III points in the
direction of overcoming the Christian supersessionism that grounds the mod-
ern intellectual and theological imagination. Moreover, insofar as they witness
to currents within New World Afro-Christian faith, these texts point the way
toward reconstituting theology itself as a discourse, a point I strongly press in
the epilogue.
The prelude, interlude, and postlude then point out the degree to which
this early Afro-Christian theological imagination, as discussed in part III, is in
keeping with Christian theological sensibilities that actually predate it and that
predate, one might say, the medieval theological mistake that set in motion the
intellectual and social processes of the racial production of the human. The
prelude explores what was at stake in the second-century struggle by theolo-
gian Irenaeus of Lyons against ancient Valentinian Gnosticism’s denigration
of Christ’s flesh—indeed, its denigration of the material order of creation and
embodiment. His struggle against ancient Gnosticism, I argue, is analogous to
the antebellum Afro-Christian effort, as I isolate it in the aforementioned texts,
to reckon with race generally and with whiteness particularly as theological
problems. Irenaeus’s struggle against the Gnostics’ protoracial outlook pressed
him to reclaim Christ’s humanity as made concrete in his Jewish flesh as a
central feature of both Christian identity and the theological imagination. That
is to say, Irenaeus’s reclamation of Jesus’ Jewish flesh caused him to reimagine
how theology functions as a discourse or as an intellectual enterprise. Herein
lies his significance as an anti-Gnostic intellectual: his theological sensibilities
foreshadow those of the nascent Afro-Christian faith.
I make a similar argument in the interlude in which I consider the fourth-
century theologian Gregory of Nyssa as abolitionist intellectual. His vociferous
and unqualified stance against slavery in any form, a stance that no one else in
antiquity espoused, foreshadows the account of freedom that one finds in the
early Afro-Christian faith and that I delineate in part III of this book. Uniting
the ancient theological abolitionist Gregory of Nyssa and his modern coun-
terparts in New World Afro-Christianity—both in its antebellum variants and,
8 prologue: the argument at a glance

arguably, in the civil rights struggle for freedom that one finds in a figure such
as Martin Luther King Jr.—is the Christological sensibility animating them.
Apart from this sensibility, neither Gregory, nor antebellum Afro-Christian
faith, nor arguably King himself is ultimately intelligible. This Christological
sensibility emphasizes the particularity of Christ’s flesh—which is Jewish
covenantal flesh and not Jewish racial flesh (this distinction, which is quite
important, is clarified in the course of what follows)—as the material horizon
within which creation is ordered toward the God of Abraham. Christ’s flesh,
which is Jewish covenantal flesh, is a taxis, a material arrangement of freedom
that discloses the historical transcendence of God.
Finally, the postlude’s consideration of the seventh-century monk and
Christian intellectual Maximus the Confessor proceeds in a way similar to the
prelude and interlude. Its reading of the Confessor as anticolonialist intellec-
tual shows how his arguments in defense of a Chalcedonian Christological
vision foreshadow the theological critique of race generally and of whiteness in
particular that is embedded in the way in which persons of African descent in
North America embodied the Christian faith. Indeed, by the end of the book
I will have made an argument as to how the theological imagination at work in
the outlook of such early church theologians as Irenaeus, the Nyssan, and the
Confessor and the imagination at work in ‘‘theologians’’ like Hammon,
Douglass, and Lee—yes, my claim is that they were theological subjects every
bit as much as they were literary subjects—are not antithetical imaginations.
Rather, their theological imaginations converge so as to loosen the white grip
on theology as a discourse. (It should already be clear by now, but it is nev-
ertheless worth saying explicitly, that ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘race’’ and even ‘‘black’’ are
in this text not merely signifiers of pigmentation. In other words, their referent
is perhaps only secondarily to color. Rather, they signify a political economy, an
ordo or a social arrangement, what Irenaeus calls an oikonomia. More on this
later.)
This brings me to the other question raised at the beginning of this pro-
logue: Why now? Why is this book on race needed now? It is needed now
because the path that theology entered on to discursively constitute and le-
gitimate the modern racial imaginary has now brought it to a crisis, and that
crisis is this: it is no longer clear that theology is a compelling discourse—
compelling, that is, not for those on its lighter side and thus compelling for its
benefactors, but compelling for those, as one theorist has said, on ‘‘the darker
side of the renaissance’’ and on the ‘‘underside of modernity.’’3 This book is
one theologian’s effort, a denizen himself of the darker underside, to reckon
with theology’s complicity in forging a modern racial imagination and in that
reckoning enact a different kind of theological imagination. The epilogue
to this book, as already noted, presses the question of the future of theology
as a discourse in the twenty-first century. While the issue of how theology as a
discourse functions may upon first consideration be deemed an issue far afield
 prologue: the argument at a glance 9

from the immediate subject of this book, I contend that, in fact, it isn’t. In
probing how the modern racial imagination and the modern theological
imagination mutually articulate each other (and what to do about this), in this
book I raise and attempt to answer a more fundamental question: What kind of
discourse should Christian theology be?
This page intentionally left blank
Prelude on Christology
and Race
Irenaeus as Anti-Gnostic Intellectual

Gnostic writing, when strong, is strong because it is supermimetic,

because it confronts and seeks to overthrow the very strongest of
all texts, the Jewish Bible. That supermimesis is an intolerable bur-
den, whether for literature or for the fallen poetry of theology.
—Harold Bloom, ‘‘Lying against Time:
Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism’’

[The Gnostic] imagines there to be three classes of human beings:

the spiritual, the psychic, and the material, after the fashion of Cain,
Abel, and Seth. It is from these three that the three natures come,
no longer in an individual but in the human race as such.
—Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus haeresus I.7.5

In this prelude, I revisit the intellectual struggle that Irenaeus (c. 125–
200), bishop of Lyons, waged against ancient Gnosticism in his
treatise Against Heresies (Adversus haeresus).1 A reading of this text
reveals that Irenaeus’s struggle with ancient Gnosticism was no mere
intellectual disagreement. It was a struggle tied to the claims that
Christianity and Gnosticism wanted to make about material exis-
tence. Irenaeus understood his struggle against the ancient Gnostic
movement, particularly in its Valentinian–Ptolemaeic variant, as
a struggle over the meaning of the body both individually and as
a sociopolitical arrangement—that is, as tied to or indicative of
the body politic. The Gnostic struggle pushed him to distinguish
Christianity’s way of imagining the body (politic) as tied to Christ’s
flesh from Gnosticism’s vision of the body (politic). Key to Irenaeus’s
12 race: a theological account

negotiation of this difference was how he envisioned the person and work of
Jesus Christ, or his Christology. It is just this issue—Christology as the dis-
cursive site of negotiating the meaning of material existence—that is central to
what immediately follows in this prelude and to the argument in this book
as a whole.
I should quickly say, however, that I do not intend to detail every aspect of
Irenaeus’s critique of Valentinianism, a task that exceeds what can be accom-
plished here without making this a very different book. My inquiry, instead, is
guided by the assistance Irenaeus gives me in coming to theological terms with
a contemporary problem, a problem that was partly within but ultimately far
beyond his own purview. This is the modern problem of imagining the human
being in racial terms, and within these terms positioning whiteness as su-
preme. As a central ideological component in constructing the modern world as
we have come to know it, the racial imagination arose inside of, nurtured itself
on, and even camouflaged itself within the discourse of theology. That is, it
articulated itself in a Christian theological idiom.
While Irenaeus knew neither of the modern problem of race nor of its
deeper animating problem—the modern theological problem of white cultural
supremacy—he did know of another similar problem. Historian of early
Christianity Denise Buell has called this the problem and polemic of ‘‘ethnic
reasoning in early Christianity.’’ By this she refers to
the modes of persuasion [employed by early Christians] that may or
may not include the use of specific vocabulary of peoplehood. Early
Christians used ethnic reasoning to legitimize various forms of
Christianness as the universal, most authentic manifestation of hu-
manity, and it offered Christians both a way to define themselves
relative to ‘‘outsiders’’ and to compete with other ‘‘insiders’’ to assert
the superiority of their varying visions of Christianness.2
This passage beautifully captures Irenaeus’s critique of the Gnostics as
‘‘[imagining] there to be three classes of human beings: the spiritual, the
psychic, and the material, after the fashion of Cain, Abel, and Seth.’’ He tells us
that ‘‘it is from these three that [the Gnostics understand] the three natures [to]
come [ek toutôn tas treis phuseis], no longer [merely] in an individual [hena] but
in the human race as such [kata genos]’’ (AH-G I.7.5; SC I.2.110). In Buell’s
terms, Irenaeus is criticizing a form of ‘‘ethnic reasoning’’ that had come to
function inside Christian discourse and identity to construct both outsiders to
Christianity (i.e., the hylics, or materialists) and outsiders who are yet inside
Christianity (i.e., the psychics, who were lesser Christians—if Christian at all—
because they still thought of their identity in relationship to Israel).
Buell’s analysis is quite helpful to the argument I formulate here, for she
grasps that there is a connection between the racial–ethnic and the religious
imagination. She sees, in other words, that they articulate each other. But be-
 prelude on christology and race 13

yond Buell, I seek to provide an account of what was at stake for a person such as
Irenaeus in theologically breaking this connection so as to reimagine what kind
of people Christians (in continuity with the covenantal people of Israel) are and
what remains at stake on this side of modernity in all of this. It will thus be
necessary to surface the ongoing theological and nonsupersessionist connection
between Christianity and its Jewish roots that is the precondition of Irenaeus’s
Christological response to ancient Gnosticism. The lifeblood of ancient Gnosis,
insofar as it was a movement within Christianity, was its supersessionism. As
Harold Bloom has said, in being ‘‘supermimetic’’ the Gnostics sought ‘‘to
overthrow the very strongest of all texts, the Jewish Bible.’’3 This prelude engages
Irenaeus’s critique of and response to Valentinianism in such a way as to show
how his diagnosis of the Valentinian approach to knowing reality (Gnosis)—
indeed, to knowing the human in multiple natures—provides a way of similarly
diagnosing how modern racial discourse generally and whiteness in particular
(as the point from which to organize and ‘‘know’’ the world) was born within and
subsequently functioned inside the discourse of theology, thus making theology
in the modern setting, certainly from the perspective of the subaltern of the
colonized and enslaved, a discourse of racial–colonial death.
In this respect, the argument presented here sets up the arguments de-
veloped in parts I and II of this book. Of equal importance is Irenaeus’s
theological response to Valentinianism, a response in which he articulates one
of the most important pre-Nicene accounts of the person and work of Christ,
an account that stressed the ongoing significance of Christ’s flesh in the work
of redemption and in constituting Christian identity. This response is nothing
less than Irenaeus’s attempt to reclaim theology as a life-giving discourse by
distinguishing and separating it from the Gnosticism that had come to infect
it. But even more, Irenaeus’s theological claim goes far in making theological,
and not merely historical and cultural, sense of the emergence of New World
Afro-Christian faith. This becomes evident in part III, where I show how the
reception of Christianity by New World persons of African descent and the
particular way they embodied or performed the Christian faith had embedded
in it a theological response to the modern problem of race generally and the
problem of whiteness in particular. I argue that, indeed, their reception and
embodiment of Christianity constitutes a redirecting and restorative moment
for modern Christian theology.
I first take up Irenaeus’s analysis of ancient Gnosis, providing an overview
of his account of Gnostic cosmology, anthropology, and exegesis, and arguing
that they function together with a view to oust all things Jewish from the
Christian imagination. My claim is that this concerted effort to overcome Ju-
daism is what binds the racial imagination at work in the forms and systems of
thought marking modernity and the anthropological imagination at work in
the forms and systems of thought marking the ancient Gnostic movements.
I then turn to the Christology Irenaeus works out in response to the Gnostic
14 race: a theological account

problem, a Christology that makes the Jewish, covenantal flesh of the redeemer
Jesus of Nazareth the locus from which to understand all created reality in
relationship to YHWH, its Triune Creator. His flesh discloses the invisible
Father and is that to which the Holy Spirit points and unites creation. The
many as constituted across space and time and that is constitutive of the
created order are ‘‘recapitulated’’ in Christ, Irenaeus declares, who in his flesh
is one with the invisible God. This term ‘‘recapitulation’’ will prove quite im-
portant, and so I give it due attention.
While the reader’s patience is required early on as I outline Irenaeus’s
account of the Ptolemaeic–Valentinian system with its seemingly endless pro-
liferation of deities, its winding narrative of their interactions, and, impor-
tantly, the fallout of those interactions—the chief one being the creation of the
material order—my aim throughout is clear. It is first to present Irenaeus’s
account of ancient Gnosticism with a view to the insight it provides in diag-
nosing the modern racial imagination. And on this score, what is crucial about
ancient Gnosticism is the anthropology embedded in it. But second, my aim is
to critically take up Irenaeus’s theological vision of human existence as bound
to Christ’s covenantal flesh, a vision he formulates in response to ancient
Gnosticism. Again, my interest here is guided by my contemporary concern:
namely, the extent to which his intellectual vision can assist me in reimagining
Christian theological discourse as disrupting strong narratives of identity such
as the proto-‘‘racial’’ one the ‘‘Christian’’ Gnostics of old proposed, as well as
the neo-Gnostic one of modern racial practice and discourse. With these two
objectives in view, this prelude seeks ultimately to be prolegomena to the larger
arguments to follow in the rest of the book.

Irenaeus’s Account of Ancient Gnosticism

After a brief but important preface that announces the overall purpose of
Adversus haeresus, Irenaeus immediately launches into an analysis of the ver-
sion of Gnosticism advanced by Ptolemaeus, the version of Gnosticism he had
the most intimate knowledge of. It was Ptolemaeus’s doctrine and that of his
followers that had in some sense systematized Valentinianism. Thus Irenaeus
calls it ‘‘the flower of the school of Valentinus’’ (AH-G, Preface, 2). He might
have ignored the rapid growth of this ‘‘flower’’ were it not for the fact that its
spread was not just among Christians and others in Rome. But spreading
further west, the Gnostics were winning significant converts within the Chris-
tian community of Lyons, the community that Irenaeus as bishop and pastor
was ordained to care for. It was this pastoral problem of the Gnostics’ distortion
of Christian identity and their dependence on Christian forms of thought and
theological ideas to do so that catalyzed Irenaeus to outline and refute the
Ptolemaeic–Valentinian system of ‘‘knowledge.’’
 prelude on christology and race 15

Irenaeus’s analysis of the system takes place primarily in AH I.1–8 and

may be divided into three aspects. First, there is his account of the dramatic
struggle within the ‘‘Pleroma’’—that is, inside the heavenly world (AH I.1–3).
This drama, which is internal to the heavenly world or, one might say, internal
to the divine life itself, leads to a fall of some of the deities into a lesser realm
outside the Pleroma. These gods struggle (some successfully, some not so
successfully) to make their way back to the higher realm and thus to be saved.
The second aspect of the Gnostic–Ptolemaeic system, described in AH I.4–5,
accounts for life in the lesser domain outside the Pleroma. This lesser but still
quasi-divine realm is the ‘‘Kenoma,’’ or Void. Finally, AH I.6–8 details the
Gnostic account of salvation. It is in this third aspect of the Gnostic system that
Irenaeus outlines the Ptolemaeic narrative of return to the Pleroma from the
Kenoma as a narrative of salvation. It is also in this section that Irenaeus takes
up the Gnostic account of the ‘‘Cosmos,’’ that material domain below the
Kenoma. What I hope to make clear is how the prototypical drama, the ur-
drama, of redemption that takes place between the Gnostic Pleroma—popu-
lated as it is with numerous deities, some unfallen and others fallen and thus
seeking ‘‘salvation’’—and the Kenoma interfaces with a material drama staged
in the Cosmos. This latter, material world is also well populated, but with
people who have all hitched themselves to certain gods, some of whom rep-
resent paths to salvation or return to the Pleroma, others of whom do not.
As I flesh out these three interlocking dimensions of the Gnostic my-
thology, keep in mind the following points, for they are the concerns guiding
my analysis. My ultimate interests are (1) the anthropology embedded in the
Gnostic drama of redemption, (2) the bifurcation of the Christ of (Gnostic)
faith (or the heavenly Christ of the Pleroma) from the Jesus of history in the
Gnostic system and thus the ‘‘Christology’’ at work in Gnosticism, and (3) the
function of scriptural exegesis to sustain the Gnostic outlook. It will turn out
that the problems I isolate here with respect to ancient Gnosticism have an
analogue in how the modern neo-Gnosticism of racial discourse and practice
work. I start with Irenaeus’s analysis of Gnostic cosmology as a kind of ur-
drama of human identity.4

Gnostic Cosmology and the Urdrama of Human Identity

In the invisible and unnameable heights there was a perfect Aeon,
prior to all. This Aeon is called Pre-Beginning and Pre-Father and
Abyss. Since he was incomprehensible and invisible, eternal and
unbegotten, he was in silence and in rest for unlimited ages. With
him was Thought, also called Grace and Silence. When this Abyss
wanted to emit a Beginning of all, he set it like a seed in the womb of
his companion Silence. When she received the seed she became
pregnant and generated Mind, similar and equal to the one who
16 race: a theological account

emitted him, alone comprehending the greatness of the Father. This

Mind they call Only-Begotten and Father and Beginning of all; with
him was emitted Truth, to compose the first and primary, indeed
Pythagorean Tetrad: Abyss and Silence, the Mind and Truth.
(AH-G I.1.1)

So begins Irenaeus’s analysis of Gnostic cosmology, which purports to have

transcended the Jewish-Christian scriptural story of creation by having un-
covered its deeper meaning. Thus, if the Genesis stories start with the words
‘‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’’ then the Gnostic
myth wants to locate the true beginning to which the scriptural words point.
This true beginning is the archaic moment of the Pre-Beginning, from
which all subsequent beginnings spring, even the beginning of the book of
Genesis. Pre-Beginning–Pre-Father–Abyss implanted a beginning of all things
in his partner, Thought–Grace–Silence, the firstborn of which was Mind–Only-
Begotten–Beginning of all. (That this is refracted through gender and sexuality
is undeniable.) But he was not born alone. With Mind was born Truth. Thus,
there was the first ‘‘Tetrad,’’ as Irenaeus calls it, of Pre-Father (male)–Silence
(female) on the one hand and their offspring Mind (male)–Truth (female) on
the other. But like Pre-Father, Mind (Only-Begotten), ‘‘sensing the purpose for
which he was emitted,’’ was himself also productive, emitting a seed within
Truth. This union between Mind and Truth brought forth ‘‘Logos and Life,
Father of all later than himself, and the Beginning and Formation of the
Pleroma’’ (AH-G I.1.1). In turn, Logos and Life produced another pair, ‘‘Man
and Church.’’ These are the first eight emanations, the ‘‘Ogdoad,’’ that emerged
from Pre-Beginning and Silence. But the productions continue. Logos and Life,
according to the Gnostic myth, produce ten more Aeons or Ages, bringing the
number to eighteen, while Man and Church emit twelve Ages of their own.
With the thirty Ages in place, life within the heavenly realm of the Pleroma was
complete, though in fact it was only the completion of Act I, one might say, of
the story. The drama was only just beginning, for in many respects this is all
background to introduce what every good story must have: tension and plot
twist. Centered on the character Sophia (or Wisdom), Act II as I call it of
Irenaeus’s telling of the Gnostic saga introduces this tension.
As the last of the emissions, she—yes, Sophia is female in the myth—is
farthest and most tragically removed from the Abyss or Pre-Beginning. In this
part of Irenaeus’s telling of the story, we learn that Sophia’s tragic distance
from the ground of her being, that is, from the Pre-Beginning, which really is
very much a gendered distance between male and female, leads to her fall, a fall
with the heavenly realm. But because Ages have offspring, this is no less the
case for Sophia. It is just that now her production is what can be called a
‘‘wayward reproduction.’’5 She will produce or ‘‘create’’ the material, worldly
realm that human beings—further products of this fall—populate. As ‘‘weak
 prelude on christology and race 17

and female,’’ since they result from the uncontrollable passions of the woman
Sophia, creation in general and human existence in particular are the products
of Sophia’s wayward passion, her fall (AH-G I.2.4).
If Sophia was to undergo conversion and be redeemed from her fallen
condition, her wayward, inner Desire, which is personified as ‘‘Achamoth,’’
would need to be restored or healed (AH I.4.1). Not only would this be Sophia’s
salvation, it would also reestablish the integrity of the Pleroma itself. It is just at
this point that Gnostic saga, taking place on the heavenly plane of the Pleroma,
begins to approximate the Christian story. It shows itself to be parasitic on it.
Indeed, it is this dimension of the story—we can call it Act III or the Gnostic
story of redemption—that will play itself out again on the plane of material
existence and will become the ground in the Gnostic story for explaining the
different ‘‘classes’’ or the three different ‘‘natures’’ of human being.
The central characters in Act III are ‘‘Limit’’ (also called Cross), the Christ
of the Pleroma (or the heavenly Christ), whose partner is the Holy Spirit of the
Pleroma (or the heavenly Holy Spirit), and the offspring of the heavenly Christ
and Holy Spirit, the heavenly Jesus. These are the characters central to So-
phia’s redemption and the redemption or realignment of her Desire (Acha-
moth). As far as Sophia is concerned, her redemption comes about because her
wayward Desire is banished to another realm, the Kenoma (Void). Her Desire
is crucified by Limit, that is to say, by the Cross. Thus Wisdom or part of the
feminine is restored. But what about the other part of the feminine, Desire
itself or what the Gnostics personified as Achamoth? How is she healed and
therefore redeemed?
Here is where the story of material existence and within this story that of
the three ‘‘classes’’ or natures of human beings formally begins, the part that
everything that I have said so far has been leading to. For it is here that
Irenaeus outlines how the heavenly Christ and Holy Spirit work to redeem
Desire. And yet, it is just at this point as well that one sees how, according to
Irenaeus’s theological analysis, the Gnostic drama of the redemption of the
Pleroma through the redemption of Sophia–Desire is in fact an urdrama that
all along has been encoding another drama, the drama of human identity,
which entails the policing of materiality (or, more specifically, the policing of
bodies) in the interest of the liberation or salvation of Desire. In short, it is at
this point that Irenaeus wants to show how the urdrama of the Gnostic gods
encodes a drama of human redemption. The hinge between the two dramas is
the liberation of Desire from its bondage to the body or to matter. Moreover,
the entire drama in both its heavenly and earthly dimensions is an interpre-
tation of Scripture. Indeed, it is a deployment of scripture in the production of
human identity. The identity generating this hermeneutical exercise is an
explanation and, further, a justification of what the Gnostics took to be the
various ‘‘natures’’ and classes of human being. I now move to how Irenaeus
interpreted the Ptolemaeic Gnostics on these matters.
18 race: a theological account

The Three Substances and Three Species of Humanity:

The Gnostic Drama of Redemption
Irenaeus provides much detail regarding the Gnostic story of the redemption
of Desire. For my purposes, what is important is this: Desire’s salvation re-
quires separating out those passions embedded in her that are either wholly
unredeemable or, with effort, are partially redeemable from those passions that
reflect Desire’s true spiritual essence and thus, properly speaking, are of the
Pleroma. The Gnostics represented these three aspects of Desire’s passions as
three distinct substances. The passions that are bad and thus utterly unre-
deemable were banished from Desire altogether to form the material, or hylic,
substance. The passions that with some work could be converted formed the
second substance, which is passible, or psychic, in nature. And last, the pas-
sions that reflect Desire’s true origin in the Pleroma constitute the final, su-
perior substance, which is spiritual in nature.
But how, more specifically, did the creation of a Cosmos occur from all of
this? Desire partnered with a ‘‘Demiurge,’’ who it turns out is the God of the
Old Testament, the God of Israel. Israel’s God is the one who actually crafted
the material world of the Cosmos from the hylic substance. This is how those
wayward and utterly unredeemable passions were banished from Desire.
Moreover, it was the Demiurge, or Israel’s God, who also formed the earthly
man from the cosmic (hylic) substance. Upon forming him, he breathed into
him a psychic element. But the psychic element does not take hold in everyone.
Those in whom it takes hold are the psychics. Thus, on the one hand there is
the psychic man, who can turn either downward toward matter or upward
toward spirit and who is capable of education. And on the other hand there is
the hylic man, who being wholly from the earth remains corruptible, unedu-
cable, and thus thoroughly constrained by the body, weighed down by the
baseness of the flesh and of material existence.
But there is something else to bear in mind: when the Demiurge breathed
out the psychic element, unbeknownst to him he secretly breathed out and
implanted in a select few a pneumatic, or spiritual, element. This element is the
spark from the Pleroma, the possession of which constitutes this other class as
the true elect or illuminati. As another class or species of human being alto-
gether, these special, pneumatic persons are of the spiritual substance of the
Pleroma itself. This is the ground of their existence, not the Demiurge. As far as
their existence is concerned, the Creator God of Israel is bypassed altogether,
and so the pneumatic are untainted or constrained by the material reality
below.
Hence, the three substances of Desire—the pneumatic element, which is
consubstantial with Desire herself; the psychic element from Desire’s educated
and converted passions; and the hylic element from her uneducable and thus
 prelude on christology and race 19

unredeemable passions, Achamoth’s ‘‘sublime waste,’’ so to speak—are tied to

the three species of humankind, two of whom are under the control of the God
of Israel, the Creator Demiurge, and the other under the pneumatic superin-
tendence of Achamoth, or Desire, in her purity and thus under the guidance of
the Pleroma itself.6 This latter class or race, who have a pneumatic nature,
make up the true church of the elect (the Gnostics), of which the Christian
church and the people of Israel are but vague, distant, and inferior represen-
tations. Irenaeus summarizes the Gnostics’ claim this way:
Thus it came to pass, then, according to them, that, without any
knowledge on the part of the Demiurge, the man formed by his
inspiration was at the same time, through an unspeakable provi-
dence, rendered a spiritual man by the simultaneous inspiration re-
ceived from his Sophia. For, as he was ignorant of his mother, so
neither did he recognize her offspring. This (offspring) they also
declare to be the Ecclesia, an emblem of the Ecclesia which is above.
This, then, is the kind of man whom they conceive of: he has his
animal [or psychic] soul from the Demiurge, his body from the earth,
his fleshly part from matter, and his spiritual man (ton . . .
pneumatikon anthrôpon) from the mother Achamoth. (AH-A I.5.6;
SC I.2.89–90)
Herein is displayed the convergence of Gnostic anthropogony (their doctrine of
the heavenly ‘‘man’’) and anthropology (their doctrine of the earthly ‘‘man’’).
Herein also lies the significance of the Christ of the Gospels, for it is partic-
ularly with respect to him, understood within the terms of Gnostic religious
and theological principles, that one sees the mirroring between anthropogony
and anthropology.
The point at which the mirroring happens is salvation. The salvation of
Sophia or her subjugation to the Limit of the Cross and her taking on of a
pneumatic, rather than a merely psychic or material, form in this moment is the
more fundamental story, according to the Gnostics, being narrated in the story
of the Christ of the Gospels and the saga of the Cross. One might say that the
four elements composing the earthly Christ—none of which, it must be noted,
is actual flesh since the hylic substance (or materiality) as such cannot be
redeemed in the Gnostic system—also reveal the heavenly Cross and its power
to banish unredeemable, material passions. One could go as far as to say that,
for the Gnostics, untoward passion is matter or body, and it is just this that is
subjected to the Limit of the Cross. Thus, the first element composing the
earthly Christ is directly from Desire in her fallen state. This element ties the
earthly Christ to that middle, quasi-divine realm of the Void. The second ele-
ment is psychic and comes from the Demiurge. The third comes from the
divine plan, the ‘‘economy.’’ And the fourth, which doesn’t quite get a name, is
20 race: a theological account

from the heavenly Savior himself. This element ties the earthly Christ to the
heavenly Christ and thus directly to the Pleroma. Christ’s sufferings take place
with respect only to the second and third elements or the psychic and material
aspects of his existence (AH I.7.2), for this is where the psychics struggle against
the passions of material existence in order to obtain salvation. In struggling
against the passions, the psychics are in fact struggling against the Demiurge
(or Israel’s God), who mired them in material existence in the first place.
As for Achamoth (or Desire herself), who is of a pneumatic constitution,
and for the pneumatic race of humans, they will enter the Pleroma. Desire will
be restored to Wisdom (Sophia), and the pneumatics will also enter the
pleromatic heavens. Such is their eschatological destiny. And finally, those
psychics (who give in to their passions, thus remaining trapped in material
existence and weighed down by the body) and the hylics (who have no hope of
transcending themselves and aspiring toward supramaterial existence) will go
the way of all matter: they will undergo the fires of apocalyptic destruction (AH
I.7.5). The material Cosmos will perish, and they along with it. Such is Ir-
enaeus’s account of the Gnostic myth, which when all is said and done is
deeply concerned as he interprets their mythology with anthropology and the
justification of a superior ‘‘race’’ inside the discourse of Christian theology. A
version of this problem will resurge in modern racial discourse and practice, as
I show in part I of this volume.

Beyond the God of Israel: Gnostic Exegesis

Having outlined in the first seven chapters of AH the Gnostic mythology and
the deeper, problematic anthropology embedded in it—what can be called an
anthropology of hierarchical essences—Irenaeus then forcefully argues
against it, claiming that at its root is an exegetical practice that must be
countered. The problem of Gnosticism is the problem of its scriptural exege-
sis.7 Irenaeus therefore embarks on a counterexegetical practice of human
existence, a different deployment of scriptural interpretation. While in what
immediately follows I detail the Irenaean counterexegetical practice, more
important, I am ultimately gesturing toward the constructive theological claims
I make in the rest of this book: namely, that a problematic exegetical practice is
also at the heart of modern racial discourse (as it was in ancient Gnosticism).
Early Afro-Christian practice, in which for some writers autobiography func-
tioned as scriptural exegesis, proved in fact to be a quite appropriate response to
the scripturalizing practice undergirding modernity and its slave economy. This
early Afro-Christian exegetical practice countered the particular kind of prac-
tice of theological interpretation—for all theological interpretation is not
alike—at the heart of modern racial reasoning. This particular kind of practice
of theological interpretation is what sustained whiteness at the level of its inner
architecture and the racial identities (including blackness) that whiteness
 prelude on christology and race 21

generated. Thus, the theological imagination at work in early Afro-Christian

existence (as witnessed in the texts I consider in part III) strove to disrupt the
problematic way scriptural exegesis has come to function in constructing and
regulating the body (politic).
But to return to Irenaeus: he signals as early as the preface to book I of
Adversus haeresus that his qualm with the ancient Gnostics turned on the
relationship between scriptural exegesis and Gnostic, pseudo-Christian belief.
‘‘Some persons reject the truth,’’ he says,
and introduce false statements and ‘‘endless genealogies, which
provide questions,’’ as the Apostle says, ‘‘rather than the divine
training that is in faith’’ (1 Tim. 1:4). They combine plausibility with
fraud and lead the mind of the inexperienced astray and force them
into captivity. They falsify the words of the Lord and make themselves
bad interpreters of what was well said. (AH-G Preface, 1)
The problem of Gnostic scriptural exegesis surfaces again near the end of his
analysis of their system of belief:
Such is their doctrine, which the prophets did not proclaim, the Lord
did not teach, and the apostles did not transmit. They boast that they
have known it more abundantly than anyone else. While citing texts
from unwritten sources and venturing to weave the proverbial ropes
out of sand, they try to adjust, in agreement with their statements,
sometimes parables of the Lord, sometimes prophetic sayings, and
sometimes apostolic words, so that their fiction may not seem
without witness. They contradict the order and continuity of the
scriptures and, as best they can, dissolve the members of the truth.
They transfer and transform, making one thing out of another, and
thus lead many astray by the badly constructed phantom that they
make out of the Lord’s words they adjust. (AH-G I.8.1)
Thus, the problem of scriptural exegesis bookends Irenaeus’s analysis of an-
cient Gnosis.
After analyzing their system, Irenaeus spends the next four sections of the
chapter providing examples of how Gnostic exegesis works: how, as he says,
they ‘‘patch together old wives’ fables, and then endeavor, by violently drawing
away from their proper connection, words, expressions, and parables whenever
found, to adapt the oracles of God to their baseless fictions’’ (AH-G I.8.1). I need
not recount his examples. It is the point of the examples that bears high-
lighting, inasmuch as they illustrate a problem that is deeply connected to
modern racial practice and discourse as it emerged inside the discourse of
Christian theology in the formation of the modern world. That point is this:
Gnostic exegesis did not function to reconstitute the identity of scriptural
readers. It neither drew them into the scriptural witness to Jesus nor drew
22 race: a theological account

them out of the Gnostic ‘‘racial’’ narrative of the supposed superiority of

pneumatic over psychic and hylic peoples. (Part of Irenaeus’s own constructive
task was to establish the fictiveness of these very anthropological distinctions,
as well to undo the class sensibilities at work in them.8) Rather, Gnostic exe-
gesis functioned in justification of these religious-‘‘racial’’ distinctions that
were made to function almost imperceptibly inside theological discourse. It did
not transform identity; it affirmed them in it.
Gnostic exegesis did two things so as to function theologically in this way.
First, it situated an interpretation of any given scriptural text on one of three
possible levels of mythic history, which correspond to one of the three classes
of human being. A given interpretation would be situated either at the highest
level of the Pleroma and then linked to the pneumatics, or at the middle level of
the Kenoma and allocated to the psychics, or at the lowest level of the material
Cosmos and tied to the fleshly hylics.9 But second, Gnostic exegesis operated
by a deeper hermeneutic principle: the severing of Christianity from its Jewish
roots. In decoupling Christianity from YHWH the Abrahamic God, the
Gnostics were able to reimagine Christian identity in protoracial terms, terms
that supported the supremacy of the pneumatics (or Gnostics) over the other
species of humankind. Indeed, if Elaine Pagels is correct, the Gnostics seized
on the Pauline doctrine of election in order to rewrite it in Gnostic terms. So
construed, Paul’s concern was not with YHWH’s irrevocable promises to Israel
as the people of his covenant and, in this way, for creation as a whole and in all
of it particularities. Instead, his concern, the Gnostics contended, was over the
election of the true, pneumatic Christians—that is, the Gnostics.10 They are a
‘‘new’’ Israel—the true church beyond Israel, the gathering of pneumatics who
are an image of the nonmaterial ‘‘Ecclesia’’ (one of the many Ages that I did not
examine in detail earlier) of the Pleroma.
It is just this dual problem—that of exegesis functioning to support rather
than disrupt the logic of Gnostic ‘‘racial’’ reasoning and the problem of a vision
of Christianity as severed from Judaism and thus from the God of Israel whom
Jesus of Nazareth reveals—that Irenaeus, having diagnosed, sought to theo-
logically move beyond. His crucial move against it is to insist, on the one hand,
on the actual fleshly, material existence of Christ for disclosing God in his
unified identity as Creator–Redeemer and, on the other, on the unique mo-
dality of Christ’s covenantal flesh in the unified divine economy (oikonomia) of
creation–redemption. Irenaeus insisted that Christ’s flesh disrupts an an-
thropological hierarchy of essences precisely in being tied to the history of
Israel and thus to the history of God’s dealings with this people. In other words,
Irenaeus sees Jewish covenantal flesh functioning unlike flesh interpreted in
terms of ontological or even cultural essences. The flesh of the covenant is not
situated within, nor does it inaugurate, an anthropological chain of being.
This is what makes Irenaeus a figure worthy of contemporary engagement
and not one of mere antiquarian interest. He thinks within a theological
 prelude on christology and race 23

imagination suited to diagnosing how modern racial discourse generally and

how whiteness in particular functions. It is suited to diagnosing how in the
dawning moments of the modern world and in its initial moments of philo-
sophical maturity, particularly in late-eighteenth-century Kantian thought—I
explore this in chapter 2—racial discourse came to function inside Christian
theological discourse to constitute the modern world as we have come to know
it. Irenaeus imagines Christ’s covenantal flesh as disrupting the substantialist
hierarchy of cosmological and anthropological essences that marked Ptole-
maeic–Gnostic thought. Irenaeus’s goal was not simply to defeat the Gnostic
argument. His larger goal was to rescue theological discourse from what in
Gnostic hands it was becoming: a discourse of death, the death of embodied
life. While bearing on all, this vision of the death of materiality bore out in the
most deleterious ways on nonpneumatic bodies. I am trying to do something
similar to what Irenaeus is doing, albeit from this side of modernity—and with
all that is entailed in this. But for now, I tarry a little longer with Irenaeus, for
there is more that I want to highlight about what he was doing as I move closer
to a direct engagement of the modern problem of race as a theological problem.
His effort to redirect Christian theology beyond the Gnostic sensibilities that
had come to operate within it falls within the purview of his Christology. To this
I now give brief attention.

Irenaeus’s Response to Ancient Gnosticism: Christ’s Covenantal

Flesh and the Notion of Recapitulation

Irenaeus gives a condensed, initial response to Gnosticism in AH I.9, a re-

sponse that he unpacks at various points throughout the five books making up
the treatise. I have already noted that of central importance for him is Christ’s
flesh in the economy of redemption. Christ did not assume a ‘‘psychic body’’
but a material one (AH-A I.9.3). Moreover, Irenaeus’s insistence on the cen-
trality of Christ’s flesh is tied to his effort to engage in a different kind of
exegetical practice, one that responds to the way in which, as Cyril O’Regan has
said, ‘‘Valentinian narratives encompass the biblical narrative and completely
disfigure and refigure it.’’11 Irenaeus wants to expose this. Thus he says,
According to them the Word did not originally become flesh. For they
maintain the Savior assumed a psychic body, formed in accordance
with a special dispensation by an unspeakable providence, so as to
become visible and palpable. But flesh is that which was of old formed
for Adam by God out of the dust, and it is this that John [the gospel
writer] has declared the Word of God became. (AH I.93)
What he wants to do is offer a counterexegesis of the very scriptural texts
the Gnostics drew on to make their claims regarding the hierarchy of
24 race: a theological account

anthropological essences and the supremacy of those of a pneumatic nature

within the hierarchy. Thus, Irenaean counterexegesis seeks both to refigure the
Gnostics’ prior disfiguring and refiguring of biblical narrative and to provide a
different narrative, a counterexegesis, of the self. Inasmuch as this is the case,
Irenaeus’s theological and exegetical imagination prefigures the theological
imagination and exegetical practice at work in the dawning moments of New
World Afro-Christian faith in responding to modern racial practice and dis-
course. (This I take up in part III, paying attention especially to Afro-Christian
faith in antebellum North America.)
Irenaeus made two claims regarding Christ’s flesh in theologically re-
sponding to ancient Gnosticism, claims that are important for the argument I
develop throughout this book. Both are at work in the following passage in
which Irenaeus once again marks a line between the claims of Gnosticism and
those of Christian theology. The Gnostics, he says,
wander from the truth, because their teaching departs from Him who
is truly God. They do not know that His only begotten Logos, who is
always present with the human race, united to and mingled with His
own creation, according to the Father’s pleasure, and who became
flesh, is Himself Jesus Christ our Lord, who did also suffer for us,
and rose again on our behalf, and who will come again in the glory
of His Father, to raise up all flesh, and for the manifestation of
salvation . . . . There is therefore, as I have pointed out, one God the
Father, and one Christ Jesus, who is coming throughout the whole
economy [ho elthôn kath holên tên oikonimian], recapitulating all
things in Himself [kai ta panta eis heauton anakephalaiôsamenos]. But
in every respect too He is man, the formation of God; and thus He
took up man into Himself, the invisible becoming visible, the in-
comprehensible becoming comprehensible, the impassible becoming
capable of suffering, and the Word becoming man, thus recapitu-
lating all things in Himself. This was so that just as in super-celestial,
spiritual, and invisible things, the Word of God is supreme, so also in
things visible and corporeal [the Word of God] might possess the
supremacy, and, taking to Himself the preeminence, as well as con-
stituting Himself Head of the Church, He might draw all things to
Himself at the proper time. (AH-A III.16.6 [trans. slightly modified];
SC III.2.313)
The first thing Irenaeus argues against the Gnostics is the unity between
Christ as God and the flesh of the man Jesus that is assumed. In arguing this
way, he distinguishes his claims from ‘‘these blasphemous systems’’ that
‘‘divide the Lord, so far as they are able to do, saying that he was formed of two
different substances [the pneumatic and the psychic], but not the hylic [or
material]’’ (AH-A III.16.5). It is in his flesh that the invisible and the visible
 prelude on christology and race 25

come together, for with respect to God, there is no opposition between the
divine or the invisible and the material or the visible, between the uncreated
and the created. Indeed, Irenaeus argues God’s difference from creation must
be understood in light of the distinction already at work in the way in which
God is God. God’s positive relationship to creation occurs inside God’s positive
relationship to himself as God. It is this positive relationship that is on display
in the invisible Father’s electing love for the eternal Son as the one who renders
visible the invisible Father. Thus the dynamism between the visible and the
invisible constitutes God’s way of being God, the divine aesthetic.
Moreover, the visibility by which the Son renders visible the invisible Fa-
ther extends to the act of creation itself, which takes place through the Son.
Therefore, creation itself and the many making it up exist through the visibility
by which the Son of the Trinity discloses the invisible God. Creation partici-
pates in the Son’s work of making the Father visible. In the Son, they are icons,
or images, of God and thus are marked with an invisible depth that exceeds
what appears, though that invisible depth articulates itself precisely in what
appears. In this strict sense, then, creation—contrary to the claims of the
Gnostics—does not exist ‘‘outside’’ of God in a region beyond the Pleroma. In
fact, the notion of a Pleroma set over against a Kenoma and a Cosmos is in-
sufficient to account for the relationship between God and creation, for creation
exists in the deepest intimacy with, even as it remains distinct from, God.
Moreover, this very intimacy is an intimacy—and this is Irenaeus’s point—that
occurs inside the Father’s love for the eternal Son who makes the Father visible
even in the Son’s materiality: that is, in his flesh in the economy of creation–
redemption.
Thus, though the Father’s love is uniquely directed toward the Son in the
Holy Spirit and therefore in this regard is exclusive, the Father’s love is not
exclusionary. It entails within it the capacity to love and create—the two finally
are synonymous for Irenaeus—and to love what is created. But loving what is
created entails the capacity on God’s part to ‘‘mingle’’ himself, as Irenaeus puts
it, with creation, all the while as Creator maintaining his distinction—in-
asmuch as love presumes distinction—from the creation. The site from which
God as Creator mingles with creation yet maintains his distinction from cre-
ation is Christ’s flesh. It is with creation and the flesh of material existence that
the invisible Father communes in loving the visible Son in the economy of cre-
ation and redemption. In arguing thus, Irenaeus comes up against the too
simplistic Gnostic notion that there is an opposition for God between the
immaterial and the material, between the divinity and humanity. By contrast,
he argues for their unity-in-distinction, which enables the human, and thus
fleshly, material existence to reveal God’s divine or supramaterial existence.
The important point here is that there is no accessing the divine or the su-
pramaterial apart from its revelation, and thus mediation, in the materiality of
creation and the flesh. It is just this point that will be affirmed in the heat of the
26 race: a theological account

Christological controversies leading to Chalecedon in 451 ce and that will be

championed by no less a Christologian than Maximus the Confessor (see the
postlude of this book): the one and the same Jesus Christ is the singular
embodiment of what it means to be divine and human.
But there is a crucial second move Irenaeus makes and that for the most
part the Christian theological traditions after Irenaeus do not develop. It
concerns the unique modality of Christ’s flesh in how it discloses God. To
account for this, Irenaeus turns to the Pauline notion of ‘‘recapitulation,’’ a
notion that, in fact, is not limited to Paul but that Irenaeus finds throughout
Scripture (specifically in Paul though; e.g., Rom. 13:9; Eph. 1:10). ‘‘There is,’’
Irenaeus says, ‘‘one God . . . and . . . one Christ Jesus our Lord, who is coming
throughout the whole economy, recapitulating all things in himself . . . . The
Word [became] man the Word, thus recapitulating all things in himself’’ (AH-
A III.16.6). John Behr observes that ‘‘recapitulation’’ (anakephalaiôsis) de-
scribes for Irenaeus the relationship between the Scriptures of the Old Tes-
tament and the Gospels of the New, as both are held together through the
events of Christ’s flesh as those events culminate with the cross: ‘‘Re-
capitulation summarizes the whole [of a] case, presenting [a restatement of it]
in epitome, bringing together the whole argument in one conspectus, so that,
while the particular details made little impact [alone], the picture as a whole
might be more forceful. Recapitulation provides a résumé which, because
shorter, is clearer and therefore more effective.’’12
With this notion, Irenaeus is able in effect to explain the ongoing link
between the Old Testament Mosaic Law, which the prophetic writings uphold,
and the fourfold Gospel, which the Epistles elaborate. In so doing, he moves to
overturn a key pillar of Gnostic theology and exegesis: namely, the inferiority of
the God of Israel and the Old Testament Scriptures in which the story of this
God in relationship to the people of Israel is told. Moreover, he is able to
theologically reverse the Gnostic move to transcend YHWH and overthrow the
Jewish Bible that is tied to YHWH. The Old Testament Law, he says, is reca-
pitulated in Christ’s flesh. His body (politic) is a conspectus, a rhetorically
potent and compacted reiteration, of the Law, that ratifies YHWH’s covenant
with Israel and analogically with creation as a whole. Irenaeus makes this
point perhaps most forcefully not in Adversus haeresus but in the only other
text that we have of his, the Epideixis, or The Demonstration of the Apostolic
Preaching:

And that, not by the prolixity of the Law, but according to the brev-
ity of faith and love, men were going to be saved. Isaiah, in this
fashion, says, ‘‘He will complete and cut short [his] Word in righ-
teousness; for God will make a concise Word in all the world’’ [Isa.
10:22–23; Rom. 9:28]. And therefore the Apostle Paul says, ‘‘Love is
the fulfillment of the Law’’ [Rom. 13:10], for he who loves God has
 prelude on christology and race 27

fulfilled the Law. Moreover, the Lord also, when he was asked, which
is the first commandment, said, ‘‘You shall love the Lord your God
with [your] whole heart and [your] whole strength; and the second like
it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two com-
mandments,’’ he says, ‘‘depend all the Law and the Prophets’’ [Matt.
22:37–40]. So he has increased, by means of our faith in him, our
love towards God and towards the neighbor, rendering us godly,
righteous and good. And therefore he made ‘‘a concise word’’ . . . in
the world.13

The winding, elongated story of YHWH’s dealings with his people as centered
in his covenantal Law, Irenaeus says, was ‘‘cut short’’ and ‘‘fulfilled’’ in another
Law, the Law of love that was enfleshed in the ‘‘Word of righteousness.’’ It
must be quickly said, however, that this cutting short and fulfilling of the Law
in another Law should not be read as an early instance of Christian super-
sessionism, the notion that Christians replace Israel as God’s people, that God
discards the Jews in favor of Christians.14 Rather than this, the cutting short of
the Law is the production of a ‘‘‘‘concise word,’’ which as an epitome or résumé
[of the Law] is clearer and therefore more effective, increasing our faith in God,
our love for him and our neighbor, and so providing salvation. Yet, while being
‘‘cut short,’’ the Word of God remains identical.’’15
That is, there is a deep unity between the Old and New Testaments, a unity
tied to the unity that I spoke of above, the unity between God and creation as
secured by and revealed in Christ’s crucified flesh. ‘‘The Gospel, as the reca-
pitulation of Scripture, is its fulfillment.’’16 And thus, though a concentrated
expression of the Old Testament Law and of the Prophets, the fourfold Gospel,
Irenaeus argues, is continuous with the Law and the Prophets through Christ’s
flesh. His flesh is continuous with the flesh of Adam and Israel insofar as his
body and history derive from theirs. And yet, his flesh is discontinuous with
what went before inasmuch as it inaugurates a redeemed pattern of life that
brings to a crescendo the pattern of life witnessed to in the Law of the Old
Testament. Therefore, discontinuity (insofar as he is a summary of a new
pattern of existence)-in-continuity (insofar as the new pattern of existence he
summarizes and newly inaugurates was in some sense yet embedded in what
went before) is concentrated in Christ’s flesh.
This basic framework allows Irenaeus to say, for example, that the birth of
Christ, whose condition of possibility is the fiat of Mary of Nazareth, recapit-
ulates the birth of Adam, just as Mary’s action recapitulates Eve’s. However,
they do so in such a way as to inaugurate a new pattern of existence and of
generation, a new arrangement or economy of birth. ‘‘Recapitulating this
[Adam],’’ he says, ‘‘the Lord . . . received the same arrangement [oikonomia] of
embodiment [sarkôsis] as [him], being born from the Virgin by the will and
wisdom of God, that He might also demonstrate the likeness of embodiment
28 race: a theological account

[sarkôsis] to Adam, and might become the man, written in the beginning,
‘according to the image and likeness of God’ ’’ (Dem. 32). As was the case with
the first Adam, Christ’s birth—and Mary’s fiat, which in the order of re-
demption authorized that birth—recapitulates the creation of humankind in
such a way as to imprint a new modality of existence on it, a modality of the
cross, the ascetical mode of life that refuses to tyrannically possess the world
(AH V.18.3; Dem. 34).
Moreover, as he passes through all of the stages of life, from infancy
through adolescence to adulthood and finally death itself, Christ recapitulates
all of the generations of human existence across space and time, from Adam
to himself and into the future. In a particularly vivid way, Irenaeus states
the following to capture the breadth of creation’s concentration in Christ’s
flesh:
This is why Luke presents a genealogy of seventy-two generations
from the birth of our Lord back to Adam (Luke 3:23–28), linking the
end to the beginning and indicating that he is the one who recapit-
ulated in him, with Adam, all the nations and languages and genera-
tions of men dispersed after Adam. Therefore Paul calls Adam the
‘‘figure of the one to come’’ (Rom 5:14) because the Word, Fashioner
of all, preformed in Adam the future divine plan for humanity
around the Son of God, since God first predestined the psychic man,
obviously, to be saved by the spiritual. Since he who would save pre-
existed, what would be saved had to come into existence so that
the saving one would not be in vain. (AH-G III.22.3; italics mine)
Irenaeus’s claim has profound ramifications for the diagnosis of modern racial
discourse I develop here and for the constructive theological agenda I sketch in
response to it. Most interesting for my purposes is his turn to the issue of
language, nationhood, and generation or birth. These three areas function
crucially in the formation of the modern world as we know it through the
protocols of race, for modern racial discourse emerges in relationship to lan-
guage, the formation of modern nations within Western civilization as
‘‘imagined communities,’’ and the problem of biology or bios in which birth
played a key role.17
I will refrain from commenting on the issue of nationhood and biology
since I have something to say about these matters in chapters 1 and 2. As far as
the modern problem of language is concerned, Tzvetan Todorov shows in a
compelling way how language functioned in relationship to the modern prac-
tice of colonial conquest, which is deeply tied to the problem of racial discourse
and economic practice. In the context of an analysis of the Spanish conqueror
Hernán Cortés’s conquest, with fewer than 600 men supported by twenty
horses and ten small cannons, of the Aztec civilization or what is now Mexico,
Todorov observes that
 prelude on christology and race 29

the Spaniards . . . establish Nahuatl as the national native language in

Mexico, before effecting Hispanization; the Franciscan and Domin-
ican priests will undertake the study of native languages as they later
assume the teaching of Spanish. The preparation for this conduct
has begun much earlier, and the year 1492, which had already seen
the remarkable coincidence of the victory over the Arabs, of the exile
imposed on the Jews, and of the discovery of America, this year
is also the one that sees the publication of the first grammar of a
modern European language—the Spanish grammar of Antonio de
Nebrija. The knowledge, here theoretical, of language testifies to
a new attitude, no longer of veneration but of analysis and of a new
consciousness of its practical utility; Nebrija writes in his Introduc-
tion these decisive words: ‘‘Language has always been the compan-
ion of empire.’’18

Todorov points to how language itself becomes the vehicle of conquest. In

many ways, Columbus himself was clear about this. Again as Todorov says,
commenting on remarks Columbus makes in journals he kept during his first
voyage: ‘‘When Columbus finally acknowledges the foreignness of [the] lan-
guages [of one of the groups of people he comes across], he insists . . . that it be
also the foreignness of all the others; on the one side, then, there are the Latin
languages, and on the other all foreign tongues.’’19 What one sees here is
Columbus arranging language within a hierarchy that situates the Latin lan-
guages, especially Spanish (Latin itself being the language of theological dis-
course), over all other languages. But precisely in doing this, Columbus enacts
colonial conquest on the linguistic level. He enacts empire. Moreover—and
this is the part that neither Todorov nor an otherwise deeply insightful con-
temporary critical theorist such as Walter Mignolo begins to do justice to—
Columbus and other conquistadors after him engage in colonial conquest, both
linguistically and otherwise, inside Latin as the language of theological dis-
course.20 Theology starts to function in a new way precisely in this moment.
But herein lies Irenaeus’s significance, for he says that human language
across time and space gets recapitulated in Christ. Now given how Irenaeus
has been arguing, this cannot be a theological expression of colonial linguistic
conquest on his part, for we have seen that he argues that in being recapitu-
lated in the Gospels and in Christ’s flesh, the Old Testament is not tyrannically
overcome. Rather, it is re-presented as in conspectus, and in that concentrated
form its freedom to signify the Creator acquires a new, iconic depth. It is made
even more potent to witness to YHWH or to be YHWH’s creaturely discourse
(logos). It follows, then, that languages are not subdued any more than is the
Old Testament to become God’s ‘‘colonial’’ possessions. The words of creation
(the logoi) are not lost in the Word of God (the Logos). Rather, they pentecostally
or interlinguistically articulate each other. Given this, one must speak not
30 race: a theological account

merely of Christ’s humanity. One must speak of his humanity as an interhu-

manity that constitutes a new, intrahumanity. That is, Christ’s humanity is the
historical display of an intradivine communion between Father and Son in the
Holy Spirit that itself opens up, by the same motion of the Holy Spirit in
Christ’s flesh, a new communion internal to human existence. In short,
Christ’s flesh as Jewish, covenantal flesh is a social-political reality displayed
across time and space into which the Gentiles are received in praise of the God
of Israel. Given this, we must say that Christ’s flesh in its Jewish constitution is
‘‘mulatto’’ flesh. That is to say, in being Jewish flesh it is always already in-
tersected by the covenant with YHWH and in being intersected it is always
already intraracial (and not merely multiracial). Its purity is its ‘‘impurity,’’
which is the ‘‘impurity’’ of its being covenantally intersected by YHWH as its
life-giving limit.21 Israel is the people that exists by virtue of being upheld in
being by YHWH, and in so being upheld Israel witnesses to what it means to
be a creature before the Creator. Therefore, the line of supposed ‘‘purity’’
between God and this people is already intersected, rendered ‘‘impure,’’ or
‘‘contaminated.’’ If the covenantal (not contractual) existence of this people
means anything, it surely means this. This people is an analogy of creation
itself, for its existence testifies to the ‘‘contaminated’’ relationship between God
and what God has created. The covenantal people of Israel witnesses to crea-
tion its own fruitful ‘‘contamination’’ before YHWH as its life-giving limit.
And hence, this people cannot be superseded, for to supersede it represents the
effort to establish fictive lines of purity within creation (is this not what
whiteness, and its production of racialized bodies, sought to do?) and thus
supersede the Creator. In his interhumanity, which is an intrahumanity, Jesus
as the Israel of God is the livinig reality of the covenantal promises of the God
of Israel. He therefore is the discourse (Logos) of creation, the one in whom all
of the words of creation (logoi)—its differences, one might say—inhere. In the
specificity of his Jewish, covenantal flesh, he is creation’s life-giving limit. He is
the living reality of YHWH’s promises to Israel and thereby for the world.
Jesus’ existence, which is covenantally Jewish, is therefore Pentecostal.
In Christ, then, language is liberated from the fiction of purity and thus
from every structure of dominance and slavery (this is how Irenaeus interprets
sin and the fall of the first Adam [e.g., AH-A V.21.1–3]). Freed from the control
of a master or mastering language—this is what Todorov describes when
Nahuatl is established as the national native language so that it can be made
subject to the colonial language of Spanish and ultimately Latin—language
itself (that is, creation) is restored to its original freedom to signify its Creator.
Christ enacts this linguistic liberation, the release of language and thus hu-
mankind from the slavery of conquest and tyrannical possession. Yet it was
precisely this vision of language and human existence that ancient Gnosticism
on the one hand and the neo-Gnosticism of racial discourse that is the inner
architecture of the modern/colonial world on the other hand sought to fore-
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