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God, Race, and History: Liberating Providence
Matt R. Jantzen
Lexington (2021). 210 pp.
In recent years, the doctrine of providence re-emerged as a pressing theological issue. In Scotland, both historical theologian Mark Elliot and systematic theologian David Fergusson published important volumes on the doctrine (Mark W. Elliott, Providence: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Account [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020]; David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]). In America, the Los Angeles Theological Conference of 2019 brought together some of the best theologians of the English-speaking world to consider the matter in greater depth (Those papers are published in Divine Action and Providence: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. by Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019]). It is in this context that Matthew Jantzen published his doctoral dissertation on the relationship between the doctrine of providence and race, titled God, Race, and History.
Jantzen begins in chapter one with Langdon Gilkey’s infamous assertion in 1963 that the doctrine of providence was “the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology” (p. 11). The lack of sustained theological focus on the doctrine since that time leads Jantzen to ponder two questions. First, what caused the doctrine’s decline, and, second, why have attempts to retrieve the doctrine failed? The conventional answer to the first question, proposed by twentieth century theologians like Gilkey and G.C. Berkouwer, is that the doctrine of providence withered in the face of the human suffering and violence that marked the first half of the twentieth century. For Jantzen, this answer is deeply problematic because it suggests that the doctrine crumbled in the face of predominantly European suffering. That the doctrine functioned so well in the nineteenth century in the face of the human suffering and violence caused by colonialism, chattel slavery, and the racial logic that funded them is the real problem that must be addressed. And once it is, the answer to the second question—why have attempts to retrieve providence failed?—becomes self-evident. The doctrine of providence does not need to be recovered; it needs to be liberated.
Jantzen establishes his case by looking at three prominent accounts of providence in modern Protestant theology: G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Barth, and James Cone. In chapter two, Jantzen argues that Hegel’s doctrine of providence amounts to intellectual colonialism. Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, interprets world history as the progressive movement of the divine spirit from past to present and east to west, arguing that God’s self-revelation in the incarnation comes to its fulness in European man. For Jantzen, this is not merely an abstraction of the doctrine of the incarnation; it is a racialization of the doctrine. Hegel accomplishes this by abandoning the traditional epistemological humility of the likes of Augustine and Calvin to transform the doctrine of providence into an account of God’s revealed will as it pertains to world history. It is precisely this epistemological hubris that made it possible to warrant colonial genocide and slavery.
In chapter three, Jantzen argues that the “radical antithesis” to Hegel’s doctrine of providence is the one forged by Karl Barth. In the century between the two thinkers, the providential election of the European white male withered in the face of world war and genocide. In Barth’s context, the perpetuation of a Hegelian doctrine of providence threatened to give a quasi-divine imprimatur to both eastern and western ideologies. Against this backdrop, Barth forged his own doctrine. Jantzen argues Barth’s doctrine of Providence in Church Dogmatics III/3 must be read against the backdrop of his occasional writings from the same period. Such a contextual reading demonstrates that although Barth shared Hegel’s belief that the doctrine of providence was “a conceptual lens” by which we interpret God’s relationship with his creation, Barth reversed Hegel’s divinization of European humanity by positing Jesus Christ as the divine subject and the meaning of world history. Therefore, Jantzen argues, Barth’s doctrine of providence is the radical antithesis of Hegel’s because Barth “attempts to foreclose upon the possibility that the doctrine may be used by European humanity as a discursive technology of self-sacralization” (p. 99).
In a move reminiscent to Hegel, Jantzen argues in chapter four that Black theologian James Cone sublimates Barth’s negation of Hegel’s doctrine of providence. Cone understood the dangerous potential of Hegel’s attempt to discern God’s providential work in the vicissitudes of history, but he also believed that Barth’s Christological turn was only a first step towards correcting Hegel. After Barth’s turn away from the Eurocentric anthropology of Hegel to the particularity of Christ, Cone asked, “who is Jesus Christ for us today” (p. 110). The answer to that question lay in what Cone called the “Blackness” of Jesus. According to Cone, in the cross and the resurrection, Jesus—the Jewish messiah—becomes the light to the nations of which Isaiah spoke. Jesus’s Jewish flesh comes to include the nations. For this reason, Jesus is also black, and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he is present to those who suffer for their blackness in twentieth century America. In this way, Cone follows Barth’s attention to Christ’s particularity without abandoning the notion that God’s providential activity can be known here and now. For Cone, it can be known when we see Christ’s activity in and among the poor and oppressed.
Chapter five unfolds in two parts. The first half of the chapter is a comparative analysis of Hegel, Barth, and Cone, while the second part is Jantzen’s attempt to construct a doctrine of providence based upon the strengths of all three thinkers. Jantzen’s comparison of the three doctrines brings forth important positive and negative features that inform his own constructive move. Positively, these doctrines point us to the importance of the incarnation, the creatureliness of humanity, and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. Negatively, Jantzen notes the persistence of masculine assumptions about divine action and the tendency to reduce the significance of the Spirit.
In the second half of chapter five, Jantzen constructs a doctrine of providence that promises to build on the work of Hegel, Barth, and Cone while overcoming the problems of masculinity and deficient pneumatology. By defining providence in terms of Christ’s presence through the Spirit, Jantzen at once emphasizes the Christological baseline for determining God’s action as well as the Spirit’s objective and subjective action. Objectively, the Spirit makes Christ present to us today; subjectively, the Spirit is how human participation in Christ’s present action occurs. All of this reflects the Spirit’s own divine agency, preventing both the occlusion of the Spirit’s personhood and anthropocentric projections of masculinity onto divine agency.
Jantzen concludes his study by giving an example that suggests how his “constructive account of providence . . . might help shape judgments about where, how, and in whom the Spirit is making Christ present now” (p. 167). Jantzen focuses on Durham, North Carolina, a city where attempts in the 1970s to become a representative of the “New South” or the “post-Racial South” resulted in economic renewal and regentrification that ultimately made Durham “whiter, richer, and pricier” (p. 170). It is in this context that Jantzen asks, “where is the Holy Spirit at work in Durham, North Carolina, today?” Jantzen gives two examples. The first is the work of Durham C.A.N. (Durham Congregations, Associations, and Neighborhoods). Durham C.A.N. uses broad-based community organizing influenced by the work of Saul Alinsky to make sure that the people who are most impacted by policy decisions regarding zoning and urban renewal have a voice. A second example is the Moral Mondays movement led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the North Carolina NAACP. Following in the footsteps of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Moral movement used mass mobilization and civil disobedience to prioritize the voices and needs of people whose lives were negatively affected by the actions of the North Carolina General Assembly in the middle of the last decade. Jantzen concludes, “Durham C.A.N. and the North Carolina NAACP represent two particular sites of human activity through and in spite of which the Spirit continues to make Christ present to creation, joining together those who ought not otherwise be together in order to give life to ordinary, overlooked, and oppressed bodies in anticipation of the end of all things in Jesus Christ” (p. 176).
As I noted above, the doctrine of providence has become a theological hot topic. Theologians who seek to rehabilitate the doctrine will do well to pay attention to Jantzen’s work. A doctrine that overcomes the concerns of twentieth century Europeans without attending to the challenges posed by slavery, Jim Crow, and contemporary conversations regarding systemic racism will be an impoverished doctrine. Jantzen demonstrates that Hegel is part of the problem but that he also may play a part in the solution. Barth’s critique of Hegel rightly undermines any certainty we can have regarding God’s providential actions in human history. Nevertheless, the Spirit is at work and Christians have a calling to bear witness to its work in the world when and where they see it. James Cone’s work shows us what it might look like to heed Barth’s warning while still taking cues from Hegel. This “yes” and “no” to a Hegelian doctrine of providence follows a pattern we see in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own thinking. Influenced by Hegel, King developed a dialectical logic that held in tension the hopefulness of the social gospel and a sober assessment of the effects of sin. For that reason, he was able to speak with great conviction about God’s providential action even as he struggled to come to terms with the magnitude of the task before him. By pointing us first to Cone and then to the work of community organizers like the Rev. Dr. Barber, Jantzen is pointing us back to the Black church tradition that helped King to remain grounded in the dialectic of Good Friday and Easter Sunday as he pointed his people to the Spirit’s movement as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
David Hunsicker is an associate pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, Alabama. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
