2008 Participants

In this essay, I am concerned with how contemporary analyses of "globalization" can help theology discern the current shape of what Baptist theologian James McClendon called the "quest for Christian community." For more than a century, various individuals and ecclesial bodies have sought the reconciliation of divided Christendom under the name of "ecumenism."  Although it has registered some notable achievements, the traditional ecumenical enterprise increasingly generates responses combining apathy and disillusionment. There seems to be general agreement that the limitations of its assumptions and methods have been exposed -- not only by various lines of theological critique, but by concrete ecclesial realities.

Classic ecumenism tended to picture Christianity as a set of discrete entities moving toward or away from some form of greater unity. The adequacy of this model is challenged by the fact that Christianity is becoming more integrated and, simultaneously, exceedingly fluid and pluriform. In the century or so since modern ecumenism took shape, has global Christianity moved toward greater unity or division? The simplest answer would have to be: "yes."

The contemporary ecclesial situation reflects the ambiguity of the complex phenomena brought together under the heading of "globalization." Over the last several centuries we have experienced the rapid deployment of technologies that connect human life around the world in fundamentally new ways. Following Marshall McLuhan, many have described these developments as the virtual shrinking of the scale of human community into a "global village" linked by the transnational bonds of economic exchange, cultural discourse, and civic association. However, what some have called the "Coca-colonization" of the world -- the expansion of advanced consumerism across political, cultural, and geographical barriers -- is matched by an overwhelming sense of fragmentation. For example, more and more people are able to connect with each other through the internet, but by no means does this guarantee an increase in global solidarity or understanding. The same medium that allows for widespread connections enables the proliferation of individualized niches in which we may choose to limit our interactions to other self-chosen insiders.

A decade ago, rival theorists read the geopolitical situation as either the "end" of dialectical world-history via the triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy, or as the build-up to a prolonged "Clash of Civilizations" as the fires of ancient antagonisms reignited following the end of the Cold War. It seems somewhat nearer the mark to say that, at present, all forms of human community take their shape from within mutually reinforcing, yet unevenly experienced, trends toward cosmopolitanism and tribalism (or, more diplomatically, homogenization and heterogenization). Cultural theorist John Tomlinson's description of globalization as "complex connectivity" gets at this multivalent reality.

Theologians have often traced the roots of the present ecumenical impasse to the atomizing epistemology and politics of liberal modernity, which have debilitated the theological integrity of confessional traditions and spawned voluntarist forms of Christianity that can pledge no more than ad hoc fidelity to historic doctrines, practices, and structures. The legitimate insights of such readings should not be discounted -- the widespread acceptance of a right to individual religious agency over the past few centuries is certainly a crucial part of the story. However, theological reflection on the church must also attend to the ways in which various embedded technologies have dramatically altered the nature of our relationship to physical distance (and our notions of "space" generally). "Complex connectivity" brings with it difficult to discern cultural, economic, and political effects that shape the church's (or churches') contemporary participation in the Triune God's "ministry of reconciliation" (I Cor. 5:21).

My primary concern is to show how and why theological reflection on the church should incorporate analysis of the ways in which certain forms of community are both enabled and highly constrained by our highly networked form of life. The issues raised by this kind of study are bewilderingly complex, and I cannot hope to offer comprehensive strategies for dealing with all of them. However, I will focus on how this reading illuminates the situation of the small tribe of "catholic Baptists" who are trying to combine identification with Baptist history and specific Baptist communities with the recovery of a more ecclesial and sacramental theology and spirituality by locating themselves within the broadly construed "great tradition" of Christian theology rooted in the classic ecumenical creeds.

This study is in many ways an attempt to show how "complex connectivity" makes such a tension-filled stance both possible and theologically intelligible. Theological engagement with globalization and its cultural dynamics suggests that -- despite the fact that their very existence contradicts the unity of the church -- historic denominations, confessions, and churches are some of the increasingly rare social spaces able to provide the (spatial) conditions for the possibility of the complex, encountered relationships and differences in and through which reconciled and reconciling communion (koinonia) becomes incarnate.

James McClendon has argued that the baptist vision (with a lowercase “b” to include a variety of free church groups) is not limited to the themes of biblicism, liberty, discipleship, community, or mission. Rather, it is most fully expressed in a particular hermeneutical principle: “shared awareness of the present Christian community as the primitive community and the eschatological community. In a motto, the church now is the primitive church and the church on judgment day” (Ethics, 30). For him, an account of baptist ethics—and therefore Baptist ethics—must resist the temptations of reductionism (e.g., an ethics of decision) and universalism (e.g., an ethics for the world). On the contrary, it should conform to the overarching narrative of a specific community, that is, the gathered church. As the biblical narrative possesses character, setting, and plot, so he emphasizes embodied witness, communal watch-care, and the way of the Lord—what he calls the “three strands” of Christian morality.

McClendon’s Ethics offers a compelling vision that warrants careful consideration and appropriation, but it also requires critical evaluation and extension. For example, what about the non-narrative parts of Scripture such as the psalms, proverbs, and epistles? He focuses on the Pentateuch and the historical books in the Old Testament and the Gospels and Acts in the New Testament, but there are other genres that should be included in a treatment of ethics that makes the Bible central. In addition, what about the crucial role of prayer in the moral formation of believers? He rightly stresses the importance of the remembering signs—baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and preaching—but he leaves room to wonder how other practices might also fit within his scheme.

I propose one way of answering these questions by bringing McClendon’s work into conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s treatise on the Psalms, The Prayerbook of the Bible. This is appropriate for at least two reasons. First, the initial epigraph of McClendon’s book comes from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics (15). In fact, McClendon structures his entire monograph around this quote in which he detects the presence of his “three strands.” Second, he uses Bonhoeffer’s life as an example of theological biography in his seventh chapter (193-212). Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran, but the influence of African-American Baptists and his commitment to discipleship allow McClendon to include him as a baptist theologian (with a little “b”). Both points show how deep and abiding was Bonhoeffer’s influence upon McClendon, though The Prayerbook of the Bible is never cited and does not appear in the bibliography.

This paper consists of three major sections. In the first part, I present McClendon’s understanding of the ethical significance of rules, practices, and narratives, using the Ten Commandments (Exod 20; Deut 5) as an illustration. The individual commands are rules that govern assumed practices, which in turn are embedded within Israel’s larger story with God.

In the second part, I explain Bonhoeffer’s proposal for praying the Psalms. By teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9-13), Jesus Christ not only gave his followers a model prayer; he also instructed them in the proper way to pray the Psalms. The Psalms are human words, but they are also God's words, given to the church to speak back to God in obedience. Here I show the tight fit with McClendon’s program. By means of the baptist vision, the contemporary church sees itself as the first disciples of Jesus learning to speak to God. Since Baptists have no formal prayer book apart from the Bible, the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer serve as rules that govern the implicit practice of praying the Psalms, which, by means of the superscriptions, are embedded in the story of David’s life with God.

In the third part, I move beyond McClendon and Bonhoeffer to draw out the ethical implications of Baptist prayer, using the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt 6:12). In the immediate context, Jesus understands these “debts” as “trespasses,” which his disciples must forgive in order to obtain forgiveness. This suggests an approach to praying the imprecatory psalms of the Psalter. If we are to pray to the God of David, we must pray about our enemies, but our Lord insists that praying against our enemies is praying against ourselves, and, conversely, praying for our enemies is praying for ourselves. For Baptists, then, biblical prayer both requires and enables a life characterized by radical forgiveness.

The appraisal of U. S. Baptist contributions to theological ethics is integrally tied to Baptist practices of race relations. Moreover, the very telling of the history of Baptists is thoroughly intertwined with assumptions about race. In this paper I propose to argue that race is entrenched in Baptist theological ethics and Baptist historiography in ways that remain to be acknowledged and engaged. I will further identify Christological, ecclesiological, pneumatological, and eschatological contributions toward decentering whiteness in Baptist theological ethics.

To a great extent, one can identify groups of Baptists in the United States by the controversies that divide them. No controversies reach more deeply into Baptists theological and historical identity than the ones growing out of racism. Among white Baptists, the division into separate northern and southern organizations remains a nexus of Baptist identity, surrounded by various ideological constructions. Even more importantly in both the North and South, the existence of the various black Baptist organizations along with other ethnic Baptist organizations marks the continuing and powerful influence of race on the history and theological ethics of Baptists.

Stanley Hauerwas has argued that it was in the early twentieth century that Christian theological ethics became a problem unto itself. Among the founders of the field of Christian Ethics, which had earlier been known as Christian Sociology, was T. B. Maston. He and his younger contemporary, Henlee Barnette, both served in lengthy careers in Southern Baptist institutions, training thousands of ministers. Many have already acknowledged the engagement of these white Southern Baptists with racial issues in society. They, along with a few other figures, illustrate that the emergence of a minority voice among white Baptists challenging racism in the South parallels the new recognition of Christian Ethics as a field of study for ministry students in Baptist institutions of theological education. Some examination of this beginning can contribute to an analysis of Baptist theological ethics.

Much recent Baptist historiography has made “Baptist distinctives” a primary hermeneutical tool of historical research and writing. One can argue that the distinctives represent the particular, even partisan, visions of Baptist identity tied to denominational bureaucracies or denominational elites engaged in self-promotion in the midst of controversy. Enumerated lists of distinctives serve to distinguish orthodox and heterodox theologies and practices, whether overtly or covertly. In addition, such distinctives privilege a particular set of controversies as central to Baptist theological ethics while marginalizing other controversies as being remote from the Baptist center or mainstream. Too often, accounts of Baptist history relegate the divisions between black and white Baptists to the margins. Such an approach infers the assumption that nothing about being Baptist is relevant to the persistence of racism or racial division in Baptist churches and their practices. Thus, it behooves contemporary theologians to examine the possibility that white identity affects the production of some streams of Baptist theological ethics.

Examining the work of selected recent Baptist theological ethicists can shed light on this issue. A number of theologians’ work will contribute to this argument, such as some of the following. J. Deotis Roberts decades ago challenged the “whitenized” theology of the U. S. churches. James Evans addresses the praxiological significance of theological reflection in black churches. James McClendon interrogates the theological practices of black churches as a corrective to an Enlightenment dualism of body and mind and to misdirected hermeneutics of dispensational theologies. Glen Stassen and Ken Sehested have drawn together peacemaking and reconciliation as central ethical concerns. Emilie Townes has articulated the relationships of health, illness, and disease to communities, race, class, and gender.

Recent interviews I have conducted with ministers in black Baptist churches will also contribute to an understanding of Baptist theological ethics which can acknowledge the entrenched position of race in Baptist theological ethics and articulate the sometimes overlooked content of Baptist theological ethics in marginalized settings. These resources will, among many themes, rely heavily on Christological, ecclesiological, pneumatological, and eschatological reflection for Baptist theological ethics.

This essay will examine religious liberty in the United States in order to show that its implications for Christian ethics, particularly the Baptist ethical consciousness, are theologically and practically under-explored. In short, it will argue that the failure to consider religious liberty as a complex (rather than simple) good that produces pluralism and undermines moral formation has left Baptists and other Christians without a coherent identity or ethical voice. Further, it will argue that overcoming this underside will require sustained theological reflection on the relationship of ethics to ecclesiology.

The heart of this study will be a comparison of Baptist and Roman Catholic engagements with religious liberty in America. Due to their influence on its development in the colonies and inclusion in the Bill of Rights, Baptists have rightly located religious liberty at the center of our tradition and claimed it as our “trophy.” Yet the heirs of Roger Williams, John Leland, and Isaac Backus have not proven adept at negotiating the situation produced by their advocacy. No longer in a position of dissent, Baptists were the first to apply the democratic spirit of the early republic to our congregations. In a culture infused by Protestant morality, we saw no need for an articulated ecclesiology. In fact, we saw that culture’s existence as a vindication of Baptist principles, but the Civil War and industrialization ended its hegemony in the North and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy marked the beginning of the end in the South.

Recent Baptist conflict has stemmed in part from differing responses to this breakdown, which typically involve a reworked version of the same dichotomy or the reassertion of an “authentic” tradition rooted in Calvinist doctrine or “distinctives” such as soul competency. The burden of this paper, then, is to reveal the neglect of social and political factors that have been far more corrosive to Baptist identity and parallel assumptions that have held Baptist ethics captive. For example, a growing number of Christians affiliate not with any ecclesial body or tradition but with congregations and media personalities that reflect their needs and desires. The illusion of choice, in turn, obscures the influence of the militaristic nation-state and the unrestrained market economy. In short, the challenge facing Baptists (and Baptist ethicists) is not the loss of individuality; Martin Marty was correct in claiming that American Christianity has undergone “baptistification.” Rather, the challenge is that we have lost our sense of what James McClendon termed “a shared and lived story.”

The Catholic Church has a very different history of grappling with religious liberty; indeed, its theoretical rejection of this principle long made it the object of Baptist polemics. “Americanists” such as John Ireland, John Keane, and Denis O’Connell challenged the Church’s position, only to be rebuked by Leo XIII. Not until Vatican II and the Declaration on Religious Freedom did Catholic teaching shift definitively. In fact, historians have traced an “Americanist tradition” of accommodation to religious liberty that culminated in the postwar culture of Protestant-Catholic-Jew and the political theology of John Courtney Murray. Murray sensed that the ethical consensus required by the American “public philosophy” was endangered by the transition from religious to moral pluralism, but his methodology reflected a pragmatism that can do little more than hope for a rational convergence in public discourse.

A product of neo-scholasticism and the Catholic subculture, Murray took much about identity and moral formation for granted and did not foresee the trajectory of American Catholicism, as the subculture dissolved and conservative and liberal theologians began a struggle over the council’s vision that trickled down to every level of the church. Today Catholics of all ideological persuasions recognize an identity crisis, and many see only the nation-state as necessary to maintain whatever vision happens to emerge from the moral pluralism Murray anticipated. This development mirrors the experience of Protestants, who no longer generate moral consensus among themselves, let alone the public. In short, Catholics have been “baptistified.”

This paper will illustrate this shared and tenuous existence by analyzing moments such as immigration and Know-Nothing nativism, the school movements and Blaine Amendments, and a comparison of Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech with John F. Kennedy’s campaign address to Houston ministers. Finally, it will contend that those who embrace religious liberty must also recognize its complexity. One way to do so is to reflect on the intersection of freedom with ecclesiology; another is to consider how the church should respond when the will of the majority conflicts with Christian ethics. This task will involve interaction at multiple levels, beginning with local congregations in which shared commitments are likely to emerge and including Baptist ethicists who engage in a process akin to aggiornamento and ressourcement. For example, if soul competency implies, in McClendon’s words, “the rejection of violence as the basis of community,” then they can call upon resources from past and present in order to question whether religious liberty is tied to liberal democracy and to renew a communal identity more important than loyalty to the idea of “America.”

In The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today, Charles Marsh makes a passing critique of Josiah Royce’s use of the phrase “the beloved community” asserting that Royce’s particular use of the phrase “gave voice to the essence of Protestant ethical religion; the beloved community shimmers with liberal hopes of human progress and perfectibility.” March continues by saying that what one needs to know about God, for Royce, “is discovered in ethical religion, slightly adjusted for churchgoers in capitalist economies.” Marsh goes on to contrast that use of “the beloved community” with Martin Luther King’s use of the phrase arguing that King’s use of “the beloved community” is not determined by the virtue of “loyalty” (as it is for Royce) but rather by the cross of Jesus Christ. Marsh finds this particular use of “the beloved community” in King’s “Paul’s Letter to American Christians.”

While I find Marsh’s reading of King and his ecclesiology both powerful and wonderful, especially for thinking about the possibility for a Baptist ecclesiology, I also think there is more in Royce’s own use of “the beloved community” that has promise for a Baptist ecclesiology. It may be that Marsh’s emphasis on the differences between King and Royce mistakenly overshadows a deep similarity between King and Royce. Both King and Royce offer profound readings of the Apostle Paul’s epistles, and one of the strengths of their readings of Paul is that neither of them approach his epistles – or the Bible in general – with the methods of fundamentalism or higher criticism. Both King and Royce approach and read Paul’s epistles in ways that are found in a pragmatist logic of scripture.

There is an implicit pragmatism in King’s biblical hermeneutics, and it is found in his logic of scripture that is best described as “the baptist vision.” But Royce explicitly applies Peircean pragmatism to the development of a biblical hermeneutics, and it is from his biblical hermeneutics and interpretation theory that his ecclesiology is developed. In other words, Royce’s use of “the beloved community” is only intelligible within the context of how interpretation works for Royce. So while I do agree with Marsh that Royce has been received in the way that Marsh says, namely through Walter Rauschenbusch’s adoption of Royce for his own ecclesiology, I think it is necessary for us to test that reception of Royce. In order to test it, there needs to be an examination of how interpretation works for Royce.

Interpretation, for Royce, is the primary task of philosophy because philosophy serves to make explicit the conditions that need to be in place in order for there to be interpretation at all. Because of this description of philosophy, philosophy itself can be described as a “general science of hermeneutics.” Not only is interpretation philosophy’s primary task, but philosophy itself is a normative discipline because it legislates “the conditions under which interpretation should take place.” And the “most general normative horizon” (Robert Corrington’s phrase) is found in the community of interpreters.

Who are the community of interpreters for Royce? The community of interpreters is the church for Royce. It is when Royce talks about the church that he introduces the phrase “the beloved community.” The goal of “interpretive activity” is to produce “the Beloved Community,” and “the Beloved Community” is the church universal. And the church universal is the body of Christ; it is an eschatological community that is, at the same time, the community of interpretation in the present. There is thus an “inner telos” of the community of interpreters that is Christ and Christ’s eschatological body. It is in this sense that the church is the body of Christ.

Royce’s use of “the beloved community,” therefore, might have more theological resemblance with King’s own use of “the beloved community.” Perhaps more importantly, however, I entertain how Royce’s use of “the beloved community” might serve as an ecclesiology for Baptists because the church, as the community of interpretation, is produced through the “interpretive activity” of reading Paul’s epistles together and becoming the body of Christ for the world. I find that Royce’s emphasis on the community of interpretation and the relationship between the church and interpreting the Bible promising philosophically and theologically for Baptists who emphasize “the baptist vision” because “the baptist vision” attempts to locate the church “now” with the church “then” in the New Testament – which Royce provides an account of in his reading of Paul’s epistles.

What is the relationship between Christian faith and the practice of racial reconciliation? How might one’s choice of what neighborhood she will live in impact her ability to befriend members of another race? How does one choose who her neighbors will be? How might a Baptist’s understanding of the reconciling work of Jesus Christ shape her decision about which church community she will join? What role might Baptists and Baptist communities of faith play in the work of racial reconciliation in the United States in the coming decade? The author of this essay presupposes that practices of reconciliation constitute an important part of the missio dei. Since the work of Jesus Christ made possible the reconciliation of creation with God, Baptists today are called to continue the reconciling work of the Son.

Undoubtedly, one of the greatest divisions in the United States both historically and today includes the division based on race. Even after the Civil Rights era and the end of legally-enforced racial segregation, the practice of voluntary segregation exists today in many arenas of American public life, including most Baptist churches. Since many contemporary black and white Baptists have some choice as to which neighborhood they will inhabit and which church community they will affiliate with, the normative practice of voluntary segregation today begs the question, Do voluntarily integrated Baptist churches in the United States today offer a more faithful witness to the reconciling work of Jesus Christ than do voluntarily segregated Baptist churches?

The hypothesis of this essay will be that the general answer to that question is yes. In order both to combat the pervasive (frequently sub-conscious) prejudices of racism and to foster the work of racial reconciliation, concrete practices of cross-racial relationship-building will be required. Instead of exploring the practices of racial reconciliation among black and white Baptists in the abstract, though, I propose to describe the witness of a white Baptist named Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who, along with his wife Leah, answered a calling in 2002 to relocate his domicile to a predominantly black neighborhood in Durham, N.C. and to join a historically black Baptist congregation in that neighborhood called St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church. My contention will be that Wilson-Hartgrove’s story serves as an embodied witness to the Messiah who “…is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”[1]

Drawing largely on Wilson-Hartgrove’s book Free to Be Bound, I will explore how his witness challenges the dominant presuppositions and motivations that underwrite the choices that many Baptists (and many other Christians) in the United States make when they choose what neighborhood they will live in and what church community they will join. Rather than allowing motivations of comfort, safety and social status to dominate our choices, Wilson-Hartgrove’s vocation serves as a challenge to white Baptists in the United States to view their domiciliary and ecclesial choices as moral tasks that involve probing questions such as, How might my choice of neighborhood witness well to the reconciling peace of Jesus Christ? How might my choice of congregational affiliation best witness to the reconciling peace of Jesus Christ? Whom (which neighbors) will I choose to serve and why? I will conclude by proposing that because of the frequent historical exclusion of blacks from full fellowship in white Baptist churches, today it is incumbent upon white Baptists who have discerned a call to participate in the hard work of racial reconciliation to relocate from their white Baptist church to the nearest black Baptist church and to consider the possibility of moving domiciles if that would enable them to knit their lives more closely to those with whom they worship.

Surely, such domiciliary and ecclesial relocation would require the kind of patience and courage named by the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Similar virtues of hospitality would also be required of the black Baptist churches that would choose to welcome white Baptists into their fellowship. The theological practices of relocation described in Wilson-Hartgrove’s book offer cogent examples of how cross-racial friendships become possible through the joyfully arduous work of living and worshiping in inter-racial Christian community. Thus, because such friendships indispensably condition possibilities for racial reconciliation, they touch on one of the most important issues in Baptist ethics today.

[1] Ephesians 2:14. NRSV. Although I recognize that the author of Ephesians was referring to the Jews and the Gentiles when he described the two groups who Jesus made into one, I hope it is not too far of an isogetical stretch to see Jesus’ work of breaking down the dividing wall between those groups as a generative example of the reconciliation that Jesus has made possible between black and white Americans.

For several years, Shorter College has had a growing interest in globalization.  It has been the hope of the college to produce “global citizens” who bring Shorter College to the world and who bring the world to Shorter College.  This goal should perhaps come with a warning label which reminds “be careful what you wish for, you sometimes get it.”  As Colin Powell has observed, producing global citizens contributes to peace and understanding in the world.[1]  It may produce a better informed and more understanding person.  For a young person of faith, however, with a thoroughly modern world view in a postmodern world, it can create a crisis of conscience that educators must shepherd them through. 

The thesis of this project is that voices from Baptist tradition (e.g., Roger Williams and John Leland) serve as archetypes for understanding and respecting various worldviews from a Baptist perspective.  These individuals show a too often latent tradition of allowing individuals from various worldviews the right to speak.  They provide a mandate for Christian listening and provide Baptist examples that remind the students that those who listen can stand in a too often neglected tradition of religious civility.

My concern is primarily pedagogical.  The challenge for students is not to decide whether globalization needs to be taken seriously, but how best to engage it in a way consistent with a Christian worldview.  A mentor of mine defines good teaching as “making the familiar, unfamiliar and making the unfamiliar, familiar.”  In this case, professors face the additional challenge of overcoming the scary nature of the unfamiliar.  Many students perceive globalization as a threat and multicultural experiences as damaging to faith. 

While I want to avoid speaking in caricatures, one of the challenges of teaching religion at a small, denominationally affiliated, liberal arts institution in the American south is the narrow worldview one sometimes encounters in some of the students.  I do have students whose worldview is mature and whose evangelistic concerns are thoughtfully considered.  I also have students in my classes whose missional concerns clearly reflect 19th century colonialism and whose worldview has no room for differing culture or challenging perspectives.  For these students, their truth is “Truth,” and your truth is wrong and does not deserve to be heard. 

Typically, this perspective comes from their received faith tradition.  These students are convinced that their understanding of the truth is the only revelation, and they often do not even respect differing interpretations within the Christian tradition.  The idea of respecting another person’s faith is foreign to them. The world may be post-modern, but news does not travel as fast to some. 

Sometimes, however, as a result of a required study-abroad experience or a class on world religions, the students are surprised to find their faith informed by non-Christian and non-western perspectives.  It is about that time that I have to deal with a faith crisis.  A perceptive student realizes that the students might be using the teachings of Buddha as an authority to inform their Christianity.  Their new found respect for an eastern religion stands in tension with their received faith tradition.  Students wonder if it really possible to respect others whom they believe are following a corrupt religion.  As the students try to make room in their worldview for the possibility that they can respect other religious perspectives, the professor has the delicate task of trying to shepherd them through a formative time of self-discovery and maturity.

While, it is possible to approach this problem by focusing on the possible benefits of globalization: political, economic, and personal, I find that I have more success when I am able to provide examples from the student’s faith tradition, i.e., Christian, and more specifically Baptist. 

Truly global Christian education will prepare students for making a redemptive difference in the world.  Self-righteous modern colonialism can be replaced with simple attention to history.  Being a global Christian citizen requires the mature civility of Roger Williams.  It requires the respect of others that John Leland showed.  It demands truly loving neighbor as self, and it requires that if we truly wish to be heard, we must first be willing to hear.

[1]Elaina Loveland, “International Statesman: An Interview with Former U.S. Secretary of State General Colin Powell,” International Educator 16 (July/August 2007): 21–22.

To its credit, the 2008 New Baptist Covenant interrupted the flow of North American Baptist fellowshipping. It brought together 1) racially separated Baptists and 2) ideologically separated Baptists. It was, as two press writers put it, “designed to bring Baptists together across a century and a half of deep theological, political and cultural differences.”[2] It was to be reconciliation. Yet, any engagement with racial reconciliation came almost entirely from the voices of black (and Latino) Baptists in the plenary sessions and in the workshops, save a few notable exceptions. President Bill Clinton’s address on the final evening exclusively addressed the latter separation—the fundamentalist/moderate schism—rather than the racial schism. Consequently, this paper asks the following questions: Can Euro-American and African American Baptists reconcile? What impairment disables this reconciliation? If it were possible, what would the process look like for Baptists and what would it require? I will propose that racial reconciliation is not possible as long as Euro-American Baptist and African American Baptist practices of interpretation—of political hermeneutics—remain foreign to one another.

I will suggest that the reading strategies of Euro-American Baptists have been depoliticized and therefore cannot sustain the praxis of racial reconciliation. Contrarily, I will show that African American reading strategies are essentially political and as such authentically embody racial reconciliation. First, I examine various early and contemporary Baptist theological practices and speech to show that a political hermeneutic of reconciliation has been central to Baptist discipleship, but has been lost along the way. In order to flesh this out, I rely on the reading strategy James McClendon says is integral to being Baptist, a “this is that” vision which I argue is similar in many ways to Richard Hayes “paradigmatic” reading of the text.[3] Using Paul Ricouer’s notion of “text”, a notion which McClendon seems to share, I expand the object of interpretation to ‘tradition’, in this case the historic Baptist theological and social tradition. My method for analysis is itself McClendon’s “this is that” historical-paradigmatic hermeneutic or reading strategy. I apply McClendon’s interpretive vision to the Baptist tradition, sifting Baptist speech and practices in order to identify the reading strategies at work in different historic periods. Second, I suggest that a breakdown in meaning construction—or in McClendon’s thought, meaning reclamation—occurs in Euro-American Baptist interpretation concerning reconciliation. However, the breakdown occurs not in the “that” but the “this” of the hermeneutical process. As Vincent Wimbush suggests, “[E]very reading of important texts…reflects a reading or assessment of one’s own world.”[4] Thus, I argue, the absence of a thick understanding of reconciliation emerges not in the interpretive lives of early Baptists, but in 21st century Baptists’ “own world.” Third, I suggest that contemporary Baptist hermeneutic of reconciliation is insufficiently political because it is insufficiently intratextual and intertextual. Specifically, it is the depoliticized core Baptist convictions and practices, and the principles of freedom derived from them, that reveal the interpretive breakdown. They are insufficiently intertextual in that they marginalize the witness of the African American Baptists hermeneutic. They are insufficiently intratextual in that they belie an internal political logic of the Baptist story.
However, there are a few Baptists—both Euro-American and African American—who salvage the Baptist political hermeneutic of reconciliation. I will show through the activities and speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Will Campbell how being Baptist requires a political hermeneutic not simply for the sake of being political, but for the sake of discipleship.

[2] This description come from an Associated Baptist Press Article written by Robert Marus and Greg Warner, appearing on February 2, 2008.
[3] James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 32 ff., and Richard Hayes, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community Cross, New Creation (San Francisco: HarperSanfranisco, 1996), 208 ff.
[4] Vincent L. Wimbush. “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretive History” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, ed. by Stephen E. Fowl (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 70.