The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race Book

This is the third book in the last year that I have read about the entanglement between Christian theology and racism. Each has provided a slightly different perspective. Each has been well-written, provocative, and original.

Much like Carter in his Race: A Theological Account, Jennings believes that the way toward racism directed against black people was paved by the church's supersessionist anti-semitism. The thesis is convincing in both accounts. For Jennings it is a fundamental flaw dating back to the early days of the Christian church that has stifled the central Christian message throughout our history and has inflicted deep wounds in the modern era.

The central Christian message should be communion -- relationships of belonging built across divides, as Gentiles are brought into relationship with Israel and Israel's God through Jesus Christ. This should have paved the way for the church to become what was enacted at Pentecost, a diverse, multi-lingual body wherein every person was treated with love, respect, and mutuality. Instead, it has become something very different.

Jennings seems to claim that the central theological symbol of Christianity in the modern age is the slave ship. And the slave ship is a terrifying distortion of Pentecost, as a cosmopolitan mix of people are brought together in a community built around violence and death, not communion and belonging.

The universal perspective of the Enlightenment has furthered the problem (Carter makes a similar point) by ignoring the particular, especially the particularity of Jewish flesh in Jesus. For Jennings the major loss of the modern era is identity shaped by relationships with the land and environment. Instead, identity is now shaped by one's racial or ethnic group, as we have become displaced from the land. His vision is that a genuine Christian communion would enact a renewed doctrine of creation, restoring our relationships with the land and environment. I would love to hear a dialogue between him and Wendell Berry.

He argues that the methodology of Christian theology is fundamentally flawed because it has incorporated the hegemony of whiteness. It must expose this history and seek to be renewed. Theology should take as its aim the promotion of genuine communion and a restoration of creation.

Along the way, Jennings' book narrates elements of the history of theology that are often overlooked, focusing on figures like Gomes Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry the Navigator; Jose de Acosta, an early Jesuit missionary to Peru; John William Colenso, an Anglican bishop in the Natal; and Olaudah Equiano, who published his slave narrative in the 18th century. The first two help to construct a modern theology of race, the third works to move beyond it but reveals how one is trapped within it, and the fourth indicates possibilities for the path forward.

I thought in a handful of places the book resonated with the systematic theology of James McClendon -- the focus on bodies, the role of jazz, the importance of biography as theology, the ecstatic fellowship of all creation.

In its emphasis on how theology has abused Jewish and black bodies, I thought more attention should have been paid to other bodies. Native and aboriginal bodies did appear in the chapter on Acosta and were mentioned elsewhere, but could have had a little more development. Female and queer bodies were non-existent. Carter and Cone, in their books on race and Christian theology, devoted significant sections to women, and Monica Coleman's Making a Way Out of No Way focused almost exclusively on it. Queer bodies were noticeably absent from all except Coleman's book. I know it wasn't a focus of this book, but it could have been mentioned, especially when talking about the role of Jewish and African-American authors and artists in creating much of America's artistic culture and referencing James Baldwin as an example.

Despite these neglects, the book is a fascinating, thought-provoking read.