Book Review
by Neal D. Presa
The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. 366 pages. $24.41
Willie James Jennings gives us a tour de force in this groundbreaking, comprehensive study of the development of race and racial identity as it was wedded with a theological vision that framed and undergirded the colonial enterprise from the Old World to the New World.
Race and racial identity became the substitute for a colonial hegemony that displaced whole peoples from their lands, from the soil, and from the animals and elements of creation from which indigenous communities had formed their identities as human beings. Colonialism commodified indigenous peoples, enslaving them, usurping property, and superimposing a European, imperial way of life and governance. Displacement of and imperial rule over indigenous peoples were supported by a Christian theological vision that categorized the world with respect to a hierarchy of those who were saved by God, those who were damned, and those who had a higher possibility for salvation. The human body, particularly skin color, and the observable traits and skills of indigenous peoples, became the criteria by which European colonists, their benefactors, and their theologians engaged the New World.
What Jennings does is call us readers not only to know the missing history of what is often elided when the history of Christianity is narrated. Jennings recounts for us a necessary history, and the theological introspection and critique that are necessary to recover and recalibrate a sense of who we are. What was lost in the development of race and racial categories as a substitute for anthropology that was nourished and nurtured by the Creator and the creation was a vacuous theology that regarded as more important profits over people, capitalism over communion, goods over goodness. Both land and people became objectified for what and how they could serve European, white hegemony that was Christian and that was separated from Israel, both in its soteriological and its geographical significance. Thus, the colonialist’s theological imagination committed in itself a double jeopardy of severing ties of the branch with the vine, or the Gentiles from the Jews.
The seeds and weeds that were planted and nurtured by this theological nightmare produced fruits that we see today in our body politic: xenophobia, white supremacy and white nationalism, human trafficking, economic injustice, racial segregation, the Prosperity Gospel, religious intolerance, and constructions of walls to separate and isolate peoples and communities.
What Jennings calls for is a Christian theological vision that takes seriously the comprehensive texture of the lived realities of place, spaces, animals, land, and all of God’s creation as a social fabric that shapes and forms our racial identities and which serves as a way for us to appropriate meaning and identity in how we are to live in communion with one another, with God, and with God’s creation.
This volume is a must-read for those within and outside the Church, for seminarians, for pastors and preachers, for anyone who cares about the deeply fractured state we are in as a global human community. We must do the hard work of re-examining those parts of our theologies and history that have contributed to the ills of church and society, especially when we talk about race and racial identities that have been systematized and codified to perpetuate a white supremacy and whiteness that is neither Christian nor fully human. What is at stake in reflecting upon this book and in living out the difficult task of what is called for is the essence of what it means to be created in the image of God for one another.
