In The Theological Project of Modernism, Kevin Hector of the University of Chicago Divinity School offers a nuanced and timely defense of what he sees as an unjustifiably maligned tradition in modern Christian theology. He focuses on what is commonly labeled the liberal or revisionist tradition, centered in its early stages on figures such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch, and, more recently, Paul Tillich. By carefully reconstructing key arguments from these thinkers, Hector shows not only how this trajectory hangs together as a tradition, but also how its animating impulse differs from what many critics have assumed. Hector's central claim is that this tradition is fundamentally concerned with a distinctive problem, namely, how to relate religious faith to a sense of one's life as one's own—or, put differently, how one's faith can be self-expressive. Hector labels this the problem of “mineness,” or the problem of “how persons could identify with their lives or experience them as ‘mine,’ especially given their vulnerability to tragedy, injustice, luck, guilt, and other ‘oppositions’” (viii). Hector argues that for his chosen thinkers in this tradition, faith—more specifically, faith in a God who is able to reconcile such oppositions—plays a crucial role in resolving this problem.

Here Hector builds on his previous book, Theology without Metaphysics, which tied concerns about faith and self-expression to a tightly focused argument about the relationship between God and language.Footnote ¹ Rather than setting God apart from human language, as some recent theologians have proposed, Hector argued there for a theology that sees God making use of language and that situates talk about God within a process of human self-expression and mutual recognition. In The Theological Project of Modernism, by contrast, Hector offers a broad historical narrative, drawing on modern theological figures from Kant to Tillich in order to vindicate the central aims of the liberal or revisionist tradition. In developing his story of modern theology with an emphasis on faith and mineness, Hector deploys his own narrative in order to counter those typically offered by the tradition's critics.

Hector starts off the book, in the preface, with the concession that modern theology, understood in terms of this Kant-to-Tillich trajectory, is not especially popular these days, and he then quickly sketches what he takes to be a prevalent but flawed account of what animates this tradition, as well as several pointed objections that have been raised against this theological outlook. According to what Hector calls the “customary account,” modern theology developed in order to cope with the emerging threats that natural science, historical criticism, and religious conflict presented for traditional belief, and it did so by turning to reason as the way to establish “a new, secure basis for belief,” thereby offering up “universal, lawlike principles,” as contrasted with “the particular, accidental principles handed down by custom and tradition” (vii). It is this enthronement of a universal reason over against the particularities of custom and tradition that Hector sees as a common feature in the historical narratives offered by critics of modern theology.

In assessing these narratives, Hector focuses on a cluster of criticisms that have arisen from some of the most important and influential conversations in Christian theology over the past several decades. One conversation, deeply shaped by the work of Karl Barth, is the ongoing debate between those often labeled liberals or revisionists, on one side, and postliberals, on the other.Footnote ² Barth and many of those influenced by him have cast modern theology's purported enthronement of human reason as a threat to divine sovereignty—that is, as an attempt to put the human in place of God. In noting this concern, Hector specifically invokes Barth, who told such a story in his vast survey, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Discussing many of the same thinkers that Hector features—Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Ritschl, among others—Barth argued that such figures, despite their differences, ultimately shared an anthropocentric, rather than theocentric, outlook.Footnote ³ Hector glosses Barth's objection as the worry that “insofar as it subordinates God, Jesus, faith, etc. to human reason, modern theology commits idolatry” (vii).

In addition to this criticism, associated with Barth and more recent postliberal theologians, Hector identifies a further strand of criticism rooted in the conversations of contextual theologians, who have done much to challenge modern theology's Eurocentrism. As Hector puts it, the latter objection holds that “that which modern theology takes to be universal is actually just a particular historical-cultural perspective, namely that of white European intellectuals,” and thus “what these intellectuals saw as Universal Reason. . . was just what was taken for granted as reasonable by those who belonged to their particular context” (viii). Here Hector specifically mentions the work of J. Kameron Carter, who has argued in his recent book, Race: A Theological Account, that the tradition of modern theology in which thinkers such as Kant and Tillich figure prominently has supported the privileging of “whiteness,” which is deeply intertwined with the phenomenon of modernity itself, understood in terms of “the political and pseudotheological significance ascribed to whiteness as the basis of Western civilization.”Footnote ⁴ Carter also argues that this tradition has played a role in “forgetting the everyday practices of people in their real worlds of pain, suffering, poverty, and death.”Footnote ⁵ It should be mentioned, however, that while Carter shows some sympathies with Barth, in contrast to figures such as Kant and Tillich, he maintains that all sides in the debate between liberals and postliberals have failed to reckon adequately with whiteness as a theological problem.

If Barth indicts the purported idolatry of modern theology, Carter's indictment centers on its dismissal of particularity and vulnerability, and of all that remains outside the privileged domain of whiteness. Hector's strategy, in response, is to show that the trajectory of modern theology from Kant to Tillich understands faith and mineness in ways that do not easily fall prey to these criticisms, and I think that in many respects he succeeds. He sees in this tradition an affirmation that faith allows one to identify with one's life, but the charges of idolatry and a disregard for particularity and vulnerability do not easily hold against faith and mineness so construed.

As indicated in the book's preface, the central thrust of Hector's response to the charge of idolatry is that these thinkers do not simply treat God as “a mere instrument for solving humanity's problems,” since, “for most modern theologians, the human predicament and the divine solution were both understood in theological terms, as a mark of our fallenness and of justification by grace, respectively” (viii–ix). Thus Barthian claims about modern theology's rejection of divine sovereignty, and its replacement with a thoroughgoing anthropocentrism, miss much of what drives these thinkers. In responding to the charges regarding a dismissal of particularity and vulnerability, Hector emphasizes the attention modern theologians have given to obstacles posed by tragedy, injustice, guilt, and the vicissitudes of fortune. He also stresses how the mineness required of faith involves both the attempt to identify with one's life in light of those obstacles or oppositions, and dependence on a God through whom all oppositions can be reconciled. Hector holds, then, that “something crucial has been left out of the prevailing account, since modern theologians were in fact chiefly concerned with that which they supposedly overlook, namely the vulnerability and particularity of humanity, as well as our dependence upon justification by grace” (ix). In addition, he suggests in the preface that contemporary theologians sharing these concerns about the vulnerability of humanity and dependence on God could find more in common with modern theology than they might expect, and this is a point to which Hector returns at the end of the book.

In terms of the book's structure, Hector helpfully introduces the key moves of his argument in the preface, then devotes one chapter to a more comprehensive treatment of faith and mineness, and from there proceeds to a series of rich, detailed chapters on specific thinkers. Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel each receive individual chapters, followed by a combined chapter on Ritschl and Troeltsch. The book ends with a final chapter on Tillich that also includes concluding remarks defending Hector's chosen tradition as a whole, and gestures toward how the tradition could be brought into further conversation with contemporary contextual theologies. I am persuaded by much of Hector's narrative and also his suggestions about its implications and relevance for contemporary theology, especially for contextually-oriented theologies. In considering his narrative and its implications in what follows, I will highlight two sets of questions. The first set has to do with Hector's selection of thinkers and whether, despite the many similarities between them that Hector identifies, he could have more fully assessed their differences, and also whether he gives adequate attention to how one might sort out whose arguments are more persuasive in cases where they disagree. The second set of questions has to do with how this tradition can be relevant—and has already been relevant—for contemporary work, and for contextual theologies in particular.

Before turning to these questions, though, I must attend to Hector's fuller account of faith and mineness in chapter 1, since this account provides a schematic structure used to organize the comparison of thinkers in subsequent chapters. This chapter is also where Hector draws on the resources of analytic philosophy, including recent literature on topics such as intention and narrative. As he notes in the preface, this helps to explain the book's inclusion in Oxford's Analytic Theology series, which features work bringing tools of analytic philosophy to bear on topics in Christian theology. In setting out his aims in chapter 1, where he will draw on such tools, Hector helpfully observes that mineness, for his purposes, refers to a sense of one's life as one's own, as bearing one's own stamp, “rather than as something imposed upon or merely happening to one” (1), and hence “to count as ‘mine’. . . one's life must not only hang together, but do so in a way that one can experience it as self-expressive” (2). This means that my life is not yet truly my own, or mine in the relevant sense, if it just meets the minimal standard of belonging to me, not to someone else—that is, if the events in it are happening to me, rather than to some other person. Rather, mineness in Hector's sense obtains only if my life meets the higher standard of being a life that I can intend and identify with as genuinely my own—a life expressing something of my own self. He persuasively shows, in addition, that a life possessing mineness in this sense involves a narrative structure, in which its parts can be connected together coherently—as parts that reflect my own intentions—rather than as a disjointed sequence of events.

As Hector already observed back in his preface, there are also circumstances or obstacles that can threaten such a life. Yet there can nevertheless be, he argues, a role for faith, which can “relativize such circumstances and thus enable one to identify with one's life even in the face of them” (3). Here in chapter 1, Hector presents faith in rather Tillichian language, as the commitment to there being “something more ultimate” (23) than these threatening circumstances. He explains that faith presents an alternative to other ways of responding to obstacles—such as becoming resigned to the fact that my life will not be able to reflect my intentions and will not be truly my own, or deciding to revise my intended narrative in hopes that I will be able to recover a sense of mineness, or trying to live in such a way that I am no longer vulnerable to the obstacles that threaten my intentions. He also notes that his Tillichian language is mere shorthand in this early chapter, to be filled out in more detail later, and hence he does not intend to deny connections to other construals of faith, such as Schleiermacher's claim about “feeling oneself to be absolutely dependent upon the Whence of that dependence,” or even “Luther's claim that to have a god is to trust in one with one's whole heart” (24). What Hector takes to be distinctive about faith's appeal to a sense of ultimacy, regardless of the specific language used to define faith, is that it involves facing such obstacles—rather than denying them, or trying to make oneself invulnerable to them—while holding the commitment that one's life can be, or could at some point be, one's own. Here he invokes the role of faith in the American Civil Rights movement, especially as articulated in Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which offers a sense of how persons suffering from injustice may nevertheless see themselves as created and loved by God and hence as capable of resisting unjust racist narratives.Footnote ⁶

Although faith, so understood, can do valuable work in helping me become reconciled to my life as my own—to see my life, despite threatening circumstances, as in some way expressive of my own intentions rather than being merely imposed upon me—Hector notes that concerns can still arise about whether such a faith is itself truly mine. For, like other aspects of my life, including my intentions and my narratives of how my life might hang together, “faith, too, may be merely given to one rather than truly one's own, or it may appear to be a form of wishful thinking, or to be at odds with one's true self, and so on, in consequence of which faith seems to be one of the phenomena that must be integrated into one's self-narratives, rather than something suited to maintain those narratives” (24). Thus Hector proposes near the end of chapter 1 that faith, properly understood, must not only play a role in helping me to identify with my life—to take my life as truly mine—but must itself be something with which I can identify. He maintains, moreover, that the modern theological tradition running from Kant to Tillich is occupied precisely with this set of concerns about how to relate faith and mineness. He ends the chapter by suggesting that each of these chosen thinkers gives an account not only of how a life would have to hang together as one's own, despite threatening obstacles or oppositions, but also of how God is “the one by whom such oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one's life will ultimately hang together,” and of “what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too” (25). This way of framing things gives Hector a common language and schematic structure for approaching individual thinkers in the chapters that follow.

In chapters 2–6, Hector proceeds to show how this common schematic structure is present in each of his chosen thinkers. In chapter 2, he argues that for Kant, concerns about mineness are articulated in terms of how one can identify with one's life given the opposition between the realms of nature and morality, as well as the corruption of one's own will in a way that turns against morality's demands; faith comes into play through the commitment to a moral God who governs nature as well as the moral realm and who can regard one as righteous in spite of a corrupted will. Hector turns to Schleiermacher in chapter 3, where mineness is construed in terms of how to establish a self-expressive harmony despite the opposition of freedom and dependence, and this harmony is achieved through faith in a God upon whom such freedom and dependence both absolutely depend. Chapter 4 shows that for Hegel, the challenge of mineness is that of maintaining self-unity in the face of what is other to, or over against, oneself—whether in the form of objects beyond the self, or others who deny one recognition, or authoritarian moral codes—and faith involves the relation to a God who takes on and thereby overcomes otherness. Ritschl and Troeltsch are treated together in chapter 5; for them mineness entails that one can find one's life integrated as a personally-formed whole, in spite of the dominion of nature and other oppositions, and faith in God allows one to organize one's life as such a whole. Lastly, Hector closes the book with chapter 6, on Tillich, for whom mineness and faith are related in the process of overcoming estrangement and developing an integrated relationship to oneself and God.

Such a cursory summary of these chapters cannot do justice to their rich contents, but as I shift now to a consideration of two sets of questions that the book raises, I will give more attention to some of Hector's key claims. The first set of questions has to do with how Hector connects together his chosen trajectory of modern theology as a coherent tradition and how the similarities among thinkers might be weighed against their differences. Hector makes a detailed, persuasive case that focusing on faith and mineness helps to highlight and clarify many of the central argumentative moves these thinkers make, while also illuminating how these concerns are shared across thinkers. Given their dense argumentation and specialized vocabulary, it would easily be possible to get lost in the work of any one of these thinkers and thus to miss the many fruitful connections that Hector is able to draw. By working at a fairly high altitude and using the common language of faith and mineness to focus on broad structural features that these thinkers share, Hector can detect patterns that might have been missed if he had surveyed these thinkers from a certain height. Moreover, Hector makes an important case for why Kant and Hegel—frequently read more as philosophers than as theological thinkers—belong within this tradition and have insightful contributions to make about how faith and mineness can be brought together.Footnote ⁷ As Hector himself notes, another benefit of offering a broad historical narrative of this kind is to be able to show that thinkers in this tradition may have more in common than they themselves often recognized. Referring to Hegel, Hector observes that his project shares much with those of Kant and Schleiermacher—“more surely, than Hegel himself seemed to realize” (126)—and the same could be said for other thinkers as well. By highlighting how, for each thinker, faith plays a role in reconciling oppositions—despite differences in how those oppositions might be understood and the specifics of how that reconciliation occurs—Hector is able to uncover a kind of deep structure that unifies the tradition.

Yet it is worth considering why, exactly, Hector chose these thinkers and not others. It is clear that his choice of thinkers reflects a commonly recognized lineage of liberal or revisionist theology—a lineage which reflects the widespread assessment that something does bind together this Kant-to-Tillich trajectory. However, Hector avoids referring to this tradition as liberal or revisionist in its aims, and the most substantial comment he offers about why he has chosen these thinkers is his remark, in chapter 1, that his strategy has been “to read and think about several figures almost universally recognized as belonging to the class ‘modern theologians,’ and only then to determine what project—if any—these figures have in common” (2). Just before this remark, he lists a number of thinkers he includes within the trajectory of modern theology, and he includes all of the figures featured in later chapters. Yet he also lists Barth, along with F. C. Baur. Given the strategy Hector lays out, I found myself asking why he would initially list Barth, but then not give him this own chapter as a member of the tradition, alongside all the others featured. The likely answer is that Barth's outlook may not fit so easily within Hector's framework of faith and mineness, for Barth is usually seen as pursuing a quite different theological path from the one typically designated as liberal or revisionist. To be sure, Hector refers to Barth at numerous points throughout the book, but rather than being treated as a member of the tradition being defended, Barth is instead deployed as a critic. The way Barth appears in the book tends to reinforce the sense that Hector has chosen to present the lineage of a specific tradition within modern theology—a tradition that would actually seem to exclude Barth—rather than telling the story of modern theology as such. Thus it would have been helpful if Hector had been more precise about his principle of selection here, and acknowledged the ways that this principle both includes and excludes.

Another related question has to do with how the similarities found among Hector's chosen thinkers should be weighed against their differences. There is certainly a set of shared concerns that unite Hector's chosen thinkers, for they are, after all, recognizable as key figures within the liberal or revisionist tradition, and the framework of faith and mineness does a great deal to help clarify exactly why they might reasonably be grouped together. At the same time, though, Hector does not shy away from acknowledging that there are disagreements between these thinkers. Indeed, one of the book's many strengths is its careful articulation of objections that can be raised against each thinker, and in many cases, those objections come from other thinkers featured in the book. Thus Hector notes Hegel's objections to Kant and Schleiermacher, as well as Feuerbach's objections to Hegel, and also Barth's objections to several of the thinkers along the way. Hector does not pretend, then, that there is unanimity among his chosen thinkers. Yet if his aim is to show how this modern theological tradition hangs together, while also defending the tradition against critics such as Barth, then it is worth asking whether the differences between his chosen thinkers might complicate some of these efforts.

Here I am thinking especially of Hector's argument that the thinkers in this tradition articulate understandings of faith and mineness that do not fall prey to Barth's concerns about idolatry. As Hector notes back in the preface, his response to these concerns involves showing that these thinkers frame their work in theological terms from the beginning, rather than just bringing in God at the last minute, as merely a tool for solving humanity's problems. I agree with Hector that none of his chosen thinkers treats God in that kind of crudely instrumental fashion, but can it also be the case that God—and even more specifically, the Christian God, and the whole apparatus of Christian theology—still remains more central for some of these thinkers than others? Hector seems disinclined to draw sharp distinctions between his featured thinkers in terms of their degree of commitment to a specifically Christian theological framework. Nevertheless, the contrast between Kant and Schleiermacher is instructive on this point. While Hector discusses how both thinkers are indebted to Christian theology and make use of it in their work, he seems to drop hints—even if he never quite comes out and says so—that a specifically Christian theology is not equally important for these two thinkers. One indication of this is the contrast seen in the overviews he provides at the outset of his Kant and Schleiermacher chapters. In his Kant overview, Hector makes no reference to how an understanding of Jesus—or whatever might play a Jesus-like role—helps overcome the oppositions in Kant's system, while his overview of Schleiermacher specifically notes the role of Jesus overcoming the opposition between freedom and dependence. A more significant indication is Hector's acknowledgement that, for Kant, the moral regeneration of one's corrupted will “seems to involve an appeal to a Christ,” which is followed by the caveat that it makes sense to say only a Christ—rather than the Christ—since “within the constraints of Kant's theology, there could be any number of suitably Christic figures” (68). By contrast, in the case of Schleiermacher, Hector sees a much more particular Christology in play, for as he notes, “Schleiermacher's fundamental Christological claim. . . is that Jesus, unlike all others, had a perfectly potent God-consciousness, and that every moment of his life was perfectly harmonized with this consciousness” (112–3). Much more could be said on this, but even these brief remarks serve to capture an important contrast.

I focus on Kant and Schleiermacher here because the contrast between them points to whether Hector could have provided a bit more nuance in framing his comparisons between thinkers. In addition to showing that faith and mineness matter to all of these thinkers, albeit in different ways, he might therefore have said more about the degree to which individual thinkers articulate faith and mineness in distinctly Christian terms. One model for doing so could be drawn from the work of Hans Frei, who was deeply influenced by Barth and has been a central figure in postliberal theology. In his Types of Christian Theology, Frei lays out a five-part typology for comparing theological frameworks. Those of the first type subsume particular Christian theological claims under more “general criteria of intelligibility, coherence, and truth,” while the those of the fifth type, at the opposite end of the spectrum, do the reverse.Footnote ⁸ Focusing more narrowly on Christology, the first type substitutes some general interpretive criteria for “the specific ascriptive subject Jesus,” thus downplaying the particularity of Jesus as the subject matter of scriptural stories, while the fifth type again does the reverse, merely repeating statements from scripture without interpreting them in any significant way.Footnote ⁹ The third type, the midpoint of the typology, involves correlating Christian theological claims with general criteria, while not doing so in a systematic fashion that would subordinate particular Christian claims to a more general framework. The second type leans toward subsuming theology under some more general system, while the fourth reverses this, instead allowing theology to govern the ways in which general criteria are deployed. I mention all of this because Frei locates Kant under the first type, but Schleiermacher—as well as Tillich—under the third, and Barth under the fourth.Footnote ¹⁰ While one might argue with some of the details of Frei's typology, I nevertheless bring it up because it shows how a further degree of nuance might be brought to the comparison of figures such as Kant and Schleiermacher, while still showing how both of those thinkers remain distinct from the outlook of someone like Barth.

A final question related to Hector's conception of this modern theological tradition—a concern connected with questions about his principle of selection, and his approach to weighing the significance of similarities and differences—has to do with whether he sees any one thinker in the tradition as ultimately more persuasive than the others. Hector does not come out and say that a single figure best captures the proper articulation of faith's relationship to mineness, but I do wonder whether he nevertheless finds in Tillich the most compelling approach overall. I say this not only because of the way Hector frames faith in Tillichian terms back in chapter 1, but also because in chapter 6, where Tillich is the focus, Hector seems to suggest that Tillich is best equipped to respond to Barth's criticisms. This is clearest in the discussion of Tillich's well-known method of correlation. While that method has often been understood as an attempt to connect theology with culture in a way that might seem to exemplify the kind of thinking that Barth finds idolatrous, Hector argues that the point of Tillich's method is “not simply to coordinate theological answers with cultural questions, but to exhibit the utter questionableness of humanity—our threatenedness by finitude and sin, along with our inability to resist these threats on our own—in order to ensure that God is approached in an attitude of ultimate concern” (253). Hector goes on to add that for Tillich, therefore, “both sides of the correlation are understood in terms of the Christian message” (254). This language strongly echoes what Hector said in the preface about his strategy for defending this tradition as a whole, since again that strategy involved showing that the tradition does not treat God merely as an instrument for solving a human problem. Rather, Hector contends, the tradition already gives the human problem a theological and indeed specifically Christian framing, in terms of fallenness, sin, and the need for grace. While this may hold for Tillich, and Hector makes a convincing case that it does, it is still not clear that this strategy holds to the same extent for all of Hector's chosen thinkers. Here I would again note how Frei distinguished Kant, on one side, from both Schleiermacher and Tillich, on the other. Even if Kant's framing of the human problem is theological in some sense, his approach still appears less distinctively Christian than some others.

I want to turn now from my first set of questions, about how Hector conceives his narrative of modern theology, to a second set of questions about the implications of his narrative for contemporary theological work, and here Carter's criticisms again come into play. At the end of chapter 6, Hector provides some further remarks in defense of this theological tradition as a whole, and in doing so, he returns to some of the worries about faith's relation to mineness that were raised in chapter 1. Against Sigmund Freud's objection that religion is a mere illusion—one that can sap our will to combat the sufferings that make such illusions seem appealing—Hector looks again to Martin Luther King, Jr. and to the American Civil Rights movement to argue, to the contrary, that faith can offer persons “an important and apparently legitimate resource with which to resist opposition and to sustain themselves during difficult times” (259).Footnote ¹¹ Here Hector provides a further reminder that connecting faith and mineness does valuable work and has ongoing relevance. Yet this naturally leads back to Carter's concerns about the limitations of such thinking in a world thought to be ruled by whiteness. In response, Hector concedes that while some of his chosen thinkers were not sufficiently aware of how they were working from merely “a particular vantage point,” Carter's concerns with vulnerabilities such as death, tragedy, guilt, and injustice are also central to this modern tradition, and hence it does not follow that mineness and faith's role in supporting it constitute “an exclusively ‘white’ preoccupation” (264).

Hector goes on to suggest that the kind of contextual theology Carter represents actually has significant continuity with the modern tradition and that contextual theologies present an important way to carry forward the modern theological project, “in light of its own commitment to faith being recognizable as self-expressive, as well as its claims about the conditions under which this could be the case” (265). This raises the question, though, of whether Hector could have given more consideration to how his chosen thinkers—especially Tillich—have already played a role in contextual theologies. He briefly mentions Mary Daly's use of Tillich in Beyond God the Father, but he might also have noted Tillich's influence on Martin Luther King, Jr.Footnote ¹² King wrote his Boston University doctoral dissertation on Tillich's conception of God—comparing Tillich's with that of Henry Nelson Wieman—and he mentions Tillich's understanding of sin as estrangement in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Another crucial figure here is James Cone, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Barth at Northwestern but also drew extensively on Tillich in subsequent work. This influence is especially evident in A Black Theology of Liberation, where Cone draws inspiration from King while weighing the usefulness of Barth's and Tillich's methodologies in terms of their adequacy for the black community at that time. There, Cone says that though Barth's warning against identifying theology with culture was “appropriate for the situation in which it was given,” it did not hold “for blacks in America,” since according to Cone, the black community needed—in the spirit of Tillich—“to see some correlations between divine salvation and black culture.”Footnote ¹³ Cone then cites one of Tillich's discussions of the method of correlation, adding that while Tillich was “not speaking to the black situation, his words are applicable to it.”Footnote ¹⁴ Cone insists, therefore, that a close relationship between faith and mineness is absolutely critical for black liberation theology, and his observations offer some strong support for Hector's claims about the ongoing relevance of this modern tradition for contextual theologies.

However, Carter complicates the story here, for he, too, notes Cone's reliance on Tillich, but he argues that this is actually one of the less successful aspects of Cone's work. This is so, Carter contends, because Tillich's method is dogged by a problematic reliance on theological abstractions, which lose the concreteness of the Christian covenantal message. Carter claims that in Cone's case, this manifests itself in the persistence of a rigid dichotomy between whiteness and blackness, and it is also worth noting that Carter traces much of this problem back to what he considers Kant's own racialized way of approaching theology.Footnote ¹⁵ Although I am not able to address Carter's charges in any depth here, I think that the forceful criticisms that he raises against the Kant-to-Tillich tradition nevertheless suggest that the connection between this tradition and the privileging of whiteness—along with many other forms of privilege—may still remain more vexed than Hector allows. While I think that Carter is too dismissive of this tradition, Hector could have done more to address concerns about how his chosen thinkers too often conceptualize faith and mineness in ways that tend to favor some persons over others, as is especially evident in their treatment of those seen as religiously or racially other.Footnote ¹⁶

It seems that going forward, the challenge for Hector, and indeed for all who are inspired to carry on this tradition, is to keep thinking about how to account for mineness—how to distinguish between what does and does not count as truly “mine”—in ways that help to overcome injustice, rather than perpetuating it further. It is a great testament to Hector's work that it prompts reflection on such profound, difficult questions, and this enormously learned, engaging defense of a central tradition in modern theology is sure to open up many new conversations in the years to come.