- We are honored today to
welcome Dr. Willie Jennings as the 2018 Hanson Lecturer. And as you now understand,
Willie, being a Hanson lecturer means this better come
from the top drawer. (audience laughs) Dr. Jennings is the Associate
Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana studies
at Yale Divinity School. He was previously Associate
Professor of Theology and Black Church studies at
Duke University Divinity School where he also served for several
years as the academic dean. Dr. Jennings is the author
of numerous articles. His monograph, the Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of
Race, won the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award
for Excellence in the study of religion and the 2015
Grawemeyer Award in religion, the largest prize for theological
work in North America. He has quite literally written the book on the construction of race
in the Christian tradition. Dr. Jennings is a great friend to Princeton Seminary and has blessed us with his wisdom and his
insight on many occasions. I'm so grateful for his
willingness to return to be with us today and to help us to think about the legacy
of our history with slavery. Will you please join me in
welcoming Dr. Willie Jennings? (audience applauds) - To President Barnes,
to Dr. and Mrs. Hanson, to Dean Walton and his
brilliant spouse there with him, to all my faculty colleagues
and dear, dear friends, I am thrilled to be here with
you today on the occasion of this esteemed lecture
for this giant among us, and on the occasion to reflect
with you on your report. A courageous act to do this report. My dean, Gregory Sterling,
would want me to bring warmest greetings to you,
and I do so including my faculty colleagues and students
at Yale Divinity School. They would want me to say
to you that along with you, we are endeavoring to do the crucial work at this moment in this country,
without giving up hope. This is our task. We know that hope is not a sentiment. It is a discipline, and today, we must be disciplined by hope. So Dr. and Mrs. Hanson, thank you so much for allowing me to be here
and honoring you this day. To educate is to build. The creature builds. All education is inside this truth: the creature builds as
God the creator builds. The building of the creature must find its way into the building of the creator, or the creature builds in vain. All theological education
is inside this truth. But what happens when our work of building is turned toward death? What happens when our building destroys, destroys, just as it builds up? Slavery, my sisters and brothers, slavery taught us how to build. It taught us how to build a
home, how to build a church, how to build a school,
and how to build a person. Slavery, slavery took a theological truth that the creature builds,
gave thanks for it, broke it into pieces, and
forced us to eat the fragments. I commend Princeton Theological Seminary and your courageous president
for doing the unprecedented, doing what few institutions
in the United States would do, to look deeply, deeply into
its own slavery-formed past. The report you produced points
in the right directions, toward both the advocates of slavery and toward those abolitionists,
toward the financial rewards of slavery, and
toward fears of slave release, toward the plans of the
colonizers to return black bodies to a black
land that they never knew, and toward the courage of
slaves and former slaves to find their way to
freedom through a faith already deeply damaged by an
emerging racial world order. The report illumens that racial
world order and in so doing shows us the stones that
the builders did not reject. Slavery was the womb,
the womb out of which our modern educational
institutions emerged. This must not be forgotten. This is easier to see with
our oldest and most venerable educational institutions, but
no educational institution, indeed, no institution formed
in the modern colonial West escapes this legacy, because
our slavery past is not just about the institution
that was the horror of slavery, but also about the
institutionalizing process, the institutionalizing process that slavery formed in the world. The slave legacy of Western education, especially theological education, is lodged deeply in our
educational imaginations. It set our work of
formation, it set our work of formation inside a
pedagogy of the plantation. Plantations throughout the
colonial world were always more, always about more
than just cultivating crops and preparing goods and services to be exported and imported
through the known world. Plantations, plantations were also about cultivating
leadership and establishing a social order necessary
for promoting civilization. This was the pedagogical work
of the racial paterfamilias, the ruling order of the father-master, aimed, always aimed, at forming sons. Paterfamilias is an ancient
term born of ancient slavery in the Greco-Roman world that
referred, as many of you know, to a system of rule formed around the body of the master as the fount from which flow the life and logic of a social order. From the racial paterfamilias flowed not only the life and
logic of a social order, but also the logic of an
educational order of masters and mistresses, of children
and slaves and animals too. All must be taught to know the Lord, in heaven and in earth. It was the innovation of
slave-holding Christianity within modern colonialism that gave us a vision of formation flawed
from its very beginning, flawed from its very beginning. The drama of Princeton
Theological Seminary's involvement with colonial
slavery, like every school's involvement with slavery,
was about the monies gained and the ideas promoted by
this flesh-buying industry, and about the abolitionist
drama of debate and advocacy, and about the hostilities,
persecutions, and assassinations suffered by black freedom
fighters and others using their education to wage war
against their captivity. But at the heart of it all
was a vision of education that sought to form people
in a white, self-sufficient masculinity, an education
aimed at forming masters, even if they don't own plantations. That white, self-sufficient
masculinity was not a person, but a persona, an intellectual
form, an intellectual form that would reach down to the
bone and would perform itself in someone who would show
mastery in what he knows, exhibit a powerful mind in
what he possessed, and give witness to a body in control,
no matter what he faced. Mastery, possession, control. Mastery, possession, control. This was education aimed at
forming those who were now in charge of a new world
given to them by God. The colonialist education
project was rooted in the desire to master, possess, and control
indigenous lands and life, and that desire would
take definitive shape in Western educational formation. Christian colonial
settlers believed that they had been given charge
by God with the burden, the burden of educating
New World peoples in order to bring them and the new
worlds to their full maturity and thereby realize their
own maturity as Christians. Whiteness emerged as a sick
vision of maturity through which the entire world could
be gauged by how well it moves toward and grows into
European intellectual form. Aspiration is a key engine
in intellectual formation. Aspiration is also the key engine for forming theological
educational institutions. Imagine, if you will,
imagine, if you will, the self-sufficient man,
who could also be a woman: one self-directed, never
apologizing for his strength or ability or knowledge; one
who recognizes his own power and uses it wisely; one bound in courage, moral vision, singularity of purpose, and not given to extremes
of desire or anger. This is a compellingly attractive goal for education and moral formation. The power of this vision
is that it binds a man, it binds a woman, to a
task, a job, a vocation, a philosophy, that
ironically takes the focus off the man, thereby drawing
him to a work and a world greater than himself, but inextricable, inextricable, from his
power and from himself. White self-sufficient
masculinity is the quintessential image of an educated
person, deeply embedded in the collective psyche
of Western education and theological education,
flexible enough to capture all people and any person so formed
to yield to it, yield to it. It flows through our
curricular imaginations, our pedagogical practice,
and the ecologies of our academic institutions. Theological institutions like
Princeton Theological Seminary have been formed to think and
feel inside this aspiration, to cultivate this man and to cultivate an institution that thinks
and feels like the master. The problem is that this man,
this master, is not Jesus, (audience laughs) and not bound to a God
who wishes to teach us how to build, guiding us in a building that moves us toward
life and away from death. Your report gives glimpses
of an institution shaped in this cultivated and cultivating man when it shows us those
who spoke from the white, imperial position of what
was best for the slave and what was best for the
country, when voices discerned without the voices of the
slaves and former slaves where they should live
and how they should live, and what they could learn and what they were incapable of learning,
and most importantly, who they should lead, and
who they could never lead. PTS was formed in the racial
logic of the plantation. Every school was formed in the racial logic of the plantation. It, like so many other
theological institutions, is capable at any moment,
any moment, in any class, in any administrative
operation, through any program, through any faculty or staff or student, of conjuring a ghost,
the racial paterfamilias, the white master who sees
everyone and listens to no one, self-directed and aiming to rule. Self-directed, and aiming to rule. The racial paterfamilias
spirit haunts all Western institutions, but its
presence in educational spaces and especially the theological academy lives close to the surface,
ready to assert itself. That spirit lay close to our
institutionalizing practice because it was born of Christianity
in its colonialist form, moving and feeling itself in
the power to dream a world, dream a world well-organized,
running efficiently, like a plantation, where
bodies are organic machines and profit begets more profit. Very few organizations today
would imagine themselves haunted by the racial paterfamilias, because they do not know or sense its ancient power that is
always present with us. That, however, is a tragic mistake, because like a father always
looking to form a son, the racial paterfamilias, that
spirit forms in the psychic spaces and the affective
spaces between efficiency and profit, between desired
order and desired influence. It seduces ambition and changes vision so that people are seen as tools for use, ever being formed toward
the role of the slave, because every institution
wants bodies, if not to give us their treasures, then to
surely give us their attention and carry our message, carry our message to a world we want on our own terms. The racial paterfamilias,
in order to be discerned, in order to be discerned,
must be thought and felt, thought and felt at the same time, and many people of color
know it, because we feel it, that sense of an old sorrow. You can sense that old sorrow
strongly now in this country, even at this moment of life
between an old master dying and a young master coming
to life through power. It is like a sick-smelling scent
riding in on a wind blowing from a past and reaching
toward a future, and we who exist in the middle
present, smelling and sensing, carry a melancholy
undeserved and unwanted. Many people of color carry this melancholy through the academy. They feel the forming of young masters, both men and women, and
the yielding of a place, a school or a department or an
organization, to an affective reality of white masculinist
longing and concern. The feeling and sensing of
the racial paterfamilias, however, remains a mystery to
large portions of the academy, especially the theological
academy and those who live down in the belly of the school
where decisions are made, because it first requires entering fully into the affective reality of
Western institutional life. There remains, sisters and
brothers, there remains a legion of scholars and administrators who continue to hold a dualism
of thought and feeling. The educational space,
in their way of thinking, is a space of thinking, not feeling. Too many scholars believe in rigorous thinking
and banished feelings. So an institution that
thinks itself makes sense. It makes sense to them. But an institution that feels itself, feels itself, does not. But institutions feel just as they think. To imagine institutional
thinking is also to invite institutional feeling; more specifically, it is to invite an
institution to inhabit sensing its comfort, sensing its
joy, sensing its energy, aimed in the right direction,
even if it's the wrong direction. So, the crucial question
for us this afternoon, my friends, the crucial
question, President Barnes, is what does Princeton Theological
Seminary feel like today? What do you sense? What do you sense at the nexus
of institutional thinking and feeling, because it is at that nexus that we encounter the
racial paterfamilias, beckoning us with a
tested and true seduction, a tested and true seduction, that promises to organize hope and
dream, tactic and strategy, toward the goal to build the master. I call this nexus of
institutional thinking and feeling the institutional
unconscious, similar to what Fredric Jameson called
the political unconscious. For Jameson, the political
unconscious was the way the world, in its relational
density, politically, socially, economically, shows
itself in the very things one would imagine are
sequestered from such realities. The institutional
unconsciousness, that nexus of feeling and thinking,
is not a bad thing. It is a good thing, but
when captured by the racial paterfamilias, it yields
institutional life, it yields institutional life to the
way whiteness likes to feel. Whiteness feels. It has an affective structure. Like extremely comfortable clothing that moves with the
body, whiteness becomes what Ann Lynn Chin calls a second skin. Whiteness presents itself
as skin and not clothing, forming the emotional glue
that denies the distinction between being a creature
and racial existence. Whiteness wants to feel institutionally. Whiteness wants to feel in control, to feel a control that is
natural and normal and feels necessary for the sake of
efficiency and functionality. Whiteness wants to feel
mastery, as if it automatically understands and knows
what is important to know, just as much as it feels
what is unimportant to know. Whiteness wants to feel in
possession of that which is worthy to possess and to
know that it is on a path, the right path, to possess
all that is important to possession, and that
the path of humility, intellectual humility, is
a path toward possession. Whiteness feels normal
and natural and therefore, always positive, unless
it is being questioned. So to question whiteness, to
question it, feels terrible, because it feels as if we are tearing at the fabric of people's lives, questioning the right of
particular people to exist. To question whiteness feels like we are throwing people into
chaos and fragmentation. It feels like hate speech. Questioning institutional
whiteness brings people into a forest of feeling that
they would prefer to escape, feelings of guilt, of fear,
of feeling overwhelmed by the sheer expansiveness, even ubiquity, of whiteness's reach into our lives. The deepest anxiety of
so many people working in institutions is not that
whiteness is inescapable, but that the feelings of
whiteness are inescapable, both its guilt and its
addictive and seductive power, because whiteness feels good as long as no one tries
to make it feel bad. (audience laughs) Yet, institutional whiteness
conceals its feelings inside academic form, inside white self-sufficient masculinist form. Most of us sitting here today, most of us have been misformed or
deformed to imagine serious, serious intellectual engagement
in only one modality: through confrontation,
through forms of disputatio, is the word, through the
European mode of disputation, which is rooted in European
chivalric war culture, where only through intense and
heated exchange and struggle do we arrive at the truth,
at rigorous thinking and strong and sure thought, firm thought. Beginning with the colonial
period, this European cultural form of chivalric
intellectual engagement, combined with capitalist forms of exchange and with the fragmentation
of knowledge, together, they became the foundation of the sick ecologies of knowledge that characterize so much of Western intellectual exchange, where our struggles and our
arguments, our struggles and our arguments, are
over increasingly smaller and smaller and smaller
bits of knowledge, extracted from their life worlds and
turned into commodities. Because our institutional
feeling is often concealed in and guarded by, like an
attack dog, guarded by this white self-sufficient
masculinist intellectual form, we have a difficult
time coming to the truth and discerning the precise
character of the cultivating work that we are always in the midst of doing. What is an institution, my friends? An institution is a
sustained work of building. It is a joining aimed at eternity, where people commit themselves to a beautiful repetition
that they hope will never end, like creating a product or
the formation of a process or the cultivating of a
person or the sustaining of a presence, like an artistic presence, or the correcting of a
problem that will not yield, or the capturing of a
hope embodied in a task that seems like a calling. The legacy of slavery gave to
us the racial paterfamilias, and the greatest tragedy
of this educational legacy is that it steals from us what
God gave to every creature, the desire to build, the
desire to build, and what the carpenter's son from
Nazareth wants to give to us, the desire to build together,
the desire to build together. That legacy sits there deeply, deeply within our educational institution, aiming to distort our work
as educators and students. My friends, listen. You have taken hold, and I commend you and congratulate you and celebrate you. You have taken hold of slavery's legacy at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the few theological
schools to do this. But now, now that you've begun, now you must take hold of
slavery's intellectual legacy at Princeton Theological Seminary. Intellectual legacy. (audience applauds) If we could call back,
someday it will happen, if we could call back from
the dead all those generations of students, white students
and students of color, all sharing the legacy of slavery with us, and we ask them the crucial
questions, what would they say? Those crucial questions are not first, what did you learn at
Princeton Theological Seminary? How did PTS prepare you for the manifold and celebrated ministries
that you all had? Those are good questions. Those are good questions,
and every development office oughta be asking those questions. (audience laughs) So, just remember that.
(Willie laughs) Those are good questions. But those are not the crucial questions. The crucial questions begin like this: What did Princeton Theological
Seminary feel like? What did it feel like? What did you sense, down
at the nexus of feeling and thinking while you
lived in this institution? If you closed your eyes and
listened with your heart, who did you hear trying
to be formed in you? Whose body, whose way of thinking,
whose vision of the world was trying to work itself
down into your soul? My friends, I think,
(Willie sighs) I think everyone in
this room knows how much I love and respect Princeton
Theological Seminary and how deeply I care for your president, for your faculty, for the
staff, and for you students. So I think I've earned the right to speak in love and in
hope for your future. I've been in theological
education all my adult life, and I have known many
graduates of this wonderful institution, especially students
of color, and many speak of a mixed love and hate
for this institution. But let me be clear: I am not casting stones in a glass house. I have been a part of an
institution where our graduates spoke of mixed love and hate. There is a word, there is
a word that must be spoken in the present when we
speak of slavery's past, and that word is reparation. That word is reparation. In a world shaped through
colonial theft so massive, so monstrous that it defies comprehension, our minds struggle to imagine restoration, return, justice, restoration,
return, justice, for those who now comprise a great cloud
of witnesses dead and living. But for theological
educational institutions formed in slavery's legacy, reparations
begin for us with simply listening and discerning what
our institutions feel like. So dear friends, my first
and maybe only suggestion; there might be some more later on, but I'll say more on that. (audience laughs) My first suggestion of what
you must do post your important slavery report is to ask your
students, past and present, what does Princeton
Theological Seminary feel like? Do you feel the racial paterfamilias here, and if so, where do you feel
it, and when do you feel it? If you close your eyes today
and listen with your heart, who do you hear trying
to be formed in you? Whose body, whose way of thinking,
whose vision of the world are we trying to work down into your soul? We want to know. I speak as a theological educator now. We want to know, because we
want to build together with you, not on top of you. You see, the challenge facing
all theological institutions today is to engage in a shared
work of building together. Too many schools are giving
up on real formation, authentic cultivation, because they have not abandoned the dream of the plantation, born of the racial paterfamilias
dream of forming masters, and they are in mourning
that they don't have those kinds of students, already poised for such a formation,
walking through their doors. I'm not making this up. Other schools have abandoned any dream of real, shared, real, shared formation, real, shared cultivation,
because they don't know how to dream the
building in the multitude. So they have created a quiet
segregation in their schools, where students are cultivated
for their context and denied the opportunity to learn how
to build a world together, build communities together,
build lives together. The creature is called to build. If we are willing to yield to
the Spirit of God, God will draw us and our work of building
into the building of God. But sometimes, we must
abandon what has been built in order to enter God's
building work, and sometimes, we have to tear down what we
have built in order to follow God in building toward life,
and sometimes, God will take what has been built toward
death and turn it toward life. Thank you very much. (audience applauds)
