The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

The story was once told of a young monk who came to his teacher and asked, “Abba, how does one speak up in the world when one is not present?” His teaching motion him over and asked, “do you hear that?” The young man responded, “hear what?” “Their cries,” the teacher shared. “The one who speaks must first hear. When one hears, one hears a story. When one hears a story, one joins. When one joins, then one can speak.”If this story illustrates anything it is the goal of Willie James Jennings’ seminal work The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Much like the blood of Abel that cried out from the ground in the days of old, Jennings invites us, much like the teacher, to sit down and listen to the cries from the soil. This soil is the violence of Christianity, colonization, and commodification bound to the process of displacement as the divine desire. Covering historical events from mid 1400s-late 1800s, Jennings does not simply invite us to the story of racial faith and Christian faith. It is not an easy journey but one we must take if we are to make sense of where we find ourselves at the intersection of race and religion. If we read Jennings’ book and our world honestly, we would conclude that there has been and continues to be a story told of polluted soil in which Christianity in the West is deeply connected to the creation and performance of race. Jennings sees this problem with race as not simply a social or a scientific construct but one with a “theological beginning.” (289) The story of Christian imagination became the story of racial imagination, one could say racist imagination. In his mind, this performance of Chriant and racial faith (slavery, missions, Bible translation, worship, etc) finds its nexus in the theological conception of whiteness as the standard and the goal of creation. He contends that “Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination.”(6)Instead of Christianity being the site of love and intimacy that met at the story of Jesus in the midst of the story of Israel, Christianity was ingested in the colonial project by which “joining often meant oppression, violence, death, if not of bodies then most certainly of ways of life, forms of language, and visions of the world.” (9) Inside of the Christian story there is a powerful way of comprehensively imagining the world and enacting social relations through a sense of connection and belonging. But it went wrong, and I mean very wrong, when this story was disconnected from the story of God’s desire and work in creation and peoples, toward the story of the deification of the European vision of maturity. This vision did not identify people with their land and place within the world but one in which the missionary endeavor and the colonialist project, though not always the same in practice, found the same telos: a vision of the creation of race in which non-Europeans were assimilated and commodified through religious and capitalist subjugation defined by the European project. In light of this hard history, for him, “a different story of race needs to be told.” (289). And one must believe it can be told. But before a new world can be imagined, or reconfigured, Jennings invites us to the old world, particularly to put our hands in the soil of history.We must ask ourselves: what is the soil that we have been planted in and the soil that we are working with? What does this mean for us today?More specifically, is Christianity, colonization, and commodification of human life related? For Jennings, the answer is yes. To show us, he masterfully and carefully takes us on a journey into four different soils: Zurara’s Tears (Chapter 1), Acosta’s Laugh (Chapter 2), “Colenso’s Heart (Chapter 3), and Equiano’s Words (Chapter 4). He invites to answer those questions by telling four seemingly disconnected stories. In part one entitled “Displacement”, Jennings narrates the trafficking of African slaves and the Spanish conquest of Peru. In this story of the chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Azurara (Zurara), and Prince Henry, he shows the prince’s need to subjugate black flesh and provide a Christian theological framework for this power. The chronicler plants the seeds of this diseased racial imagination by binding divine right and blessing to white power over black flesh. The next narrative of Jesuit priest Jose de Acosta Porres follows the same trajectory. Like the prince and chronicler, Acosta engages in what Jennings calls “pedagogical imperialism” by which whiteness becomes the litmus test for Christian faithfulness and intimacy is not centered on the body of Jesus but the body of the European.Part two, entitled “Translation”, follows the same narrative. He highlights how translation of the Bible, Christian literacy and conquest created a space of naming, perceiving and acting in the world, particularly a white space that engendered a segregationist Christianity. One can clearly see, especially in the story of the catechism of Rev. Charles Jones (238), that whether it was Bible translation, catechism, or worship spaces, somehow the story of Christianity’s expansion was whiteness, and whiteness was the story of what it means to be Christian. He writes, against the backdrop of such a history, that if the soil of “Christianity is going to untangle itself from these mangled spaces, it must first see them for what they are: a revolt against creation” (248) The European became god and the non-European became its subject. One must wrestle with how deeply connected Whiteness and Christianity in the Western world have been and are even unto this day.He argues convincingly that God has intended a different imagination, one that is centered on the story of Jesus and the story of the community he is creating. (259) In spite of such a history, Jennings invites us to re-imagination. In his final section, he begins to help us wrestle with what it might look like for us to recover, or to discover for the first time in some sense, intimacy with God-in-Christ and the story of creation and redemption by which we have been called to participate in. He yearns for a vision of “Christian intellectual identity that is compelling and attractive, embodying not simply the coming of reason but the power of love that constantly gestures toward joining” the story of Jesus in the midst of the story of Israel. (291). He doesn’t necessarily set out a goal as he points us into a trajectory of questioning. The questions he invites us to ask us to look into our histories and stories by way of radically remembering how our space and place has been supplanted by the colonial agenda (286) and how we my join in such a way that build “actual life together, lives enfolded and kinship networks established through the worship and service of God of Israel in Jesus Christ.” (287).Jennings offers us no less than the radical vision of the healing work of the Spirit creating a new community and a new vision of life together. This is a work of crucifixion and resurrection - crucifying the old interpretation of Christianity as Whiteness and resurrecting the original vision of Christianity as beloved community. Though I wished he would have worked out what this vision would look like on a practical level, I must conclude that through his questions one should see this book as doing enough: allowing us to listen to cries from the ground and participating with God with our hands dirty and work together to shape a new world. If one wants to work for a more loving and just world so deeply fractured by race and Christian faith, then this book is a great starting place.

Its rare for an academic book to propelled you to your knees in raw, supplicative prayer. Thanks to Jennings, that's what happened to me when I finished reading The Christian Imagination.An intellectual tour de force, his beautifully crafted text narrates a journey of earth shattering revelations. Jennings provides an unexpected answer to one of our faith’s most troubling questions. Why has Christianity--a religion whose trajectory would seem bent toward boundary crossing intimacy and the formation of just social worlds--presided over, indeed led, so much of the oppression of the past several centuries, particularly toward people of color and blacks most dramatically? He locates the heart of his answer in supercessionism. The segregationist spirit that found its fullest treatment in America was first cultivated in Christians by our hegemonic colonial stance toward the world. This stance swapped Israel out for European imperial identities, and created a novel source of identity that exchanged land for bodies, continually evaluated against the totalizing glare of whiteness.That Christian performance has (on the whole) been remarkably abusive is fairly obvious to any casual reader of history. The agony of discovery in *Imagination* issues from its exposure of just how deeply Western theology is infected, and how subtle warps in our faith provided generous space for domination. Rehearsing the complex historical analysis Jennings offers is impossible here. What I want to lift up are the two primary theological motifs he offers as both the sources of trouble and the sites of hope.First, Jennings takes great pains to reassert Christian identity as Gentile identity. We are those who did not belong at the table, but like the Canaanite woman gratefully grasped for the crumbs that fell from it. The story that makes sense of the world is not our story, it is Israel's. Most importantly, Jesus is not a white male. He is Jewish, and scandal of his particularity provides the context through which humanity can be guided into communion. Desire for Christ and the experience his hospitable embrace enfolding our life into himself allows us to likewise turn toward neighbor with a new desire to intake their concerns and dreams as our own. This, Jennings explains, is the kind of border-line erotic intimacy Christian theology should cultivate.Second, *Imagination* uncovers a forgotten reality: before there were races, nationalities or even ethnicity, there was the land and one’s place within it. Identity constitution was dramatically reworked in the colonial moment when Europeans showed up on inhabited shores and claimed it as their own. As they left their lands behind, they carried their body with them as the central determinant of self and culture. In lieu of place, whiteness took on geographic proportions, becoming “determinative of the true (intelligence), the good (morality), and the beautiful (aesthetics)” (277). We lost our way theologically in anthropology, creation, and in all aspects of the missio Dei (for starters). All else was obscured as we became the God-men recreating the world in our image.I am immensely grateful to be introduced to this text at this moment in my life. It wove together many of the themes I have been tugging at over the past few years, bringing them together in much sharper relief. Jennings precisely expresses what draws me so magnetically toward this faithful following of Jesus, “There is within Christianity a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging” (4). And yet time and again we seem to fall short. My prayer today is that his insights will bore into our collective unconscious, into our hearts, and seed there to inform our personal, communal and vocational lives that they may come to bear the fruit of genuinely generative love, a new social performance of our faith that breeds justice.

Prepare to fly at a high altitude when reading this book, and to be deeply challenged. It connects massive developments such as supercessionism (Christians being the New Israel without regard to our engrafted relationship to Jews, the historical Chosen People), colonialism and slavery, certain approaches to the translation of scriptures, the commercialization of property and place, and the use of pedagogy for domination. Jennings shows how all of these come together to form a diseased Christian imagination. It is an imagination that presumes a sort of divine right to assess and judge others concerning their intelligence and spiritual aptitude. It is an imagination that categorizes, ranks and segregates people and creation according to utility. Instead, he says, our imagination should be answering the radical call of Jesus to join each other as one body and one creation. He offers hope, too. Christians can retell our central experience as one in which Gentiles becoming Christian means joining another people in order to learn of God. Christians can take place and space seriously, the land and animals, not for use value but as the basis for knowing who we are and how we are connected. Christians can enter into a new intentionality of life together by paying attention to the messages that try to steer us towards some relationships and away from others. The book is at its best when using examples from people's lives, but sometimes goes for many pages without offering such windows to help the reader. Nevertheless it is very much worth the reader's efforts. It also may lay the groundwork for a new dialogue and common cause between African-Americans and Jews.

This book is wonderful and I've already read 1/2 of it in one day.That being said Amazon threw it into a bag and sent it to me, damaging the corner of the book. Disappointing service.

This book is making me rethink everything...