Everyone complains about meetings—at least the ones they have to go to. But other meetings, of famous figures at influential times and places, structure our imagination of who we are and what we could be. What’s at stake in a meeting? At a time when the value of the free, direct exchange of ideas has come to the fore of our public discourse, the importance of gatherings, conferences, and collaborations captures our public attention and imagination. From secret political intrigue, to the game-time and locker-room cohesion of sports teams, to the communal production of art and culture, we await and even vicariously participate in meetings, both behind closed doors and on camera, whether we are participants or not. In order to leverage how famous meetings function as locations where identities form, I tried out the following exercise in a new course I’m offering on “Race, Ethnicity, and New Testament Interpretation.” In essence, we compare and contrast our readings of the “Jerusalem Council” of Galatians 2 and Acts 15 with those of the famous Congress of Negro-African Writers and Artists in 1956.

In the study of Christian origins, no meeting looms larger in the scholarly and theological imagination than the anachronistically labeled “Jerusalem Council.” The meeting between the leaders of the Jerusalem church (James the brother of Jesus, John, and Peter) and Paul (with his co-workers) marked the first nodal point for reflecting on the global spread of the Jesus movement, called to consider the question (driven by Paul’s travels and preaching) of the status of non-Jewish people joining, at a distance from Israel, an ostensibly Jewish fledgling community. The basic notion that Gentiles (at the very least) would not have to follow the Torah in full (and the circumcision prescription specifically) seems to stand as the basic outcome of this meeting of the minds. The two existing accounts, however, and their discrepancies have presented a challenge to Christian historiography, particularly since the late nineteenth century. Paul was at the meeting, and thus has an ax to grind and a reputation to maintain; Acts, written decades after the fact, seeks to present a smoother transition among its main characters from its local, Jewish group of followers to a dispersed, urban, Gentile population. As a way of demonstrating to students that Christians, even at the origins of Christianity, contested the nature of the movement, contrasting the two versions of this meeting stands as a classic exercise.

Yet a further, fundamental question grounds the tension in this comparison: what is at stake for the modern reader of this meeting? What contemporary interests drive our vicarious participation? If we peer in the windows, if we wait outside the doors for news, if we refresh our screens to see if Paul will live-tweet the proceedings, what are we waiting for? What’s at stake for us in the Jerusalem Council?

In preparation for my new class on race and ethnicity, I necessarily kept running into the work of Hortense Spillers. So I watched the above lecture one day when I needed a break from reading and was arrested by her description of The Congress of Negro-African Writers and Artists. The dynamic between the absent W.E.B. du Bois and the American contingent there (including James Baldwin, whose report from the meeting, “Princes and Powers,” informs Spillers’s discussion) revealed the contours of a contestation over the nature and liberating power of black culture. At the same time, I tried to reflect on my own orientation toward this event and Spillers’s investment in it. What was I, a white, cishet male Bible scholar doing in learning about this event by watching Spillers’s lecture and then reading “Princes and Powers?” The Congress was clearly a momentous intellectual event that continues to inform meditations on black culture. But I also pushed myself to address the smaller but more personal question: what is at stake in it for me? At the very least, on a pedagogical level, it struck me that these two meetings, the Jerusalem Council and the assembly of black intellectuals at the Sorbonne 1900 years later, could mutually foreground how the idea of meetings and conferences distills the process of identity creation and could focus reflection on what’s at stake in this process. Why do Christians care about this first Christian council? What are some of the many reasons why Christians (or Americans, and especially white people) should care about the negotiations of a group of African-Americans amidst an international black community?

I set this up as a group exercise in a new elective at my seminary this semester, “Ethnicity, Race, and New Testament Interpretation.” The second class meeting was devoted to exploring ways of theorizing ethnicity and race in preparation for modules on ethnicity from ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish/Judean sources, ethnicity in Paul, John, Luke-Acts, and various other early Christian materials, and then exploring the development of Western notions of race through medieval and early modern Spain, colonial and ante-bellum America, and the present-day situation in the United States. In order to focus on the nature of race in America, I take the now somewhat common tack of spending time talking about whiteness as a racial construct in America, making the notion of what is at stake in reading Paris a bit more challenging but differently productive.

Spillers’s discussion of black culture helped ground our discussion in that she speaks of culture as being potentially distinct from what she calls “morphological race.” So does her focus on black culture as “critical culture,” in that it is relational to surrounding cultures—in large part, its critique of white, imperial, capitalist culture. A reading from the beginning of Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft also helped students meditate on the orientation between biology and culture.

We began in class by considering Galatians 1-2 and Acts 15. We noted the usual discrepancies and surmised the filters through which each author cast his narrative: Paul was actually at the meeting, of course, but certainly (and angrily) asserts his authority in the way he recounts its proceedings and aftermath; while the author of Acts wants to depict a smoother internal transition between Jews and Gentiles despite external opposition. In this particular class, all the students happened to be Christian (not surprising at my seminary, but often not the case), all white, and none black. So when we turned to what students themselves had at stake in the meeting, they stated the obvious: as Christians, they might not “be here” if Paul’s version of the gospel had not found a role in the first-century movement and eventually become the norm in global Christianity. Would the message have spread so far, they wondered, if the prescription of law observance and circumcision had potentially prevented Gentile converts from joining the fledgling Church?

We turned to Baldwin’s account of the Parisian Conference, and the students were at first excited to explore the details of such a dynamic and, at times, contentious event, especially as told through Baldwin’s sharp and evocative prose. Contained in the essay are a number of encapsulated definitions or theorizations of culture and nationality: Leopold Senghor’s discussion of art and life in Africa; Aimé Cesaire’s postcolonialist reflections on local cultures as “sub-cultures” to Europe’s hegemony of power and knowledge; and statements by various Christian leaders of the black diaspora concerning the relationship between the Bible and the land. Implicitly, I think the broad discussion supported the ways in which my class discusses the notion of ethnicity and race as culture.

When we turned what we had at stake in reading of this conference, the students lifted up the importance of understanding the black experience, particularly through the eyes of Baldwin and his colleagues in the American contingent to the Congress. Class discussion centered around the ways in which the experience of the oppressed speaks to society as a whole. It is important to understand better the experience of the marginalized so that we might understand how anyone, including ourselves, can be marginalized (for example, through gender or class). Understanding marginalization can also help us learn how to better foster justice for the oppressed when we are in positions of relative power. It also occurred to students that the Congress was an exercise in creating a movement and solidifying an affiliation group among a diverse and far-flung community that could help us learn to participate in similar projects. The question of what “black culture” even meant occupied many speakers, and, like Spillers, who sees black culture as essentially “critical,” some attendees in Paris viewed their global community as defined over and against white domination. Thus, the creation of a community was as much about orientation as static definition.

Finally, we explored the travails of the American delegation to the Congress, who faced a chilly reception from the artists and scholars who lived under colonial domination and saw the Americans as having, in Baldwin’s words, “been born to a greater number of possibilities, wretched as these possibilities seemed at the instant of our birth.” The flip side of this experience of democracy was the fact that black Americans did not live in the land of their ancestry and had long since been wrenched from local African cultures. (The specter of the Cold War also haunted the meeting, as many of the attendees were socialists, a tension du Bois’s letter only exacerbated for the Americans.) Contextualizing the African American experience within the global African diaspora gave students a better sense of what it meant to be specifically black and American, and we were able to extrapolate from this observation another way of understanding the extent to which ethnicity is tied more to history than to origins, especially if these origins are filtered through a notion of biology.

We then pushed each other to meditate upon the American aspect of Baldwin’s project in this essay. For he clearly sets forth that the special African American contribution to the Congress and to the project of black culture more generally was to explore what it meant to be an African population not only so radically alienated from land and origins but also so explicitly yet problematically merged with one version of the Western experiment—democracy. As he ironically puts it, African Americans can reveal something about “the mysterious continent of Africa” precisely by saying something about their essential role in “the mysterious American continent.”

At this point, it became clear to us that the project the American contingent worked on in Paris was not just the global project of reflecting upon and fostering black culture but the revelation of what it means to be American from the epistemologically privileged position of the African American—the heir of both citizenship and enslavement, the Declaration of Independence and Jim Crow, who embodies the full cultural product of America. What is at stake for white Americans reading about the Paris Congress or the work of black culture in America generally is not simply to learn more about African Americans but to learn about ourselves as Americans. And we notice, and perhaps lament, that, as white American Christians (and, really, perhaps just as white Americans), we find it easier to relate to a group of Judean men living two thousand years ago than to our fellow Americans expressing who they are on the global stage just over sixty years ago. To be sure, it may be productive to benefit from whatever might be intercultural and subversive about the Eurocentric Church recovering its Jewish roots. But any advantage to this recognition will be lost unless we, as white people, do not also acknowledge our difficulty recognizing black Americans as, as Baldwin might put it, members of our house.

I was gratified by how this exercise helped introduce the work of the course. Not only did we explore in a more engaging way approaches to understanding race, ethnicity, and culture, but I hope we were able to set up later conversations about what is at stake when it comes to race and ethnicity in our own contexts, regardless of racial identity. And I have been proud so far of my students’ willingness to interrogate their own positionality, and to do so both in our own gatherings as well as in conversation with a global network.