Browsing by Author "Jennings, Willie J"

Christianity in South Korea has long been touted the one success story in Asia, dubbed the “Korean miracle,” whose traction and trajectory of explosive growth are unanimously traced back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in numbers at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them, one monumental figure towers over all: the Presbyterian Reverend Horace G. Underwood (1859-1916), widely considered the single most important and influential western missionary ever to set foot on Korea, in large part due to his extraordinary sacrificial love for the nation and the people of Korea.

As such, his theology and practice of missions represent a work of love from the missionary par excellence of Korea, who missiologically operated out of best intentions and overwhelming love for the natives. However, as this dissertation critiques, it is a work of love compromised by his racial imagination, not incidental to his missiology but at its core. Specifically, this dissertation theologically examines how race manifests and functions in Underwood’s missiology as a multifaceted pseudo- or anti-Christology. Hence, the story of Underwood is one in which his theology of mission problematically operated out of a thick and dynamic racialized Christology, even as he imagined he was espousing and performing the very teachings of Jesus, making it all the more ironic and tragic. At the core of such a false and faulty “Christology,” whiteness, with Underwood himself as its white masculine exemplar, as racially constructed and stabilized, unrelentingly seeks to usurp the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. In this way, race as an anti-Christology with the white masculine posing as Christ functions as the missiological basis for his formation of a de facto white Korean Christianity.

The dissertation deconstructs and critiques Underwood’s racialized Christology in two parts. In Part I, I argue that Underwood’s missiological approach in making Koreans known through a comprehensive and comparative racial characterization presupposes a racialized doctrine of creation, whereby the white body, in lieu of Jesus, is deemed the revelation of full humanity (Chapter 1). What is more, in this doctrine, the white body positions itself also as the definitive judge of all humanity, and through its “all-seeing, all-knowing” judgment, the white body creates humanity anew, which in Underwood’s case meant re-creating Koreans as racialized modern subjects with a subjectivity posed to perform whiteness. As such, whiteness arrogates for itself Christ’s divine roles as the Judge and the Creator (Chapter 2).

In Part II, I shift to the heart of Underwood’s missiology: his racialized soteriology. I show that his argument for the missionary investment in Koreans is predicated on a racialized doctrine of salvation, which designates the white body, as opposed to Jesus, as the very incarnation of the elect, the very image of the saved (Chapter 3), along with the nation, as opposed to the church, as the body politic of the elect, with the emerging American empire the very image of the elect nation (Chapter 4). Moreover, in his racialized soteriology it is the white body who is the savior or the one electing, in place of Jesus, the true Elected One and Savior. Here, his racialized doctrines of creation and salvation come together in his re-creation of Korean religious subjectivity for the sake of saving the nation and the people of Korea. In this way, Underwood helps to establish a vision of racial nationalism for Korea that continues to shape the interaction between Christian practice and nationalist goals of well-being and progress in whiteness within Korea and in other parts of the world.

This work offers a theological reading of and response to migration restrictions in the United States of America, focusing on their instantiation in the U.S.-Mexico border and on the discourses and practices of citizenship and alienage that support these arrangements. Unlike most works in Christian immigration ethics, this work not only highlights the negative effects of migration policies, but also unearths the basic assumptions grounding these policies, all while displaying the racial and theological imaginaries grounding them.

The first part of this work argues that the assumption grounding all migration policies is “the preferential option for one’s own people,” that is, the view that citizens not only may but must prefer or prioritize the life of fellow citizens over that of non-citizens. The first chapter draws on French theorist Michel Foucault and decolonial intellectuals to offer a reading of three non-theological arguments for migration restrictions, namely, security, economics, and culture. In short, those who believe the U.S. must have migration restrictions believe that aliens may threaten the security, economy, and culture—in short, the life—of citizens. The second chapter interrogates theological arguments for national borders, the most visible way of restricting migration, showing that ultimately theologians assume the legitimacy of Westphalian nation-states. The third chapter offers a theological reading of the concrete effects of border practices on “illegal aliens,” arguing that national borders will continue to exist as long as citizens assume both that “our people” means “fellow citizens,” and also that they may and must prefer and prioritize their life over that of others. The latter assumption is particularly troubling because it implies that the insecurity, poverty, and cultural denigration that aliens face—though perhaps saddening—is ultimately just. The central argument of the second, constructive part of this work is that Christians (and others) should not prefer or prioritize fellow citizens over non-citizens. Chapter 4 discusses the nature and task of citizenship in light of the parable of the Merciful Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, and chapter 5 employs Hispanic theologians to articulate an alternative account of faithful citizenship with undocumented Latina/o migrants.

The doctrine of election holds the dissertation together theologically. The first part shows that the preferential option for one’s own people—even when proclaimed by a theologian—is a secularized performance of the doctrine of election: citizens elect themselves for life and belonging, but in so doing they damn the undocumented to death and anxiety. The second part shows that God’s election of the Jews, favor for the poor, and destiny of fellowship for the world sets Christians on a trajectory of border-crossing solidarity that opposes the preferential option for one’s own and de-borders belonging.

The current era of American Christianity marks the transition from a Western, white-dominated U.S. Evangelicalism to an ethnically diverse demographic for evangelicalism. Despite this increasing diversity, U.S. Evangelicalism has demonstrated a stubborn inability to address the entrenched assumption of white supremacy. The 1970s witnessed the rise in prominence of Evangelicalism in the United States. At the same time, the era witnessed a burgeoning movement of African-American evangelicals, who often experienced marginalization from the larger movement. What factors prevented the integration between two seemingly theologically compatible movements? How do these factors impact the challenge of integration and reconciliation in the changing demographic reality of early twenty-first Evangelicalism?

The question is examined through the unpacking of the diseased theological imagination rooted in U.S. Evangelicalism. The theological categories of Creation, Anthropology, Christology, Soteriology, and Ecclesiology are discussed to determine specific deficiencies that lead to assumptions of white supremacy. The larger history of U.S. Evangelicalism and the larger story of the African-American church are explored to provide a context for the unique expression of African-American evangelicalism in the last third of the twentieth century. Through the use of primary sources — personal interviews, archival documents, writings by principals, and private collection documents — the specific history of African-American evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s is described. The stories of the National Black Evangelical Association, Tom Skinner, John Perkins, and Circle Church provide historical snapshots that illuminate the relationship between the larger U.S. Evangelical movement and African-American evangelicals.

Various attempts at integration and shared leadership were made in the 1970s as African-American evangelicals engaged with white Evangelical institutions. However, the failure of these attempts point to the challenges to diversity for U.S. Evangelicalism and the failure of the Evangelical theological imagination. The diseased theological imagination of U.S. Evangelical Christianity prevented engagement with the needed challenge of African American evangelicalism, resulting in dysfunctional racial dynamics evident in twenty-first century Evangelical Christianity. The historical problem of situating African American evangelicals reveals the theological problem of white supremacy in U.S. Evangelicalism.

Disease metaphors dominate Christian theological discourses that equate sex with sin. When Christianity is imagined to “cure” sexuality, religious communities push out those members who are perceived to threaten the health of the social body. Progressive policy might give the impression that sexual liberation is best realized when disentangled from religion. Post-apartheid, democratic South Africa serves as a test case because it boasts having implemented some of the most progressive policies on sexuality. However, its groundbreaking laws have not curbed the country’s high rate of hate crimes, which largely target LGBTIQ citizens. In order to account for this dissonance, I elucidate the shortcomings of both progressive policy and theology before offering a constructive alternative. This project requires a transnational, interdisciplinary methodology that integrates Christian theology, critical theory, biblical theology, and fieldwork. The first three chapters critique theological and political attempts to “cure” sexuality in exchange for salvation and citizenship. These include the rhetoric of “cure” in hate crimes in present day South Africa, the coerced aversion therapy and sex reassignment surgeries performed to “cure” conscripts during apartheid, and the legalization of same-sex marriage during the transition to democracy. In conclusion, I propose that a decolonial theology based on the notion of Christ as contagion displays the meaning and purpose of baptism for costly discipleship and intimate life together.

In this dissertation, I examine the widespread failure of racial reconciliation work between black and white Christians in US American churches. I treat such failure as a failure of love, specifically the failure of black and white Christians to love each other as enemies. This sets two primary tasks for the dissertation. First, I work to understand this failure of love. Drawing on black studies—on the work of Frank Wilderson, in particular—I examine what I call the racial enemy relation, which I argue is a fundamental antagonism between black people and white people. This antagonism is grounded in and perpetuates white supremacist systems of violence and exploitation. I turn to affect theory to argue that this enemy relation is obscured by a distorted love. At the heart of this distorted love is what Sara Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. In short, I argue that racial reconciliation work fails insofar as Christians embrace an idea of love that confuses good feelings with good relations and, in doing so, are unable to confront the racial enemy relation with faithful love.

Second, I give a Christian theological account of faithful love that can guide intervention into the distorted love of white supremacy and promote a constructive approach to love of the racial enemy. In conversation primarily with black, womanist, and feminist theologies, I argue for a notion of faithful love as the embrace of the lover’s need for the beloved, while holding such love accountable to self-love, love for God, and God’s love for those who suffer. I ground this account of love in an understanding of divine love as driven by God’s need for creation, including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that in confronting the racial enemy, Christians are called to embrace their need for their enemy and to pursue that need toward conditions of mutuality in their broader society.

One of the most significant problems facing the doctrine of salvation is that it's been tied to a word foreign to its very nature: self-improvement. The dissertation articulates an idea of change that is inherent to the idea of salvation that resists and that fortifies us against the idea of improvement rooted in patriarchal commitments. It is an attempt to critically analyze the doctrine of salvation by asking the most pressing question facing it at this moment: is salvation good for women? It’s a constructive re-thinking of what the doctrine means in light of women’s bodies and the fundamental problem of improvement and self-improvement. Within 20th century protestant American contexts, the doctrine of salvation has often been structured in ways that equate self-improvement with salvation. Furthermore, the expectation for this salvific “work” plays out differently across different kinds of bodies, aligning itself with oppressive hierarchies. This kind of improvement is different from both the change initially experienced in salvation and improvements made as the believer enters into the communal reality of being a Christian. The idea of self-improvement as a salvific act presupposes an isolated self that will be cleaned up. This self becomes the white masculine. I argue in this project that the performance of redeemed masculinity (a saved man) is articulated by means of ideas of self-improvement and in turn ideas of self-improvement articulate a redeemed femininity (a saved woman) calibrated to masculinist longings for control and power. Evangelical theology articulates ideas of masculinity within a doctrine of salvation as the outworking of the effects of salvation, or being saved. That is, Christians demonstrate faithfulness by approximating, perpetuating and defending a particular vision of masculinity that depends upon self-improvement. This conflation of self-improvement with the work of salvation depends on the existing (and continuing) inadequacy of the believer. This refracts through existing hierarchies of oppression such that those who are oppressed require more improvement. Thus, the doctrine of salvation has become unrecognizably entangled with social mechanisms that validate and perpetuate cultural hierarchies of oppression.

As a theological quandary, the questions theologians have struggled over are threefold: 1. Who enacts self-improvement, God or the human, or some combination of both? 2. What does an improved Christian look like and who must see the performative embodiment of this improvement? 3. What defines the content that people should approximate in their improvement? The problem emerges at the place of the surface for women, in terms of the formation of a loss of optic control whereby men are positioned as the fundamental observer/approver of the faithful self. If regimes of improvement constitute agency (Foucault), and if such regimes have been seized by women, especially women of color for emancipatory possibilities, then what are we to make of the idea of improvement for doing political, social, economic, and theological work? My project explores the problems and possibilities of salvation and improvement in their theological and related registers. The dissertation ultimately pivots on the question: can the doctrine of salvation itself be saved from its entanglement with self-improvement or its patriarchal commitments?

The practical outworking of a doctrine of salvation enmeshed with self-improvement affects people differently. The way women are taught to imagine faithfulness forms them in obedience to a masculine gaze and masculinist forms of self-evaluation. That is, Christian obedience has been articulated from the site of men who determine the content of women’s obedience and position themselves as the evaluators of it. In this instantiation of masculine-determined obedience, women’s faithfulness is understood in reference to male desires. The dissertation suspects that not only do these practices of improvement get translated as the work of salvation (i.e., faithfulness), but that they are internalized into the subject’s own identity. Thus, women’s obedience is equated with a certain kind of gender performativity that is coded theologically. Further, because this obedience-as-improvement registers as a salvific operation, women not only willingly participate within it on occasion, but often perpetuate it amongst themselves (e.g., mothers teaching daughters). The entanglement of this kind of improvement with Christianity’s notions of salvation and the biblical exhortation to “work out of your salvation” (Phil. 2:12) severely complicates notions of agency for those participating within it. This proves especially problematic for feminist, queer and black thought.

When biology becomes theology in this way (faithfulness is determined by gender performance), it over-determines all humans into racially gendered categories that define faithfulness according to these categories. That is, faithfulness takes on the tone of improving oneself into one particular kind of man or woman, an ideal. Theologically, the question of the ideal human is often answered Christologically, interpreting Jesus Christ as Savior and ideal man. Rosemary Radford Ruether has analyzed the way sexism infiltrated Christology and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza extended this analysis to include how Christology used and legitimized other forms of oppression. How has this entanglement with an oppressive ideal affected women’s bodies, how they understand their faith and how they practice faithfulness? Further, how do Schüssler Fiorenza and Radford Ruether’s analyses of Christology and oppression play across other registers of subject identity (e.g., race, sex, orientation, etc.)?

Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology enters this conversation by giving unprecedented attention to the role of self-improvement within the doctrine of salvation. These representations also reveal the content of who should improve and how and establish who will be evaluating this improvement. It connects this alignment to women’s experience of their body. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to the budding field of theology of bodies, utilizing feminist and womanist scholarship to develop ideas of faithfulness and identity not rooted in self-improvement.The purpose of this dissertation is to expose how self-improvement became entangled with Christian notions of salvation, such that faithfulness looks like self-improvement calibrated to masculine visions of the human. The dissertation looks toward the constructive turn for conceiving of a doctrine of salvation not entrenched in self-improvement, but it is also conscientious of “saving” the doctrine via the same problematic technology of improvement.

Description of Methodology and MaterialsThe dissertation is primarily a textual analysis with some elements of historical archival research. Largely following the methodology of systematic theology, this dissertation engages a variety of texts analyzing their theory, historical location, the author’s biography, and how the text engages or reflects its cultural setting. The dissertation pays special attention to the subject location of the theologians it engages as a performance of its methodological argument that patriarchy attempts to present certain texts as objective or universal truths. By situating theological texts within the author’s broader socio-political existence, the dissertation attempts to undermine this patriarchal tendency. Beyond this, the dissertation largely functions as a theory driven analysis of the cultural manifestation of patriarchy and offers explorations of its practical manifestations.

The materials used are all texts and include feminist, queer, theological, womanist, philosophical, and exegetical. Non-theological philosophy informs much of the theoretical analysis of patriarchy and how it functions culturally. These texts are incorporated into the standing theological framework and then analyzed for how these systems became incorporated within theology and theological doctrine.

Conclusions DrawnThe dissertation finds that patriarchy has infiltrated the Christian doctrine of salvation such that it requires self-improvement calibrated to patriarchal interests. It terms the product of this infiltration patriarchal soteriology. Patriarchy has accomplished this by conflating two things: conversion with approximation and Christ with the masculine ideal. When Christians confuse conversion with approximation, then both their freedom and theological orientation shift away from Christian values. While conversion signals the possibility of transformation and change, approximation (as described in this dissertation) indicates work toward change as a requirement. Approximation indicates lack that must be corrected and functions as a mechanism that communicates the work must always continue. This continuous work simultaneously reinforces the subject’s continued inadequacy. Approximation also indicates a goal to which Christians attempt to move toward. While this sounds reminiscent of the Christian value to be like Christ, approximation is predicated on inadequacy that must be corrected rather than the relational freedom proclaimed in Christianity. In this sense, approximation establishes a hierarchical system where Christians can be evaluated on the extent of their lack. Within the patriarchal system, this lack gets read through many registers including race, gender, ableism, intellectualism, etc. The dissertation narrows this analysis of patriarchy’s ordering of bodies to consider how this emerges in race and gender. The second conflation describes the content of what Christians are approximating under patriarchal soteriology.

By conflating Christ with the masculine ideal, patriarchy establishes a theological foundation for its arrangement of bodies and teaches Christians that confirmation to this system is an act of faithfulness. Christ as a masculine idea equates Christ’s masculine qualities with holiness. Thus, patriarchy depicts Christ as a young, white, strong, male. This is the shift of biology becoming theology and it informs how certain bodies should improve in order to become more holy. When the masculine ideal is actually what Christians are approximating, however, what is actually happening is the patriarchal ordering of bodies (e.g., women submit to men, men lead, whiteness rules, etc.). Both of these conflations provide a theological justification for patriarchy’s existence and perpetuation.

Against patriarchy’s infiltration into the Christian imagination, the dissertation conceives of three strategies theology can use: anti-patriarchal christology, fugitive theology, and interrelationality. Anti-patriarchal christology uses a lens informed by patriarchy as a system to analyze biblical texts. It operates on the assumption that God is invested in deconstructing systems of oppression (like patriarchy) and as such Christ demonstrates clear actions to this end. Fugitive theology invites reinterpretation, expansion, imagination into the work of theology in order to resist patriarchy’s ever-expanding colonial grasp. Lastly, interrelationality emphasizes the commonality between all creatures, thereby challenging the legitimacy of an ideal figure or the sovereign self.

To this end, Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology contributes to the emerging fields of theology of bodies, theology of entanglement and critical whiteness studies. It deconstructs Christianity’s entanglement with patriarchy and offers a constructive turn for how Christians can imagine a doctrine of salvation that does not reproduce patriarchal oppression.

One of the most significant problems facing the doctrine of salvation is that it's been tied to a word foreign to its very nature: self-improvement. The dissertation articulates an idea of change that is inherent to the idea of salvation that resists and that fortifies us against the idea of improvement rooted in patriarchal commitments. It is an attempt to critically analyze the doctrine of salvation by asking the most pressing question facing it at this moment: is salvation good for women? It’s a constructive re-thinking of what the doctrine means in light of women’s bodies and the fundamental problem of improvement and self-improvement. Within 20th century protestant American contexts, the doctrine of salvation has often been structured in ways that equate self-improvement with salvation. Furthermore, the expectation for this salvific “work” plays out differently across different kinds of bodies, aligning itself with oppressive hierarchies. This kind of improvement is different from both the change initially experienced in salvation and improvements made as the believer enters into the communal reality of being a Christian. The idea of self-improvement as a salvific act presupposes an isolated self that will be cleaned up. This self becomes the white masculine. I argue in this project that the performance of redeemed masculinity (a saved man) is articulated by means of ideas of self-improvement and in turn ideas of self-improvement articulate a redeemed femininity (a saved woman) calibrated to masculinist longings for control and power. Evangelical theology articulates ideas of masculinity within a doctrine of salvation as the outworking of the effects of salvation, or being saved. That is, Christians demonstrate faithfulness by approximating, perpetuating and defending a particular vision of masculinity that depends upon self-improvement. This conflation of self-improvement with the work of salvation depends on the existing (and continuing) inadequacy of the believer. This refracts through existing hierarchies of oppression such that those who are oppressed require more improvement. Thus, the doctrine of salvation has become unrecognizably entangled with social mechanisms that validate and perpetuate cultural hierarchies of oppression.

As a theological quandary, the questions theologians have struggled over are threefold: 1. Who enacts self-improvement, God or the human, or some combination of both? 2. What does an improved Christian look like and who must see the performative embodiment of this improvement? 3. What defines the content that people should approximate in their improvement? The problem emerges at the place of the surface for women, in terms of the formation of a loss of optic control whereby men are positioned as the fundamental observer/approver of the faithful self. If regimes of improvement constitute agency (Foucault), and if such regimes have been seized by women, especially women of color for emancipatory possibilities, then what are we to make of the idea of improvement for doing political, social, economic, and theological work? My project explores the problems and possibilities of salvation and improvement in their theological and related registers. The dissertation ultimately pivots on the question: can the doctrine of salvation itself be saved from its entanglement with self-improvement or its patriarchal commitments?

The practical outworking of a doctrine of salvation enmeshed with self-improvement affects people differently. The way women are taught to imagine faithfulness forms them in obedience to a masculine gaze and masculinist forms of self-evaluation. That is, Christian obedience has been articulated from the site of men who determine the content of women’s obedience and position themselves as the evaluators of it. In this instantiation of masculine-determined obedience, women’s faithfulness is understood in reference to male desires. The dissertation suspects that not only do these practices of improvement get translated as the work of salvation (i.e., faithfulness), but that they are internalized into the subject’s own identity. Thus, women’s obedience is equated with a certain kind of gender performativity that is coded theologically. Further, because this obedience-as-improvement registers as a salvific operation, women not only willingly participate within it on occasion, but often perpetuate it amongst themselves (e.g., mothers teaching daughters). The entanglement of this kind of improvement with Christianity’s notions of salvation and the biblical exhortation to “work out of your salvation” (Phil. 2:12) severely complicates notions of agency for those participating within it. This proves especially problematic for feminist, queer and black thought.

When biology becomes theology in this way (faithfulness is determined by gender performance), it over-determines all humans into racially gendered categories that define faithfulness according to these categories. That is, faithfulness takes on the tone of improving oneself into one particular kind of man or woman, an ideal. Theologically, the question of the ideal human is often answered Christologically, interpreting Jesus Christ as Savior and ideal man. Rosemary Radford Ruether has analyzed the way sexism infiltrated Christology and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza extended this analysis to include how Christology used and legitimized other forms of oppression. How has this entanglement with an oppressive ideal affected women’s bodies, how they understand their faith and how they practice faithfulness? Further, how do Schüssler Fiorenza and Radford Ruether’s analyses of Christology and oppression play across other registers of subject identity (e.g., race, sex, orientation, etc.)?

Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology enters this conversation by giving unprecedented attention to the role of self-improvement within the doctrine of salvation. These representations also reveal the content of who should improve and how and establish who will be evaluating this improvement. It connects this alignment to women’s experience of their body. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to the budding field of theology of bodies, utilizing feminist and womanist scholarship to develop ideas of faithfulness and identity not rooted in self-improvement.The purpose of this dissertation is to expose how self-improvement became entangled with Christian notions of salvation, such that faithfulness looks like self-improvement calibrated to masculine visions of the human. The dissertation looks toward the constructive turn for conceiving of a doctrine of salvation not entrenched in self-improvement, but it is also conscientious of “saving” the doctrine via the same problematic technology of improvement.

Description of Methodology and MaterialsThe dissertation is primarily a textual analysis with some elements of historical archival research. Largely following the methodology of systematic theology, this dissertation engages a variety of texts analyzing their theory, historical location, the author’s biography, and how the text engages or reflects its cultural setting. The dissertation pays special attention to the subject location of the theologians it engages as a performance of its methodological argument that patriarchy attempts to present certain texts as objective or universal truths. By situating theological texts within the author’s broader socio-political existence, the dissertation attempts to undermine this patriarchal tendency. Beyond this, the dissertation largely functions as a theory driven analysis of the cultural manifestation of patriarchy and offers explorations of its practical manifestations.

The materials used are all texts and include feminist, queer, theological, womanist, philosophical, and exegetical. Non-theological philosophy informs much of the theoretical analysis of patriarchy and how it functions culturally. These texts are incorporated into the standing theological framework and then analyzed for how these systems became incorporated within theology and theological doctrine.

Conclusions DrawnThe dissertation finds that patriarchy has infiltrated the Christian doctrine of salvation such that it requires self-improvement calibrated to patriarchal interests. It terms the product of this infiltration patriarchal soteriology. Patriarchy has accomplished this by conflating two things: conversion with approximation and Christ with the masculine ideal. When Christians confuse conversion with approximation, then both their freedom and theological orientation shift away from Christian values. While conversion signals the possibility of transformation and change, approximation (as described in this dissertation) indicates work toward change as a requirement. Approximation indicates lack that must be corrected and functions as a mechanism that communicates the work must always continue. This continuous work simultaneously reinforces the subject’s continued inadequacy. Approximation also indicates a goal to which Christians attempt to move toward. While this sounds reminiscent of the Christian value to be like Christ, approximation is predicated on inadequacy that must be corrected rather than the relational freedom proclaimed in Christianity. In this sense, approximation establishes a hierarchical system where Christians can be evaluated on the extent of their lack. Within the patriarchal system, this lack gets read through many registers including race, gender, ableism, intellectualism, etc. The dissertation narrows this analysis of patriarchy’s ordering of bodies to consider how this emerges in race and gender. The second conflation describes the content of what Christians are approximating under patriarchal soteriology.

By conflating Christ with the masculine ideal, patriarchy establishes a theological foundation for its arrangement of bodies and teaches Christians that confirmation to this system is an act of faithfulness. Christ as a masculine idea equates Christ’s masculine qualities with holiness. Thus, patriarchy depicts Christ as a young, white, strong, male. This is the shift of biology becoming theology and it informs how certain bodies should improve in order to become more holy. When the masculine ideal is actually what Christians are approximating, however, what is actually happening is the patriarchal ordering of bodies (e.g., women submit to men, men lead, whiteness rules, etc.). Both of these conflations provide a theological justification for patriarchy’s existence and perpetuation.

Against patriarchy’s infiltration into the Christian imagination, the dissertation conceives of three strategies theology can use: anti-patriarchal christology, fugitive theology, and interrelationality. Anti-patriarchal christology uses a lens informed by patriarchy as a system to analyze biblical texts. It operates on the assumption that God is invested in deconstructing systems of oppression (like patriarchy) and as such Christ demonstrates clear actions to this end. Fugitive theology invites reinterpretation, expansion, imagination into the work of theology in order to resist patriarchy’s ever-expanding colonial grasp. Lastly, interrelationality emphasizes the commonality between all creatures, thereby challenging the legitimacy of an ideal figure or the sovereign self.

To this end, Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology contributes to the emerging fields of theology of bodies, theology of entanglement and critical whiteness studies. It deconstructs Christianity’s entanglement with patriarchy and offers a constructive turn for how Christians can imagine a doctrine of salvation that does not reproduce patriarchal oppression.

Recent focus on the police treatment of dark bodies has brought the visual perception of race to the forefront of national discourse. It has raised the question of why certain people are seen as a greater social threat than others. The current project engages this issue, offering a Christian theological reading of the problem of modern visuality in relation to race and gender as well as a constructive way forward.

Using Byzantine iconophile theology, namely, the concepts of iconic and anti-iconic, as the governing framework, this dissertation teases out the theologically charged nature of visuality deployed by the modern, western racial optic. Beginning with an exploration of the modern optic in the United States (chapter 1), this project applies the analytical framework of Byzantine iconophile visual theology (chapter 2) to the racial optic as it emerges in a modern form during the Colonial Period (chapter 3) and develops during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (chapter 4).

Through this theological study of the deployment of the racial optic upon bodies, it becomes clear that there are structural and procedural similarities that exist between the bodily evaluation, categorization, and conversion that take place within the liturgical practices surrounding the Christian icon of Jesus Christ and those belonging to the cultural liturgy of the racial optic, build around western modernity’s holy icon – the white male. In both cases, people are transformed by the practice of veneration. In both cases, the external body functions as an indication of internal character, revealing one’s state of fitness for inclusion within civilized society. Understanding the visual practice of the modern racial optic through Byzantine iconophile theology’s iconic and anti-iconic sheds light upon why the presence of those considered dark, deformed, and abnormal has been and continues to be treated as a threat to the order and wellbeing of the modern, western social body.

As a work of Christian dogmatic theology, this dissertation proceeds from the primary theological claim that human existence in time is determined by the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It also examines how the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have been affected by, and produced by, claims of scientific authority. The implications of these accounts are not only a matter of abstract doctrinal and philosophical reflection. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have been death-dealing rather than life-giving, characterized by a set of temporal pathologies that participate at the deepest level in marking some lives as expendable.

There are four particular pathologies that this project addresses in turn. The first is the mystification of theology by questions of human origins, especially as those questions are addressed by figures of scientific authority. The second is the problem of progress and politicized eschatology, in which securing a desired vision of the future becomes a human project. The third is temporal distancing, in which some human beings are marked as temporally retrograde or outside of history. The fourth, and final, problem addressed is the Hegelian perspective outside of time from which time is evaluated.

This dissertation offers a set of Christological temporal recalibrations through a reading of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, highlighting the ways that both figures rejected an approach to time that is not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history, and with the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state. It also suggests how the liturgical calendar may, and may not, provide Christians with the formational resources to think differently about their own time, and about their neighbors.

This dissertation approaches the question of Christian self-sacrifice through a particular problematic of race in the United States; specifically, where white supremacy “divides and conquers” by creating conditions for antagonistic relations between minoritized populations, broadly referred to as “racial triangulation” (Claire Jean Kim). As I demonstrate, theological logics mimic and reinforce this American sacrifice of racialized and gendered difference. My intervention provides an account of how two kinds of substitutionary logic are at play, rather than just the one-to-one logic that is typically assumed. I critically identify a substitutionary logic of equivalencies that allow for theological thinking to be interchanged with multiple trajectories of thought, in turn reinforcing the one-to-one thinking that contributes to the American liberal narrative of assimilative sacrifice.

In Chapter 1, I look closely at theological analyses of sacrifice, both that reject it for liberative possibilities, and those that attempt to retrieve it as a vital aspect of Christian practice. Focusing on the figure of the martyr as an image or stereotype of sacrifice allows me to articulate the mimetic assumptions that underlie both rejections and retrievals. Chapter 2 expands upon the ontological assumptions animating the stereotype, via the logic of surrogacy and mammy stereotype. I delve into the domestic space as a site for sacrifice, and how prevailing sacrificial narratives commodified the realities of black motherhood and family for the sake of economically ordering the domestic spaces of white households.

Chapter 3 continues to focus on the domestic space, but more explicitly examines the religious character of sacrifice as a logic of domestication. More specifically, the transformation of Asian Americans from yellow peril to model minority reveals the interchange of theological, economic, and political logics in the mission of Christian domesticity. Finally, Chapter 4 pushes into the question of sacrifice as one of genealogy. I attend to this problem by turning to the genealogical problems and promise of baptism, specifically as seen in Daniel Boyarin and Karl Barth. Constructively drawing upon Anne Anlin Cheng’s idea of “unlikely affinities” and Judith Butler, I offer up an undomesticated account of sacrifice.

Sex sells. A lot. But who exactly is on the market?

What kinds of bodies are calibrated for traffic and consumption, and how exactly do they get there? When it comes to “sex” trafficking—which comprises a minority percentage of human trafficking, yet dominates the moral imagination as an “especially heinous” crime—the rise in predominantly white, evangelical Christian American interest in the trafficked subject galvanizes an ethical outrage that rarely observes critiques of race, ethnicity, sexuality or class as conditions of possibility. Though a nuanced mandate to fight trafficking is all but cemented in the contemporary American political and moral conscience, Virgin Territory accounts for the ways Christian ideas of purity annex both gender and sexuality inside the legacies of racialized colonial encounter, and foreground the market expansion of the global sex trade as it exists today.

In Part I, I argue that the narratives of virginity tied to Mary’s body simultaneously foregrounded the gendered, sexed Other as sparked disdain for the religious Other, for the Jewish body and for Mary’s Jewish identity. Through this analysis I explore the connections of racial identity to the Christian theological elision of Jewish election. I demonstrate how the questions of sexual ethics materialized at the site of the Virgin Mary, and align the moral attachments of sex and purity in the production of whiteness. These machinations, tied to the emerging European identity of empire, irrupt horrifically into the narrative ontology of dark flesh in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In Part II, I highlight the function of these narratives inside of the moments of colonial encounter, demonstrating how the logics of purity and virginity were directly applied to manage dark female flesh. I map the visual iconography of the Black Madonna first through a Dutch painting entitled The Rape of the Negress. I read this image through the social theological imagination instantiating the idea of the reprobate body and white imperial gaze. This analysis foregrounds a theological reading of Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” as the center of a complex sex trafficking investigation, outlining the genealogy of race, as well as the ideologies of the racial, ethnic and national Other, as mitigating factors in the conditions of possibility of a global sex trade. By restoring these narratives and their theological undertones, I reiterate the ways Christian thought is imbricated in the global sex trade, and propose theological strategies for rethinking humanitarian responses to sex trafficking.

How did our world’s wealth become so unevenly distributed? How did a small group of Europeans and Americans manage to acquire and retain so much wealth while so many others struggled to acquire enough to sustain their basic life functions? Why did some individuals desire to accumulate massive amounts of wealth? In answering those questions, this dissertation first examines the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social forces that inhibited wealth acquisition and the technologies that overcame those forces. The primary technologies under consideration are not of the mechanical type, like guns and steel. This dissertation primarily examines social technologies that relate to practical human action: patterns of buying and selling, rhythms of speaking, and structured systems of ideas about truth, goodness, and beauty. I call these action and idea patterns “technologies” because they were, like all technologies, intentionally constructed over an extended period of time, and they served a critical function. They executed valuable work and facilitated wealth accumulation. After examining the essential forces working against and the technologies working for wealth accumulation, this dissertation uses slave narratives and the theology of Thomas Aquinas to explore how distorted human passion, in the form of greed, served as a principal motive force in unjust wealth accumulation. Finally, this dissertation attempts to construct a Christian anthropology that redefines human life and purpose in order to heal greed distorted passions.

Theology is dense and multifaceted.

It is a dense foray into questions of faith and praxis; it merges multiple interpretations of spiritual wisdom with human expression and action. It holds the progression of relational life. These are a few of its gifts.

Its shortcomings, however, are nocuous. Christian theology is the crucible in which practices of racism and sexism can be and have been maintained and spiritualized for the benefit of a few in positions of power. Theology, in this form, must be refuted; this resistance must come from the voices from within it. Most prominent have been and continue to be the voices that have struggled and forced their way in to theological conversation and relevance. The people and communities held within these voices would not be silenced. These voices know and live Christian theology at critical junctures.

One such voice is that of Mercy Amba Oduyoye. One of interruption and interrogation Oduyoye unashamedly calls the church into account through theological truth-telling. An authoritative voice over the decades, her work is one that has impacted the nature of Christian theology towards fuller inclusion of those outside the status quo within the Christian church. Her voice is one worth knowing.

Thus, this dissertation is an exercise in listening to Oduyoye in order to know her on her own terms. It is an exercise in hearing and learning about her through her own words. It glimpses the journey of her doctrinal and theological positions and in this it pronounces that an African woman’s voice is essential to doing Christian theology with integrity and impact.

I introduce Oduyoye through what she means to Christian thought as a theologian of African decent with particular cultural convictions. She relentlessly questions the cultural and social messages and cues that aim to force African women into narrow versions of themselves under the guise of upholding theological principles. She forges innovative paths towards more theologically sound directions.

This dissertation, then, moves in three parts, the first focusing in on “voice,” the second attending to the notion of “word,” and the third examining the idea of “witness.” The conclusion illumines the interconnectedness between the notions of voice, word, and witness in Oduyoye’s theology.

Chapters one and two narrate Mercy Oduyoye’s formation through her kinship ties, cultural standpoint, and theological commitments. Here we learn Oduyoye’s name and the details of her life. We also learn of the progression of her voice: her life contours her voice, and her voice contours her elucidation of the word and witness of African women’s theology.

Chapters three and four offer Oduyoye’s doctrinal examination of the theology of God as well as explore the person and work of Jesus Christ through her explication of African women’s Christology. These chapters illumine the revelation of “word” in African women’s theological accounts. The foundation and purpose of God and Jesus Christ in Christian precept serves as a reminder that the words that formed Christians precede Christian witness.

Chapters five and six consider human relationships and their role in revealing the divine. They tackle the “witness” aspect of Oduyoye’s theological positioning through interrogating how human relationship independently and interdependently comprise the crux of relationality. Attuned to aspects of theological practice and custom, whether cultural, religious, or both, the notion of human relationship draws attention to divine workings in the everyday lives of those overlooked or forgotten.

This theology, rich with African women’s conceptions of life and their understanding of relationship, is holistic and well grounded. It recognizes life as the platform on which African women’s theology continues to gain prominence. A religious position attentive to the lives of others proves itself to be a theological instantiation of what God in Christ called the Christian church to be.