Witherspoon luncheon

General Assembly 2004
Witherspoon at the Assembly

Witherspoon luncheon hears Katie Cannon's call to "ontological blackness" as a way of doing theology and renewing our witness

[6-28-04]

Sunday noon at General Assembly saw Witherspooners, and their friends and many more - some 240 altogether - gather in a ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Richmond, just across the street from the Greater Richmond Convention Center, for the annual Witherspoon Society Awards Luncheon.

The featured speaker was Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Seminary/PSCE here in Richmond. The planners of the event had asked her to address the question of "Power in the Church," since we have long believed that reality in our church's life should be an important part of the work of the Theological Task on the Peace, Unity and Purity. In fulfilling Witherspoon's request she gave a rousing talk on "The Power of Ontological Blackness in the Presbyterian Tradition," offering it as a way of understanding reality and faith through the distinctive experiences of black people in America over the centuries.

Dr. Cannon was introduced by Heather Shortlidge, a new graduate of Union/PSCE and this year's Witherspoon Wareham Intern at the Assembly, who compared her demanding classes at "high-impact aerobics."

Cannon began by posing the question of how we are to live in a world where our knowledge is so often labeled as false, or as just unprovable and so meaningless. And beyond that lies the question of how we can live faithfully as Christians when the values of our world make that kind of living absurd.

She told a story to illustrate the problem: Years ago while she was studying at Union Seminary in New York, she was going to a meeting of black Presbyterian women, wearing the clerical collar she sometimes used to help people see her as really being a minister. As she hurried through the subway tunnel she was assaulted by a white man wearing the service staff uniform of a nearby hotel. He looked at her collar and slammed her against the wall, screaming in her face, "How dare you defy Jesus Christ?"

Badly shaken, she continued on her way to the meeting. When she got there she said not a word about the attack, because she as a Christian woman of color she had learned the skills of what Alice Walker calls being "traditionally capable," because for women in her situation being a "weak-kneed wimp" is simply not an option.

The story got worse later, when she told this story to a Wall Street Journal reporter, who checked on the story and couldn't accept it as true, because the hotel from which her attacker had come no longer existed. So she learned - not for the first time - that being black and female made her automatically not credible.

But what does this mean for Witherspoon people? Gaining the strength of being traditionally capable has to do with the power of "ontological blackness," which means that if we're going to "walk to freedom and take others with us," we need to learn from the people who have been living for years - centuries - with the absurdities of slavery and all the oppression that has followed from it. This is a very different kind of knowledge from what we find in our church publications. It's the knowledge gained from enduring oppression at the hands of the ruling class - the white males.

In that very common experience we see how our personal truth is often denied by our "public fictions." In such a situation, "it is our prophetic responsibility to expose those Presbyterians who are here, there and everywhere, ... who situate themselves throughout the church in an effort to breed tensions and disruptive dissension as they repeatedly slam us against the wall howling 'How dare you defy Jesus Christ?' in their effort to cut the lifeline of our denomination." So there are presbyteries which deny ordination to those who use inclusive language, there are Presbyterians who threaten to try us for heresy, and many congregations withhold support from our national programs.

Cannon summed up her major point, saying "Whenever the church fails to take seriously the valid bodies of knowledge produced at the intersection of race, sex and class; whenever the church decides to classify the inner workings of progressive Christianity as questionable fool's gold; whenever the masterminds of intellectual imperialism encode our candid perceptions and our scholarly labors as nothing more than noisy gongs and clanging cymbals ... then we end up with Christian discipleship that is not equal. We end up with theological knowledge that is incomplete, and we end up with an ethical worldview that is devilishly distorted. Therefore - therefore - let us turn our attention, our resources, to what it means to really grapple with the power of ontological blackness in the best of the Presbyterian tradition."

First, this means that we must engage in "realistic power analysis," being willing to question precisely those ideas that have been assumed to be "beyond question." We might do this, for example, by looking seriously at the experience and the faith of early black people in America - black people who were members of Presbyterian churches as early as 1640. Gayraud Wilmore has shown us how Presbyterians of African descent refused to submit to the oppressive definitions of their place in the world.

Once this power analysis has been done, our second step is to reimagine our Christian heritage in light of the experiences that make up our ontological blackness. So as Delores Williams suggests, we must "reimagine the Good News story" that is so often read to justify the abusive power held "in high places." But the Witherspoon Society cannot do its work of advocacy, she added, "by hiding behind screens of disinterested exploration." It must begin by taking seriously the experiences of those people for whom it would advocate.

Only then, she concluded, will we "know and be able to tell the whole truth, to know and tell the whole story about how we walked to freedom, and about how it was not the first time, nor will it be the last."

Witherspoon awards presented to All Souls Presbyterian Church in Richmond, and to Dr. Doug Ottati [6-28-04]

The Whole Gospel Church Award

Witherspoon's annual Whole Gospel Congregation award was presented by Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon Issues Analyst, to the All Souls Presbyterian Church in Richmond, a congregation which was founded in 1952 as an interracial church. is remarkable in its commitment to building a community that is truly multi-racial. TeSelle described it as a church "which continues to be a church for all souls, dedicated to bringing harmony and unity to all people," adding that it is "active in the Interfaith Council of Greater Richmond, it participates in the Caritas program of shelter for the homeless, and many more."

The citation read:

The Witherspoon Society presents the Whole Gospel Congregation Award to the All Souls Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia, in grateful recognition of its commitment to building bridges of reconciliation among people of all races and ethnic groups.

The Rev. Ulysses Paine, the pastor of All Souls, in accepting the award expressed his sense of standing in a procession of congregations that have received this award in the past, and others that will receive it in the future. He reminded us of Jesus' call to his people "to follow the Word into the whole world, and as we do, let us do that with the whole Gospel in our midst."

The Andrew Murray Award

The Andrew Murray Award, which is given each year to recognize the outstanding work and witness of a Witherspoon member, was presented by the Rev. Trina Zelle to Dr. Douglas Ottati, Professor at Union/PSCE. Zelle spoke of Ottati's ability to "take a complicated idea and present it simply enough to be understood and yet keep its original meaning," which "gives us access to what once seemed arcane and obscure and maybe even hostile." "Who would've thought before Doug," she continued, "that Calvin would be a catalyst for transformation, and rather than being a dark and narrow maze, Calvinism is an interesting and graceful labyrinth leading us to the heart of God. ... So it's appropriate that the one who put the bounce back into Barth and the sizzle back into Schleiermacher - and most importantly, the capaciousness" of God that Ottati finds through Calvin, should receive this award.

The award plaque reads:

The Andrew Murray Award goes to Doug Ottati in grateful recognition of his capacious and eloquent advocacy of continuing confession and continuing reformation in our time. "Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda."

Ottati responded with thanks, adding simply that "liberal Reformed theology is not gone, it's not dead, it's back, and it's a good thing to support, and I think the major tenet of it is simply that we all belong to God's grace, no one is excluded, everyone is welcome."