Chapter 2
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
Within Christianity is “a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging” (4).
But we live and move within a diseased imagination, in which the logics of colonialism and whiteness have embedded so deeply they’ve become invisible. Jennings in this text elucidates the corrupted theological imaginations that emerged over and through the epoch of European colonialism.
For Jennings, there are two things we keep forgetting: touch dirt and remember Israel.
Processes of colonialism alienated us from the land, and made us believe that our identities could be simply encapsulated in the physical form of our bodies. But Jennings argues that the Christian tradition shows us how deeply connected to the soil we are: from the beginning of our Creation to the end of our lives.
Supercessionist readings of the Bible have also allowed us to de-materialize biblical Israel and to each imagine ourselves as the protagonist of every story. But Israel is real, and if we remember that simple fact, we will also remember that we all come to this story as Gentiles: foreigners who have been grafted in by Grace, not by divine election.
What Jennings concludes with is a kind of idealism: the building of global kinship networks.
His self-conscious idealism requires vulnerability. It is vulnerable to reconfigure one’s orientation away from bounded in-groups and out-groups and towards the precarity of grace through Christ.
Can anyone be compelled by this? To abandon ancient, primordial bonds of kinship towards electively identifying as Gentilic, or outsider?
