Thandeka (minister)

Thandeka's theological work considers the role of feeling or emotion in human religious and spiritual experiences. Her book The Embodied Self is based on a close reading of Schleiermacher's Dialektik, focusing on his idea that feeling is primary in human experience, and exploring how feeling enables people to connect mind and body,[3] or thinking and organic being.[6] Thandeka has gone on to consider the religious significance of neuroscientific understandings of emotions,[3] especially those of Jaak Panksepp.[7] Thandeka's affect theology centers affective consciousness, as opposed to belief, in religious experience.[8] She is critical of contemporary Protestantism that does not focus on creating an experience of love and revitalized communities.[7]

Thandeka also critiques some popular approaches to anti-racism work, and takes a different approach to understanding white racial identity. She considers the concepts of racism and white privilege to be no longer useful.[9] Instead, she analyzes the psychology of white identity, showing how white identity was constructed to hide a profound sense of betrayal by one’s own white kith and kin, white community, and white government.[10] This sense of betrayal injures persons’ ability to be “relational beings.”[11] While Thandeka is hopeful that insights into this will help white people heal and change, others disagree.[12][9] In 1999, Thandeka criticized the anti-racism program adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association for its reliance on ideas of original sin and human helplessness, which are rejected by Unitarian Universalism.[13] Her program for congregational spiritual revitalization includes efforts to address racial and economic injustice through the love, care, and compassion of small group ministries networking together to heal themselves and the world.[14]

Thandeka's books include Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness (2018), which tracks how (1) Christian theology lost its original emotional foundation of love through a linguistic error created by the first-century Apostle to the Gentiles Paul when he introduced a new word “conscience” [Greek, 'syneidesis'] to discourse on Christ that became the New Testament emotional foundation for handling gentile pain and suffering that generated almost 2000 years of anti-Jewish and anti-Judaic Christian sentiment and activity, (2) Paul’s error was initially justified, explained and compounded by Augustine and then Martin Luther, (3) Schleiermacher tried but failed to correct the error by reaffirming love as the affective foundation of Christian faith, (4) the nineteenth-century American enlightenment of Common Sense moral values reaffirmed the false foundation for Christian faith of pain and suffering accidentally created by Paul, and (4) liberal Protestants abandoned the errant emotional foundation without retrieving the original emotional foundation for Gentile faithfulness to Christ that Paul tried to establish, (5) the critique of the compromised legacy of Protestantism by Reinhold Niebuhr and John B. Cobb Jr., (6) and the successful reaffirmation by Thandeka of the original Pauline foundation of love for faithfulness to Christ. Thandeka’s book as a major new work on systematic and constructive theology has been characterized by Daniel Boyarin as “a thrilling new possibility for understanding Paul;” John C. Cobb Jr. in his forward to the book called it “a book of rigorous scholarship, brilliant original insight, and great practical importance” such that it he will “never be able to think of [his] theological heritage in the same way again;” Desmond Tutu, Archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, recommends this work as “a hope-filled book reminding us in historical and contemporary terms that we are loved always, even when we feel lost and alone.[7]

Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America (1999), which historian David Roediger characterized as "indispensable";[15] and The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Solution to Kant's Problem of the Empirical Self (1995), which undertakes a major re-reading of the philosophical analysis of F. D. E. Schleiermacher's theological claims, namely, his Dialektik.[6] Amos Funkenstein, one of her teachers and a member of her dissertation committee, called this book when it was published in 1995 "the finest book on German philosophy published in the last ten years." Her essays have appeared in The Oxford University Handbook on Feminist Theology and Globalization (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher (2005).[16]