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Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in ecclesiology as postliberal theologians, such as Hauer was, have found it useful to ally with communitarian critics in order to promote the church as an alternative to individualism. In doing so, they have often enlisted Wittgenstein as an ally. Much of this work has been laudable, yet it seems to have been accompanied by an inability to also speak articulately about the individuals in those communities. By attending to the place of Augustine's Confessions in the Philosophical Investigations, this chapter reads Wittgenstein alongside Emerson in an attempt to distance him from the communitarians.

This chapter presents the project of liberating a concept of religion from social antagonism as the defining problematic of modern theology since the Enlightenment. It identifies two basic strategies by which Christian theology in the modern period has sought to dissociate religion from the political. The first of these, liberal universalism, has for the most part dominated the avant-garde of modern Christian thought, from the natural theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, up through the universalist fulfillment theologies of the nineteenth century, to the experiential pluralism of the twentieth. The second strategy, theological communitarianism, comes to the fore in the postliberal theology of George Lindbeck and his followers. The chapter shows that the various efforts to “depoliticize” theology and religion generally have not succeeded in this aim.

The Introduction locates the narrative roots of white supremacy and white theology and briefly states their implications for the contemporary church and world. It outlines the methods this book will use to analyze white postliberal theology and black liberation theology in order to find the tools for an ethic of responsibility to confront white supremacy. Addressing key terms and concepts like colorblindness and whiteness, it introduces the argument that all of white theology and white Christian practice are implicated in white supremacy. After summarizing the argument that follows in the book, this introduction concludes with an outline of each of the six chapters.

Chapter 3 analyzes the ways that white theology neglects race and white supremacy as topics of ethical engagement. The chapter presents the influential postliberal, witness theology of Stanley Hauerwas as an example of a theology that fuels colorblindness through its avoidance of race. This chapter argues that Hauerwas and many white theologians are indebted to the concept of tradition and a limited account of narrative that have been influenced by whiteness. This theological model hinders the ability of white theologians to see the effects of whiteness in their work. This chapter then identifies resources within Hauerwas’s work that are useful in confronting whiteness, even if Hauerwas has not deployed them to this end.