Last night I attended – that is paid close attention to- the Annual Hughes-Cheong Lecture at Trinity College, Melbourne, given by Willie Jennings, author of After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020) The Christian Imagination: Theology and Origins of Race (Yale, 2010), and a commentary on the Book of Acts.
I paid attention to all that Jennings said. I took three pages of notes.
I paid attention to how he spoke – how his body moved with (or in against) his words. My friend beside me, a student of narrative method and gesture analysis, kept her own running commentary, not in notation but in embodiment, mirroring his actions.
I paid attention to his sources and his media.
I paid attention to the form of the event: Who else spoke in introductions and questions from the floor? Six men and one woman.
I paid attention to the architecture, the furnishings, the icons of culture, to the symbols of value and virtue, and to the materiality of the space, to manufacture and nature.
I paid attention to who was present, social dynamics and choices. I paid attention to my own feelings.
And I paid attention to whose names were honoured. A role call of three esteemed men – the Dean of the College, the Deputy Warden of the College, and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Divinity were recognised in the first introduction, preceding acknowledgement of country. Next in line were the two men whose names are enshrined in the lecture itself, by virtue of their historical roles as Priests at the affluent Melbourne parish of St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, whose trust funds the lecture. The Parish of St Peter’s was specifically given recognition. Money talks. Then two further names, Rowan Williams (former ArchBishop of Canterbury) and Miroslav Volf, international luminaries who had previously delivered the Hughes-Cheong lecture were cited. Then Jennings was introduced.
This list of notables occupied the first five minutes of the evening. Eight men. Two communities, Wurundjeri mentioned once, St Peter’s mentioned four times.
When Jennings took the platform, he added his wife’s name – Rev. Joanne Browne Jennings – and accomplishments: the first female acknowledgment, before bringing greetings from a colleague at Yale, another male, an anglican who had held high office at Trinity, where the lecture was being given.
We can see some of the logic of how this roll call of honour was constructed. But within five minutes, it was impossible not to feel the tonnage of institutionalised white masculine power we are still hauling around in this colonial Melbourne theological community.
Jennings is a baptist from the northern part of the US. He is a guest and a diplomat, a generous and emotionally literate man. He’s not ignorant of the enmeshed relationships of church and academy and power and money and white colonial culture. But I wonder what he made of our strange ways.
To the content – Jennings speaks forthrightly against the fractures of identity that western colonial ventures, the ‘whiteness’ project as the ideal measure among humanities, and the commodification of land has brought to our cultures and our theologies. His opening question is ‘What are people for?’ He investigates the place of human beings within the large entity of the cosmic environment: within land. Jennings reminds us of the wisdom lost in the silencing of indigenous knowing, that land, waters, skies, animals, growing things cannot be rightly possessed. That we are kindred with all, and it is the land that possess us, that we belong to, belong within, as we belong within the createdness of God. He speaks of the call to un-selfing, that is not negating ourselves but opening ourselves. Rather than dividing, or segmenting from one another, from land, (the necessary practice for selling and profiting), abstracting from interconnected incarnate cosmological existence, Jennings leads with the answer of ‘What People Are For’ – we are for God, we belong to God, we are for joining (in God) with others, and not just human others. He rejects the measures of human identity along the scales of whiteness, through the wounds of assimilation, via the goals of autonomy, independence and the struggle for possession, control and mastery.
The title of this lecture was ‘The Preaching Creature: Touching the Art of Theological Anthropology.’ As a tactile, sensory, embodied theologian, with my paints and visual journal ready, I was eager to experience how Jennings might facilitate touching, art, and creatureliness in theological engagement.
I began counting how many times he used the word ‘touch’ – five times in the first paragraph or so. Elsewhere Jennings has spoken critically on the controlling image of white masculinist autonomy that dominates theological education and formation. He opposes out the judgement of this culture that calls ‘sensing’ a ‘nonsense’. Bravo, brother.
What alternative processes, pedagogies, ways of being and belonging (which is his trademark word for theological reformation) might we encounter. The title itself prompted wondering: Who preaches? Which creatures preach? And how do we apprehend their preaching? Indeed, Jennings asserts that all of creation preaches to us and through us, though how this happens, and how we listen remains undetailed. There were, I’m afraid to say, no birds, no leaves, no stones, no soil, no bark, not even a feather or a seed to be seen in the auditorium. The earth was silent still.
But, Jennings brought us two poems, and even sang a short verse of hymnody to illustrate the liturgical tradition of monetary offering, as an example of how communities of faith recognise in a small way that we are possessed by the land, the cosmos, by the life of God, and are not rightful possessors or owners of land. I wondered if given greater liberty, he might have wished to engage and integrate our senses more robustly in the theological work of the evening?
I sat in a row, as it happened, with four local baptist ministers. Each of them have been examples and educators for me in the art of embodied sensorially and emotionally rich theological work. They are each deft and diligent practitioners in theological depth and demonstrable embodied community. What did they come to hear and see? They are open challengable, responsive, adaptive humans, ready to learn, to revise their theory and practice. I wondered at the crowd that had assembled on a wintery Melbourne evening to hear an hour of monologue – rich and intellectually stimulating by a celebrated theologian from Yale. What drives our will to hear someone speak of an embodied, cosmos integrating theological practice, yet cased, contained, perhaps constrained, in such abstracted form. What was I doing there, with my paints, eager, hoping? Jesus asks the pharisees:
What then did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes?
Luke 7v24-25
Is this our best way of addressing theology? Listening to an abstracted authority, then going away to do the maths ourselves and work out what it means in Abbotsford, Reservoir, Warnambool? Where is the voice of the local community doing its own theology being expressed?
Jennings critiqued the global market revaluation of local human identity, agency and collaboration. The global market assesses what happens on the ground in an integrated community responding sensitively, artfully and uniquely to context as inconsequential. Only that which can be packaged for mass distribution and generalised use is of use.
I wonder though, if this is not what we were participating in? Was Jennings allowed to bring himself to us only in the way approved by international marketing? And at the cost of local exchange.
The only woman who spoke was a denominational leader, asking a question from the floor about the use of the word ‘Sovereignty’ and how to offer ourselves in humble community with indigenous peoples with whom the wounds of sovereignty never ceded obstructs the ways of justice seeking. It was clear that in Jennings’ US context, this word had been hijacked for particular political goals that further divided and destroyed belonging. But not a few months ago this female leader had led her denomination on her knees, in apology and asking forgiveness before indigenous representatives, embodying as best we know how to begin a response that acknowledges our understanding that the traditional custodians of these lands, skies and waters, held a sovereignty borne of knowing they were possessed by the land, not possessors of it.
How was Jennings to know this, from his place behind the lecturn, flown in but an hour before? Impossible.
No blame or offence in either direction of course, but it provokes the question, how do we do this theological work better? Can the trust fund of such a thoroughly Western colonial institution ever be turned towards the goals and administered with the ethics and radically different culture that Willie Jennings proclaims as the ways of God?
Elizabeth Waldron Anstice
multivocality 