White Supremacy with a Human Face: reflections on Australian theological education

I have been in and around theological education in Australia since 1992, when I first enrolled in a Bachelor of Theology through Whitley College and the Melbourne College of Divinity.  As far as I can tell, I was the very first Aboriginal student to successfully enrol in that hallowed institution. Unsurprisingly, working my way through the degree proved challenging. For myself, certainly, but also for my teachers and fellow students. For I was a 'difficult' student. 

On the one hand, I was academically capable and articulate in class. On the other hand, I struggled to find a home within the prevailing culture. My teachers and my class mates were overwhelmingly white and middle class. They valued being polite and avoided any discussion which might highlight white privilege or the prominence of white people in cultural violence. Matters of theology (from books written almost entirely by white Americans or Europeans) were discussed mainly in the abstract, thus indulging the white fantasy of objectivity.  Or, when discussion strayed into the personal or the biographical, it was white and middle-class worlds which were assumed to be both 'normal' and 'moral'.  Many, not all, of my comrades would shift uncomfortably in their seats when I found the courage to speak about what was normal for my family and community or to make a critique of what they assumed to be 'normal'. As a consequence, I was often taken aside by teachers and asked both to 'tone down' my contributions and to 'be respectful' of others.  At the time, I felt beaten up, misunderstood and despairing. I fell into a long and deep depression. Now, from the vantage point of years and experience, I can see that the dominant culture was simply seeking to expel and control what it understood to be a threat to its equilibrium.  

To be and feel at home in this 1990s world of Australian tertiary theological education required much more than a talent for theological reflection. You also had to possess the cultural capital that came with being white and middle class. You had to know, deep in your belly, how to navigate the cultural rules. And I didn't know. Nor could I! Because here is the cruelest fact of all about white, middle-class, theological education. It is fundamentally and structurally racist. If you suceed as an Aboriginal person, even if they give you a degree (or two, or three) you will never be seen as the equal of similarly trained white people. Even if you write books and teach with aplomb and insight and grace, your legitimacy will forever be questioned. You will always have to work harder and longer and with far less institutional, financial, and personal support than everyone else. Simply because you are blak. Simply because you will never belong to the privileged society that makes the rules. 

There's more. What I have said so far could apply, equally, to many people 'of colour'. South-East Asians. Semites. Indians and Sri Lankans.  Africans. South Americans. Pacifica people. Even Indigenous people who have come to Australia from other parts of the world. But Australia reserves an especially intense form of racism for its own Aboriginal people. For mob represent not only white society's 'other'. We represent that other which has survived colonisation and attempted genocide at the hands of the white settler community that now controls this country. We are therefore arch symbols of both the failure of colonial ambitions and the shame of its genocidal desire. We are, quite literally, white Australia's worst nightmare. As such, we attract a sense of revulsion in the white gut that runs stronger and deeper than all the more common forms of structural racism.

That is why, despite the many welcome changes that have occured in Australian theological education - despite the great influx of teachers, students, and theologies from the sub-continent, south-east Asia and the Pacific - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and perspectives are barely there at all. The best the established churches can do is Nungalinya, an institution that continues to teach theology at TAFE level because its financiers and white governors believe that we are not capable of much else.  Wontulp Bi-buya was much the same, despite having a Torres Strait Islander man as its Principal. In any case, Wontulp was closed just a few weeks ago for lack of funds.  The School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity, which sought to become a place where Aboriginal theologies were developed and taught by Aboriginal academics, was recently closed after less than three years of operations. Whilst it is true that the School 'failed' because it could not raise sufficent funds to stay operative, it is also 'failed' because that was always going to be the case. It is very clear now, if it has never been clear before, that established churches have no interest in Indigenous theologies or the development of a tertiary-educated Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander leadership. The School of Indigenous Studies was set up to fail. And now it will be blamed for its failure. Which leaves only the NAIITS programme at the Sydney College of Divinity, a programme run by a single Aboriginal academic using funds raised in north America, as the last hope for our people in Australian tertiary theological education.*

Let me be as clear as I can about what all this means.  White supremacy has a human face in Australian theological education. Its face is that of the concerned white ally who expresses sympathy and solidarity as a private individual, but who continues to occupy a secure place in a system that excludes and villifies the crucial contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers, students and theologies. It is the face of tenured white theologians who do not hesitate to appropriate the labour of untenured Indigenous theologians and to teach the theologies of the marginalised as if such theologies were their own. It is the face of white instutional moderators, bishops, presidents and principals, who agree that the theologies of Indigenous people are important, but allocate not a dollar to either employing us as tenured academics or to recruiting and supporting Indigenous students.  

There are very few Aboriginal people with research degrees in theology. There are very few tertiary-trained Aboriginal clergy or church leaders. We are marginal to society, and perhaps even more so to the established churches. Most of us do our ministries and our theological work entirely without recompense. But that is why our theology is so crucial for Christianity in Australia. We, more than anyone else, occupy the symbolic space of the crucified one, the Jesus who was driven out of town and crucified on the cross of empire.  We are those who have been exiled from our own land. We are the strangers and sojourners the colonial church can only ever pretend to be. Could it be, then, that Aboriginal people might be just the theological teachers that the church needs to learn the way of Christ? Could it be that Aboriginal theologians, who have experienced the paschal mystery in the embodied life of our own history, might be exactly the ones who can teach that path to others?  Could it be that Aboriginal theologians might instruct the church about the primacy of country and of creation to our common survival? I believe so. But belief has never been enough. What we need, also, is communal and institutional change. Trunk and root change. Some kind of revolution.

I am tired and I need to retreat a while to lick my wounds and commune with country. For I am the one who, with valued blak and white allies, founded the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity. I am one who, along with the entire Aboriginal staff of the University, was made 'redundant' just a couple of weeks ago. I am tired, and hurt, and sad once more. But I take comfort in the words of the Johannine Christ, 'If the world despises you, be aware that it despised me first' (Jn 15.18). Now, as always, and especially in the midst of this present catastrophe, we can speak from the depths of the divine experience with empire.

*An update from March 2025. NAIITS appears to have disappeared as well.

This post is dedicated to my esteemed Aunt, Dr Anne Pattel-Gray, and my cousin Ms Naomi Wolfe. Blak theologians both.

Garry Worete Deverell

August 6, 2024

On Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann's 'Dadirri'

Colonisation is not only about the annexation of land and the removal of those who live on it. It is also about the annexation and repurposing of imagination and thought. The ‘white possessive’ (a term from Aileen Moreton-Robinson) wants to own the brains and hearts of Indigenous peoples, as well as our territories and bodies. That is why the ‘welcome’ offered to Indigenous people into white institutions, especially institutions of learning, is deeply conditional. ‘You are welcome’ means ‘You are welcome so long as you submit to our (white) knowledges, our (white) epistemologies and our (white) ontologies’. Resisting the terms of that conditional welcome is fraught with difficulty because it is offered by the dominant, controlling, culture. It is a welcome backed not only institutional power, but also by the dominating imagination that animates that power. In this context, when a white teacher says ‘listen to me’, the invitation comes with a number of unspoken corollaries: ‘ . . . because I know the objective truth . . . because your truth is inadequate to the real (white) world you must face . . . because your survival as a worthwhile contributor to (white) society depends upon your listening . . .’ and so on.

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s invitation to come listen (‘dadirri’) to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is therefore deeply radical. She is not inviting (white) people into a lovely, wafty, spiritual experience with ‘nature’, for example, the kind of experience that you can also get from a (white) Buddhism that is deeply compatible with, and supportive of, (white) middle-class suburban life. She is inviting (white) people to question and relativise the very foundations of the white possessive, including its imaginative power, its epistemologies and ontologies. What Miriam-Rose means by ‘dadirri’ is a deep and sustained process of conversion, of learning and unlearning: a learning about Indigenous practices of ethical relationality with the ancestor-creators who formed the earth, with country and waterway, with animals and plants, and finally with other people; and, with that, a subsequent unlearning of (white) practises that ignore and even abuse these deeply beloved kin. 

Conversion like this will certainly never happen if Indigenous knowledges and practises continue to be seen as interesting but marginal, pretty and decorative, like a dot painting on the wall of a suburban home that is otherwise entirely european in style. Conversion only comes, I believe, when the stability and apparent ‘success’ of a particular paradigm starts to come undone. I suppose I hope that the ecological emergency that is slowly starting to penetrate (white) Western consciousness, along with the collapse and imminent implosion of (white) churchly structures and their supporting theologies, may eventually create the kind of crisis in which Christian people will eventually turn to what the world’s oldest living cultures might have to say.

Insofar as the Christian faith can be an ally in that learning and unlearning, Miriam-Rose, myself, and many others are happy to be Christian. But the Christian faith we embrace will be necessarily different from the dominant (white) ways of being Christian. Our faith remembers that Christianity arose in a colonial setting as a protest against the excesses of the Roman empire and against the Jewish leaders who collaborated with empire in their oppression of ordinary people. Our faith remembers that Jesus was a keen observer of the processes and cycles of local ecosystems, and that he counselled his hearers to attend to the lessons he observed there in the parables. Our faith remembers that Jesus blurred the difference between bread and his body, wine and his blood, all these things being, for him, a dying and a mourning by which life and joy is given anew, as much in country and ecosystem as in human community. Our faith remembers that Jesus was concerned, most of all, with the last and the least, the forgotten victims of oppressive structures and regimes. In him we see ourselves, and we hear in his message the voice of our ancestor-creators who say that life is not yet spent, that there is hope yet for a better tomorrow.

With thanks to Prof Dorothy Lee who prompted me to write something about this.

Garry Deverell

The blessing of faith

Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22.23-31; Romans 4. 13-25; Mark 8.31-38 

In the land of Israel and of Palestine there is a war. Despite the current truce, people are being killed daily, and not only those who carry weapons. Non-combatants are losing their lives also: men, women, and children. Over these past decades since the creation of Israel as a modern state many thousands of families have been left to grieve for their loved ones in numbers that most of us would find unimaginable. I remember an interview with one of those Palestinian women who survived the 1983 massacre carried out by the “Christian Militia” in southern Lebanon, a massacre that was clearly engineered by Ariel Sharon as Israeli Defence minister. With eyes that, even 18 years later, had not done with crying, she described how the militias had entered the one-room house of her family at night. They shot her father and brother immediately, and while they were still alive but helpless, proceeded to rape her mother and herself. She was only 12 years old at the time. Then, after they had killed her mother also, the militias left. 

It is these kinds of atrocities which fuel the resolve of the suicide bombers. For many there seems no better way to honour the dead than to take from the enemy ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life’. And let’s not kid ourselves here. While the war between the Israeli military and Hamas is certainly political, and certainly ethnic, it is also, and most importantly, a religious war. It is very much a religious war: a struggle between two religious laws, the law of Moses and the law of Mohammed, each striving for supremacy over the other, each claiming the land for itself in the name of the God who gave it, and each doing so to the absolute exclusion of the other. The Israeli government has said, on many occasions, that there shall be no Palestinian state while the suicide bombings continue. Hamas, on the other hand, will accept nothing less than the total exclusion of Israel from the occupied territories and beyond. And Hamas is willing to fight for that end with the only effective weapons it appears to have, the bodies of its young. How does one resolve such a deadlock? How does one break this cycle of retributive and summary justice, especially a justice that seems so deeply religious in its culture and derivation? A difficult question, a very difficult question! But one I believe to be essentially religious and theological in character. For whether the individual combatant and his or her superiors have a personal religious commitment or not, all of them speak and think and act within a complex web of religious and theological meaning. Each of them act out their sense of vengeance and of justice within a language and code that is religious to the very core. So there will be no solution to this conflict without that solution being also a religious and theological solution.

Read in the context of this clash of two religious laws, each of them claiming an exclusionary legitimacy over the other, the letter of Paul to the Romans takes on an extraordinary poignancy. For Paul writes as a Jew who sees serious flaws in the use of religious law to make any such claims. Listen to what he says to his fellow Jews in Romans chapter 2, verses 17-24:

If you call yourself a Jew and rely on the religious law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and determine what is best because you are instructed in the law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, you, then, that teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You that forbid adultery, do you not commit adultery? You that abhor idols, do you not rob sacred places? You who boast in the law, do you not dishonour God by breaking the law?

And then again, in chapter 3 verses 28-30: 

For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the religious law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not also the God of non-Jews? Yes, of non-Jews also, for God is one; and God will make righteous the Jew on the grounds of faith and the non-Jew too, through that same faith. 

Can you hear what Paul is saying here? The difficulty with believing that one’s own religious law is superior to another’s, and therefore worth opposing to that other’s by whatever means seem necessary, is simply this: that any religious law worthy of that name is impossible to keep. Its righteous demands are way beyond the capacity of even the most devoted of worshippers. Now, if that is so, then the promotion of that law as the highest law of God, the only law, the law to which all other codes must bow in submission, ends up in a profound and tragic irony. God is actually dishonoured by the ones who promulgate that law in his name. And so the law also condemns the very one who would keep it! So what is the law for, according to Paul? Not to save, he says, but to condemn. Not to exalt the one who believes in the law over those who do not, but to humble such a person to nothing beneath the impossible demands of divine justice. And doesn’t this analysis describe the situation in Israel and Palestine so very well? The Jewish law condemns the Jews for their murder, and the Islamic law condemns the Muslims for theirs. And yet the war continues, because these respective laws are applied only and exclusively to the ones perceived as the enemy! 

There is only one way beyond this tragic situation, says Paul. And that is to relinquish all belief in the efficacy of one’s religious law, whatever its contents, to establish your superiority over another. In fact, says Paul, no human being is able to claim superiority over another because all of us are justified, made righteous and whole, not by the works prescribed by the law, but by faith in the mercy of God to all, and for all. Now, this is where Paul makes a very interesting and clever move, a move that has the potential, even today, to dissolve the power of religious conflict. He invokes the story of Abraham: how God promised that he would be the father of many nations, and that his descendents would live in the land which we today call Israel or Palestine; how Abraham was made righteous and whole not by his obedience to a religious law, which has not yet been given, but by his faith in God’s promise, even when such promises seemed no more that a foolish dream. And that is how it is for us too, says Paul, whether Jew or Gentile. None of us are made righteous and whole by our obedience to a religious law, but rather by our faith in God’s merciful promise. 

Now this is really important stuff in the midst of the religious wars in the Middle East. For the three religious traditions which hold Jerusalem to be holy are also traditions which look to Abraham as the first witness to a God who is one. And Abraham, in a cycle of stories which all three traditions regard as authoritative, is one who is justified not by his obedience to the law-giving of Moses, or of Jesus, or of Mohammad, but by his faith in the merciful promise of God! Can you hear the hope in this proclamation? Can you see the potential there for demolishing the very ground which justifies this war? If Abraham is our common father in faith, witnessing to the one God in whom we all believe, then cannot Jew and Christian and Muslim sit down at table together, not as enemies, but as siblings? If we are justified and made whole not, first of all, by our obedience to the law as we find it in our particular traditions, but by our faith in God’s mercy, than can we not share, humbly, in the wonder of that gift together? And finally, if God promised Abraham that his descendents would live in the land and become a blessing to the whole world, can we not share, as daughters and sons of Abraham, in that inheritance? For the text of Genesis 17.7 is quite clear. The promise is for all Abraham’s offspring, not for Jew alone, or Christian, or Muslim. It is for all Abraham’s seed.

So, let me encourage all of you to prayer. Let us pray, along with Jews and Muslims who share these convictions, that the stories of Abraham may be read and reread in the schools and markets of the holy land. And not only there, but in the parliaments and palaces of Iran, Iraq and Libya; in Mosul where ISIL is holed up; in the White House and at 10 Downing Street; at Kiribilli and at the Lodge; and in the homes of both Meshaal & Netanyahu. Most of all, let us pray that the story of Abraham’s faith may penetrate even into the training and education of soldiers, that they may learn the lesson at the heart of all our faiths: that Shalom, the within and between peace of God, comes only to those who are willing to die – not in conflict with one’s enemy – but to the very idea of the enemy. Only by dying to the basic principles and claims of this dark world, says Jesus, may we rise with him to the peace of our Father’s kingdom.

This homily was first preached at Ormond College on the 2nd Sunday of Lent in 2009.