關於種族的神學探索 :: a theological investigation on race

這是個『種族化』(racialised) 的世界 —— 以種族界定現象，把人分門別類，評定優劣；西方社會過去二三百年從這『種族化』中獲取優勢；基督教（及其神學）也在其中自我界定為屬於西方的文化傳統。

對這個課題，基督教神學可以有甚麼思考呢？

在這樣的背景之下，杜克大學神學院 (Duke Divinity School) 的 J. Kameron Carter 這本剛出版的新書，應該十分有趣。【HT: Halden】

J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 504pp.

美國牛津大學出版社的介紹如下：

In Race: A Theological Account , J. Kameron Carter meditates on the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and that still mark how we function in it and think about ourselves. These are the legacies of colonialism and empire, political theories of the state, anthropological theories of the human, and philosophy itself, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present.

Carter's claim is that Christian theology, and the signal transformation it (along with Christianity) underwent, is at the heart of these legacies. In that transformation, Christian anti-Judaism biologized itself so as to racialize itself. As a result, and with the legitimation of Christian theology, Christianity became the cultural property of the West, the religious ground of white supremacy and global hegemony. In short, Christianity became white. The racial imagination is thus a particular kind of theological problem.

Not content only to describe this problem, Carter constructs a way forward for Christian theology. Through engagement with figures as disparate in outlook and as varied across the historical landscape as Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, Albert Raboteau, Charles Long, James Cone, Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, Carter reorients the whole of Christian theology, bringing it into the twenty-first century.

Neither a simple reiteration of Black Theology nor another expression of the new theological orthodoxies, this groundbreaking book will be a major contribution to contemporary Christian theology, with ramifications in other areas of the humanities.

這份思考，對咱們的本土神學、華人神學、漢語神學、東亞神學 ... 等等，不知又會帶來甚麼刺激/啟迪/挑戰？