Dark Weeping and Light Sleeping :
Whiteness as a Doctrine of
De-Formation

Friday 1st March, 2024​

Arrivals from 9:30am for tea and coffee 

Lecture 10:00am - 12:30pm​ (including break) 

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Within the contemporary Western church and theological institutions, it is common for disciples of Jesus from a “Global Majority Heritage” to highlight their contextual particularity as an intrinsic grounding for God-talk and the Christian life as a whole. However, only recently have White Western Christians and theologians begun to reflect on their own placement regarding the colonial wound of White Western modernity.

 

In the 2024 Whitley Lecture, Tim Judson advocates an approach to theology that faces the inadvertent and invisible assumptions made by White people and White institutions in the name of a paradigmatically White Jesus. He witnesses the charge from Black theology towards White Christians. Rather than instrumentalising Blackness, he reflects on the lessons he is learning from Black thought and experience, which have been a mirror and critical friend regarding his own White subjectivity. He proposes a work of reconfiguration in order to address the heart turned in on itself racially (Whiteness), which entails a personal struggle to see, hear and perceive oneself as a disciple who is consciously White. Judson then offers a reading of Gethsemane that yields a helpful theological imaginary for White people like himself seeking to attend to this. From here, Judson proposes some of the rudimentary ways through which White churches and institutions can cultivate greater wakefulness, helping disciples to “stay awake with Christ” and resist the temptation towards racial slumber in a world that is continually racialised by Whiteness. 

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