Dark Weeping and Light Sleeping: Whiteness as a Doctrine of De-formation - Tim Judson

Introduction
Tim Judson's timely and powerful reflection on Whiteness is a deeply personal and carefully argued appeal that combines theological insights with biblical reflection. Through exploring the trauma Jesus experienced as he anticipated the cross he opens up neglected themes in the gospels' account of Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane, illuminating questions of justice and identity. This Whitley lecture demands a response that begins with sitting with the uncomfortable truth it explores.

Romilly Mark Janes, Whitley Secretary
New North Road Baptist Church. Huddersfield. 

Abstract
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. Yet, 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. 


Tim Judson (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is Lecturer in
Ministerial Formation at Regent's Park College, University of
Oxford. He also serves as Pastor of Honiton Family Church
(SWBA), Devon, having trained for Baptist ministry at Bristol
Baptist College. He is married to Becca, and they have two sons,
Micah and Boaz. Tim has written a number of journal articles
and contributions to edited academic volumes, and has recently
published Awake in Gethsemane: Bonhoeffer and the Witness of
Christian Lament (Baylor University Press, 2023). Tim is part of
the Baptists Together national racial justice hub and a member of
the International Bonhoeffer Society.

Click here for more about the Whitley lecture

Cover image: Regent's Park College, Oxford