Portrait of the Theologian as an Organizer

Brown—“Ray” to his friends—was an orthodox Roman Catholic priest (Sulpician) who preached on weekday mornings across the street from Union at Corpus Christi parish. I heard him preach many times on weekday mornings before hearing him lecture the same morning. He invited me to his apartment, accepted that I didn’t talk about myself, and told me what it was like for him in his early career, a priest ordained in 1953 who lacked any inkling that Vatican II would occur. The first Catholic theologians to get an exemption from the anti-modernist encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius X were biblical scholars. In 1943, Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu called for new translations of the Bible into vernacular languages using early manuscripts instead of the Latin Vulgate, which legitimized textual criticism, permitting use of the historical-critical method within boundaries drawn by Catholic doctrine. Ray said he had clung for over a decade to Divino afflante Spiritu. It was just enough to legitimize his scholarship, until Vatican II issued the dogmatic constitution Dei verbum in 1965, which opened the door to a non-inerrancy doctrine of biblical infallibility: Scripture is infallible for its saving purpose, not in its reportage of incidental details. The first volume of Ray’s historic Gospel According to John came out the following year.

Form criticism, a method developed by German scholars Hermann Gunkel, Martin Noth, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann, classifies units of Scripture into distinct literary patterns such as poetry, proverbial saying, legend, and the like, investigating the oral transmission of each type to identify the original genre. Redaction criticism focuses on the process by which editors shape texts to achieve distinct theological or ideological purposes. German scholars Günther Bornkamm, Hans Conzelmann, and Willi Marxsen developed the redaction critical method of comparing accounts, analyzing recurrent motifs and themes, and dissecting editorial word choices and styles. In the classroom Ray paid due respect to form critics, but specialized in redaction criticism, often finding the hand of a redactor in the most innocuous-looking text. The latter discoveries could be unsettling. A few times they took my breath away, as I thought: “Oh my God, it’s all made up. It’s fiction all the way down.” But there was Ray, at the lectern in his clerical collar, delivering another load of editorial redaction, while prizing his Catholic orthodoxy and the imprimaturs that bishops stamped on his books. In the Society of Biblical Literature, for which he served as president during my year at Union, Ray occupied the middle ground, exactly where he wanted to be.

I was a sponge for his immense learning, meanwhile taking a job at an educational institute, auditing lectures by James Cone and visiting theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, and showing up for meetings and actions called by New York DSOC. Cone had recently published his major theological work, God of the Oppressed (1975), which responded to critics of his early work and surprisingly adopted MLK’s doctrine of redemptive suffering. Gutiérrez had founded Latin American liberation theology on the argument that theologians must privilege the questions and experiences of oppressed people of faith. Acts of solidarity and praxis come first; liberation theology is secondary reflection shaped by the voices of oppressed people. One day, Gustavo told his class that he had spent the past week reading Walter Rauschenbusch, a revelation to him—why don’t you Americans talk about this American treasure? That emboldened me to approach him after class, telling him that Rauschenbusch had changed my life in college, converting me to Christian socialism. To me, only King was more important than Rauschenbusch.

In October 1977, my Harvard friend Robin Lovin attended a conference in midtown, knocked on my door, and introduced me to Cornel West, who had joined the Union faculty the previous year at the age of twenty-three. I had previously seen Cornel holding forth to a sidewalk crowd at Harvard, but had not met him. He had grown up in Sacramento, California, and heard the Gospel at Shiloh Baptist Church. He cut his teeth politically at Black Panther meetings, admired Malcolm X and MLK, was hooked by Kierkegaard’s struggle with melancholia and mortality, and sailed through Harvard in three years. He entered the doctoral program in philosophy at Princeton, studying under Richard Rorty and Sheldon Wolin, and adopted Rorty’s pragmatic historicism. Wolin persuaded him to drill into the Hegelian Marxist background of the Frankfurt school, so Cornel started with a dissertation on British neo-Hegelian T. H. Green. At Union he switched to the Aristotelian aspects of Marx’s thought and switched again to the ethical values underlying Marx’s critique of capitalism and morality, meanwhile politely enduring critics who told him he didn’t deserve his faculty position. Cain Hope Felder, later a prominent biblical scholar, was a leading chastiser of Cornel; Church historian James Washington, the dearest friend Cornel ever made in the academy, was his rock and ally.

In my room, Cornel headed straight for the Kant and Hegel section. He pulled down the brand-new English edition of Hegel’s Phenomenology translated by A. V. Miller, remarked on my marginal scribblings, and asked, “Is it any good?” He meant the translation, not the Phenomenology. “Yes,” I said, “it’s wonderful, so much better than Baillie, though Miller doesn’t understand the master-slave parable; he thinks it’s pro-colonial apologetics.” Cornel burst out laughing and I thought, “Thank you, Robin; I have met Cornel West.” I knew I would savor the memory for a long time.

Running in Central Park was almost as enjoyable for me as running along the Charles River had been, just before running became a mass activity. It stunned me, years later, when I ran my old routes in Central Park alongside hundreds of others. New York City was battered, dangerous, and reeling in 1977, but all of it was new and interesting to me. I often took the subway to some distant site and ran home, learning the city by running through it. Sometimes I ran past huge piles of rubble, city blocks lacking a single building that hadn’t been torched. One night the lights went out. By the time that I gingerly descended the stairs at Columbia’s Butler Library, I could see buildings on fire and stores being pillaged. New York had careened far out of control, which didn’t stop me from loving it.

I wrote a thesis on the Kantian transcendental frame of Hegelian idealism and never considered staying at Union, since I identified Union with the trauma that brought me there. To make a new beginning, I had to move somewhere else. My frightening school debt was ironically a reason to enroll somewhere, putting off the financial reckoning. Princeton Theological Seminary was nearby, philosopher Diogenes Allen was on the faculty, and enrolling at Yale Divinity School would have required me to borrow twice as much as at PTS. So in January 1978 I rented a U-Haul in Chelsea and drove through a snowstorm to Princeton, hustling the van back to Chelsea in time for the one-day rate. That night I lay awake in my bare former room in McGiffert Hall, vowing to join a church, perhaps an Episcopal church, get on an ordination track, find a paying job in organizing, and break out of my loneliness: “It’s my own fault that I’m so lonely.”

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