Toward a Critical Theological Imagination, Part 3: Expanding Circles of Theological Knowledge Production
César ‘CJ’ Baldelomar in search of critical theology theorists and decolonial methodologies
Community Freedom Quilt, 2009. Artist Edna Patterson-Petty worked with quilt and sewing clubs throughout the Confluence area in East St. Louis, Illinois to create a large community quilt that speaks of Freedom. During the slavery era, freedom quilts were displayed as signals to enslaved people that they should begin to pack for the journey. Photo: Lynn deLearie
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Why, who, when, and where…
These were the words emblazoned on a green fabric banner that hung in my elementary school’s library. The image is among my earliest, most vivid memories as a student, and one that perhaps best illustrates the conclusion to this three-part series on theological imagination.
Asking ‘why, who, when, and where’ of the text, teachers assured us, would lead to a clearer comprehension of the text’s genre, function, and relevance to our contexts. Little did I know then that asking such questions would inspire me to always adopt—knowingly and unknowingly—a hermeneutics of suspicion toward all texts, especially authorized or canonical ones, and toward normative claims made in academic and public spaces. That green banner led me, so many years later, to explore decolonial thought and critical theory.
Students, however, do not begin schooling on equal footing. While some students learn to always question any pedantic attempt at knowledge transmission, others learn to accept any “authoritative” knowledge as unquestioned truth. In Unequal Childhoods, sociologist Annette Lareau notes that some children begin the race of life at mile marker five, while others begin at zero. Children from upper- and middle-class backgrounds tend to develop a “sense of entitlement,” asserting their individual preferences during class interactions; such privileged students tend to feel little hesitation in questioning a teacher or other authority figure on matters they perceive as incorrect or unjust. In contrast, Lareau claims, poor and working-class children develop a “sense of constraint” in school settings—meaning that students (many of whom are Black and Latinx) neither assert their preferences nor develop the sense of agency so prevalent among wealthier students. Poor and working-class students tend to fly under the radar to avoid detection by authority figures whom students perceive as teaching knowledge that is irrelevant to their lived realities. Such students learn early on that their voices—and their imaginations—do not matter. And that even the slightest misstep in school or in the community could mean serious trouble and possible charges of delinquency or labeling as deviant. (Think, for example, of the school-to-prison pipeline.)
It therefore stands to reason that students of theology do not enter their respective undergraduate or graduate programs on an equal footing. The statistics in this article show that people of color are far underrepresented in theological education generally, and in theological knowledge production specifically. But marginalized students cannot—must not—succumb to a sense of constraint. Though silence can be a form of resistance, the credibility and survival of the theological enterprise hinge on widening theological imagination with diverse voices; some of these voices may offer poignant critiques of theology and theological education itself, just as I aim to do throughout this series. And critique should be welcomed, especially by a discipline prone to rehashing certain claims authorized by the same group of thinkers.
Perhaps the most common question I hear is:
What solutions can you offer after your deconstruction of the theological enterprise?
To which I always respond:
Viable solutions to a stagnant theological imagination can emerge only en conjunto, as Latinx theologians point out.
The best solutions can come only through a cooperative engagement with and for those we seek to serve through our vocations as scholars, writers, teachers, ministers, activists, and community organizers. We are invested in advancing the discipline. In fact, its value is the reason why so many of us have chosen to undertake theological education.
For me, theology’s promise comes from its ability to resist imaginative paradigms shaped by capitalism and the market, and to embrace ones formed by, for instance, the radical words and deeds of Jesus, as well as paradigms offered by the seductive and powerful nuggets of truths sprinkled throughout Christian theological texts dating back nearly 2000 years to the present, spanning continents—from the texts of Alexandria’s Origen to those of Argentina’s Marcela Althaus-Reid, for example.
Expanding theological imagination and writing can be powerful and transformative for the academy, churches, and society. The problem is that, for too long, this effort has disregarded the imaginations and wisdom that emerge from ‘marginalized’ bodies. Theological education—at least in its institutional form—will wither unless fresh voices continue to nourish the very roots of traditional theological imagination, writing, and education.
I conclude this author’s note—and this series—with a call for a network to discuss how we can reignite theological imagination en conjunto. The hope is that collective action will, in turn, reignite social and political imaginations. I can think of no better time than the present to undertake a complete overhaul of how we theologize and, by extension, (re)imagine the whys, whos, whens, and wheres that have yet to be.
Part 3: Expanding Circles of Theological Knowledge Production
Who is producing theological knowledge today?
Many theologians, including me, now write about racial justice and decolonization. There are, for instance, Latinx theologians writing about concerns specific to the Latinx community. Surely there is more diversity now among theologians than, say, 30 or even 20 years ago. Right?
The numbers
Let us start with some simple statistics.
According to the latest data from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), of the roughly 225 doctoral degrees awarded in theology or religion in 2014, only nine (4.4%) went to “Hispanics” (the term used in the statistics). In total, 34 (14.9%) of all the theology doctoral degrees were awarded to “all racial/ethnic minorities.” This implies that 85% of all doctoral degrees in theological/religious studies went to white (or ‘nonminority’) students. While the 14.9% minority doctoral awardees represents a modest gain from the 9.9% of 1995, the percentage is lower than the 17% of 2006. And, of course, statistically speaking, chances are that most of the 2014 doctoral awardees who will gain employment within a university will come from the pool of the 191 white (or ‘nonminority’) awardees, as opposed to the pool of 34 from all racial/ethnic minorities. And the chances of a racial/ethnic minority landing a tenure-track position at a prestigious university are lower still, especially when the field continues to be mostly run by white scholars who make the hiring and tenure decisions.
As of fall 2017, of all full-time faculty in US colleges and universities, 76% were white (41% male and 35% female), while Black and Hispanic faculty accounted for a total of 12% (3% for males and for females in each group). Of these faculty, those holding the highest academic rank of Professor were, as expected, mostly white males (54%) and white females (27%). Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males each accounted for 2% of those holding the rank of professor, while Hispanic females comprised only 1%.
With these paltry numbers of Black and Latinx doctoral students and professors, is it any wonder that theology—and, indeed, all of academia—remains a white arena?
Reimagining theological knowledge production
Increasing the numbers of faculty of “color,” however, will not do the trick of leveling the field. To truly reimagine theological knowledge production, the discipline itself must undergo a deep deconstruction, one that delinks theology’s highest values (such as normative anthropologies that place “certain” humans atop all creation or that deem serious theological reflection as something akin to a hard science) from its historical ties to colonialism and dogmatic control of character formation. Theology, like other disciplines in the humanities, must undergo decolonization. Theology must come to terms with its questionable past, with its ties to white supremacy and colonialism, and with its very limited epistemic geography.
Christian theology, in particular, is prone to the vice of epistemic superiority. Indeed, for almost two millennia, the discipline has been able to conceptualize its knowledge as transcendent, universal, and teleological (purpose-driven) precisely because of its theorizing on the Divine (theology) and on humanity’s relationship to the Divine and to each other (ethics). Scholars and other agents within the discipline, however, are ethically bound to bring theological thinking down to earth in order to demystify its knowledge—and to allow other voices (other epistemes) to shape theological imagination.
Black, Latinx, Asian, mujerista, and queer theologians have already begun to ground theology in the particularities of their communities’ lived daily realities and struggles. To take but just one example, consider the late mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s assertion in her now-classic En La Lucha/In the Struggle:
“The liberative praxis of Latinas, having as its source our lived-experience, is an adequate base for moral norms and values because it enables our moral agency and empowers us to understand and define ourselves—to comprehend what our human existence is all about and what its goal is.”
Rather than reflect theologically from an ahistorical and non-contextual starting point, grounding theology demands asking concrete questions about context and purpose (more on this in the next section). The answers should always aim to be specific to the community asking those questions.
For instance, in A Black Theology of Liberation, James Cone states that “[w]hatever theology says about God and the world must arise out of its sole reason for existence as a discipline: to assist the oppressed in their liberation.” For Cone and other liberation theologians, theological knowledge should come from both a (re)reading of tradition (normative theologians) and the collective experiences of specific communities that require a liberative praxis for their own historical moment. Theology is therefore always dynamic—and not static or frozen within the pages of medieval tomes of scholastic commentaries.
What type of theologians—theological knowledge producers—then, do marginalized communities need, especially during these perilous times?
Confluence Freedom Quilt, 2009. Community quilt envisioned by art teachers from three Confluence Academy campuses, in collaboration with artist Edna Patterson-Petty and Grace Hill Settlement House in E. St. Louis, IL. Students designed quilt squares that represent their own ideas of Freedom. Photo: Lynn deLearie
Freedom Quilt, 2009. Patterson-Petty also worked with the Confluence (Trailnet), Grace Hill Settlement House, and teen mothers, who integrated symbols they associated with ‘freedom’. The quilt honors the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing, Missouri’s first nationally designated Underground Railroad site. Meachum, a free black woman and widow of a prominent black clergyman, helped enslaved people cross the Mississippi River from St. Louis, MO toward a route to freedom through IL. Photo: Lynn deLearie
Call for critical theology theorists
I call for critical theology theorists––that is, for theology scholars (producers of knowledge) who are willing to dismantle the field through engagement with critical theory and decolonial methodologies. Critical theology theorists, like critical race theorists, should approach all knowledge with a hermeneutics of suspicion.
Questions critical theology theorists should ask include:
Who produced this knowledge?
For whom and for what purpose?
How does this knowledge possibly exclude or make invisible those historically excluded from theological knowledge production and education?
Essentially, critical theology theorists should expose theological knowledge for what it is: a contextualized political exercise in meaning making that should aim toward infinite imaginations but that currently remains confined to the fiat of few imaginations, dating from the first centuries after Jesus to the present.
Critical theology theorists, then, should envision theology from the vantage point of those excluded from theological meaning making:
How would theology be different were it to develop in the streets, bedrooms, bars, or international refugee zones instead of within universities or seminaries?
Can theology, especially liberation theologies, resist the temptation to ontologize or caricaturize the poor, the excluded?
Can theologians resist the urge to write about the poor as a monolithic group with similar pains and desires?
Can theologians avoid offering yet more ethical and moral maxims to groups and individuals that feel hopeless amid ongoing physical and mental violence?
“Welcome Mat” quilt square, 2009.
Photo: Lynn deLearie
Until theologians acknowledge our own complicity with epistemic violence against those dead and forgotten by dominant theological and historical narratives, and against the contemporary “wretched of the earth,” theology will continue as a Euromerican-centered discipline with a scholastic disposition. And a scholastic disposition, as J. Kameron Carter writes in Race: A Theological Account, leads to learning as an “escape from the worlds of pain, suffering, violence.” But it is the critical theology theorists who are called to always remind theologians of the pain, suffering, and violence that theological imaginations might intentionally or unintentionally cause, especially since the discipline remains so white, male, and heteronormative and thus out of touch with what it means to be black or brown, woman and queer, or poor.
Theological imagination requires a fracture, a violent fragmentation that forecloses any possibility for an ultimate, so-called timeless truth. Such a truth is impossible, for all knowledge is contextual and subject to change. Only then can theological imagination expand: After the fragmentation of theological knowledge, what will remain are context-specific imaginations that await their chance to take flight—to envision what never was. In order to expand imaginations, however, theologians must first dismiss any egotistical fantasies that they alone harbor the truth. And for this to occur, theologians must be willing to acknowledge the discipline’s epistemological limits, even if this means the discipline’s implosion.
Therefore, expanding imaginations of what could be—and picking up the pieces after—should be a challenge that culls the imaginative and creative power of peoples historically excluded from meaning making. This could be theology’s saving grace.
And it will take more than scientific-style writing to convey this saving grace to a generation of scholars waiting to be seduced by theological imagination and texts once again—or for the very first time.
“Beloved” quilt square, 2009.
Photo: Lynn deLearie
Are you a critical theology theorist with ideas for reigniting theological imagination? Do you believe that creative theological writing matters in (re)envisioning moral formation and ethical paradigms?
If so, let’s begin to form an informal network, where our imaginations en conjunto—shaped through our words and deeds—can begin to take flight outside the normative academic spaces.
If interested, contact CJ Baldelomar at baldelom@bc.edu.
