Must I Be An Ethicist?

This is post is dedicated to all of the critics and doubters out there. Population: 1. Wait, maybe 2.

Originally posted on LIVEJOURNAL.

A couple of years ago, Monica Coleman, author of Making a Way out of no way , now identifies herself as a postmodern womanist /process theologian.  She wrote a scathing article entitled Must I Be A Womanist?questioning whether just because she is an African American female in the academy, whether she had to be a Womanist to get by, to get a job, since it is sorta like picking a brand name.

If I may be honest, here is where my journey has taken me.

When I first started my theological studies, I was a rabid 4 point Calvinist. Eeeeek! I know, then as my first semester of seminary winded down, I sorta became a Barthian, going all neo-orthodox and such, reading Barth and Brunner and Hans Von Balthasar through a Black theological lens none the less. So, it was a natural transition for me within the next few months of reading Jurgen Moltmann’s The Trinity and the Kingdom as well as the disappointing The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (some trinitarian, he was pro-slavery!) So, after reading James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation for a second time, I became a Barthian liberationist who wanted to do ethics.  Of course, I got a hold of the successor to Barth in the academy, Stanley Hauerwas, a theological ethicist and I did read every book I could of his.

You see, I noticed that ethics was the place where African American scholars worked, doing that and black church studies.  That’s the place where Black scholars belonged. Let me say it again, essentially, African Americans could only do ethics. I do not know but for whatever reason, this is what I sensed in the religious academy.  White males were only qualified to do systematic theology.  Blacks did CONTEXTUAL theology. Women did CONTEXTUAL theology.  I tried to fit myself, conform my identity to the marketplace. I wanted to be like a black theological ethicist in dialogue with Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and Alasdair MacIntyre.  I was knowing my place, finding my niche as they say so to speak.

In the past year and a half, everything has changed.  A small still voice has remained restless and I kept feeling uncomfortable and unsatisfied with what I was doing academically.  But now I know.  All this time, I had been so quick to bash philosophy and philosophical theology but I remained oddly curious.  I had not tested myself, stepped outside of my Barthian, Baptist, Black theological box.

Yet today, I say unto thee, that I finally did decide to challenge myself, to see the scholar who I could be.  Postcolonial theory changed everything. I started to read the classical postcolonial texts of Fanon and Spivak in addition to early Christian theologians, the Patristics.  I felt an affinity for both, but my soul was split into to; should I go the way and defend tradition (the same old same old) or should i become strictly a postcolonial theologian.  I made the choice to intentionally do both, to do the unheard, the impossible. For the past year and a half, I have changed personally, and have heard disparaging remarks about my attempts to reconcile both sides of me, two worlds, one foot in the wisdom of the ancients, the other in the path of my contemporaries.

I give credit to God for putting me on this path.  I feel like God was always there, trying to persuade me to go a different direction, to not go with the flow. I see these developments as part of my journey in the construction of a 21century anti-racist, anti-classist theology as well as bridging the gap between the church and the academy. God knows that I am not a person who usually goes with stream or with what is popular. That has never been me; why would I start now? Out of the demand of the market? It is in the instance in which corporatist forms of capitalism and racism collide that they can impact the real choices of the individual.  But, because God has created human beings free, we do have real choices.  And I have made mine, as a nonconformist.

Truth and Peace

RodtRDH

Formerly known as Rod of Alexandria, Rod the Rogue Demon Hunter Preacher of Hope | Black Scholar of Patristics | Writer for Nonviolent Politics. Destroyer of Trolls. It must be that angry puppy.

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