Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, reviewed by Amos Yong
Pneuma Review Winter 2013
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). x + 366 pp.
Jennings, former academic dean and now theology and black church studies professor at Duke Divinity School, tells the story of how our contemporary Christian imagination has become so deeply shaped by a racially divided understanding of the world—a world formed by the forces of modern colonialism. This racial imagination, in turn, has become the deformed lens through which we see “reality.” At one level, this is not a new thesis, although it is surprising how easy we forget this (almost like fish swimming in an ocean are oblivious to an alternative reality) even as it remains sadly true that many members of Jennings’ primary audience—Christian academics, scholars, theologians—still have not seriously grappled with the theological implications of this claim. Those of us in evangelical and renewal traditions who are restorationists or primitivists at heart generally tend to also lack historical consciousness or sensitivity. We ask, why bother with a fallen Constantinian history anyway? And therefore, we are all the more liable to dismiss this argument or at the least ignore or minimize its pertinence and consequences.
Beware: those without at least some level of graduate education will find the theological argumentation dense in various places. Yet, the four narratives that structure the three-part movement of the book help those who embark on the journey. Section one, “Displacement,” unfolds the mid-fifteenth century beginnings of slavery in dialogue with accounts left by Prince Henry of Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara (1410 – 1474), and complements this with sixteenth century developments as seen through the life and works of Jesuit theologian to the New World Jose de Acosta Porres (1540 – 1600). “Displacement” argues first that the modern world was founded on the theological and even Christological creation of race: black and brown, fit for enslavement following in the steps of the suffering Christ, and derivatively, white, fit for being the purveyors of the gospel of the risen Christ to the rest of the world. As a corollary, this first part also unfolds the theological anthropology that underwrote the colonial ideology of whiteness that empowered the displacement of black African and indigenous Americans from their lands, and that justified their exploitation (or their redemption, from the white Christian perspective).
The second section, “Translation,” shows how this narrative of displacement was complicated—both subverted and perpetuated, simultaneously—in the lives of both colonists and slaves. John William Colenso (1814 – 1883) was the first Anglican bishop of Natal (South Africa), mathematician, theologian, Biblical scholar/translator, and social activist who came to see things at least in part from the perspective of the black African, although he was too steeped in the colonial project to make a substantive difference during the nineteenth century. Olaudah Equiano (1745 – 1797) was one of the first slaves to have gained his “freedom” and published his own autobiography; in the end, though, it appears that he mastered the white man’s tools, including his theology, only to have resigned himself to the “white order of things.” “Translation” shows that acts of resistance, even at the theological level, are impotent against emerging market forces of the early modern world—for land, resources, and cheap or free labor.
Throughout the first two parts of the book, one of the dominant theological threads is that with the colonial project, the new norm of whiteness replaces the biblical Gentiles, which is understood by whites also to have superseded the Israel of the Old Testament. God’s plan, then, is to shift from a chosen group of people, bound to their land, to a universal group, now represented primarily by the white missionary vision and vocation. For the sake of the world’s salvation, then, the white chosen race is to think, act, and be universal religiously, politically, socially, economically, and geographically. White universalism thus displaces, literally, indigenous forms, ways, and philosophies of life (because of their limited, parochial, premodern, superstitious, pagan, barbaric, demonic, etc., character). The colonial project has succeeded to the point that the enslaved, or those relegated by the racializing forces of whiteness to the lower tiers of value in the human hierarchy, have embraced white theology to justify their own lot in life!
Part III is titled “Intimacy,” wherein Jennings proceeds to the constructive task of articulating, at the literary and theological levels, what it takes to move from racially fragmented and segregated mentalities and spaces “inside the white house” to communion, confraternity, belonging, embrace, and living spatially together. Central to the adopted strategy is a reconsideration of a non-supersessionist reading of the gospel narrative of Jesus and, in a short section, the Pentecost narrative as drawing Gentiles into Israel’s covenant narrative in ways that do not separate identities from land, culture, and language. Pentecostal, charismatic, and renewal readers of this journal will be intrigued and challenged by this part of Jennings’ argument.
There is no doubt that the contemporary global pentecostal-charismatic renewal began as an interracial and multiracial movement in the early twentieth century and, over the course of the next hundred years, expanded and permeated across nations, cultures, languages, and ethnicities. Equally certain, global renewal is constituted by modern technology, late modern capitalism, and an emerging global mentality that is deeply embedded in the colonial project. Within this matrix, renewalists, renewal theologians, and scholars of the global renewal have neither sufficiently theorized nor substantially theologized about the meaning of race for renewal movement in particular and the emerging Christianity of the global South in general. Jennings’s The Christian Imagination thus begs for extended reflection in relationship to renewal Christianity. Some of the questions this book ought to prompt among renewalists include:
Has modern theology inhabited and been deformed and distorted by the regime of whiteness? If so, what are the implications for global renewal and any renewal theology striving for articulation in the 21st century?
Is the recovery of a biblical pneumatology, one centered in the Day of Pentecost narrative, crucial for the theological task “after” or “beyond” race, as Jennings indicates? How might renewal and pentecostal theologians respond to the reading of the Pentecost narrative proffered in this text?
How might a renewal historiography that revisits the history of Christianity from its charismatic “underside” complement, extend, or revise the genealogy of modern Christianity as unfolded by Jennings? Do renewal, charismatic, or enthusiastic voices in the history of Christianity anticipate, parallel, echo, or otherwise set in relief the voices of people of color subjugated by the colonial enterprise?
If modern theology is embedded in a racially defined market economy as Jennings suggest, is the globalization of renewal Christianity also thus racially circumscribed? To what degree does the theology of prosperity in renewal circles participate in or perpetuate colonial configurations in a postcolonial world?
To what degree is renewal Christianity implicated in the supersessionist replacement of Israel and the Jews that Jennings says characterizes the emergence and development of modern Christian thought? How might renewal biblical hermeneutics informed by the Pentecost event continue, improve upon, or resist such supersessionist tendencies?
How are non-supersessionist modes of thinking essential for reconsidering the universality and particularity of the Christian gospel? To what degree is global renewal Christian identity dependent upon or even opposed to the identity of Israel as a people of the land?
How might renewal Christian perspectives drawn from across the global South—from Asia, Africa, and Latin America—contribute to the articulation of a post-binary (black-white) Christian theology called for by Jennings? How should inhabitants of the former colonies think about race and racialization in the 21st century?
Do the various trajectories of global renewal Christianity inhibit or encourage the post-European, post-Western, and post-colonial paradigm that is struggling for ascendency amidst the modern racially formed project? Do renewal categories of indigenization and contextualization help in this regard, and might the renewal motif of “the many tongues of Pentecost spoken to the ends of the earth” contribute to such an undertaking?
Jennings has focused on “the origins of race.” The God of Jesus Christ seeks now the redemption of race. What does that look like? Renewalists ought carefully and prayerfully to ponder this question while reading this book.
Reviewed by Amos Yong
From the review, this book seems to be an excellent and profound treatment of the subject at hand.