After Whiteness: An education in belonging. (2020)
The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. (2010)
both by Willie James Jennings.
Good theology makes for exciting reading. These two books are exciting. They address one of the most important questions for the church today – not decline but distortion.
And it’s not just the fundamentalists and conservatives who are preaching a distortion of the gospel but us progressives as well.
According to Jennings this distortion has its roots in the way European Christianity discriminated against and saw the Jewish people as less than human. This distorted view broadened to include all non-white people during the period when European empires were being formed.
In this new age of Empires and Colonisation the myth of the superiority of white people became embedded in both church and state. This myth helped colonial powers justify both brutality and slavery. In the Church, it led to a blindness in relation to the presence of God in the lived lives of non-white people, especially in relationship to their relationship to land and creation. It also led to a belief that it was in the white church that the gospel could be most truly found. As a result, the voice of God could not be heard outside of the narrow confines of white experience. This was a white experience increasingly cut off from the natural world and natural relationships of intimacy. Jennings’ books are an attempt to unpack this phenomenon and help us make the first steps in making necessary change.
After Whiteness is the easier read, though dealing with the esoteric topic of theological education. However, Jennings’ critique of theological education has far wider implications. For Jennings much of theological education is caught “in the formational energies of white self-sufficient masculinity”. (p6) His analysis and critique also apply to other educational institutions such as medicine, social work, nursing etc which prepare people for service to the community. As Jennings says towards to the end of this book,
Theological education could mark a new path for Western education, one that builds a vision of education that cultivates the new belonging that this world longs to inhabit. (p 154)
In The Christian Imagination, Jennings does the groundwork so that this new vision can emerge. This is careful and detailed work. At times it is horrifying when one realises just how incorporated into Christianity were both slavery and brutal colonisation. It is also liberating in providing a new and different vision that is both grounded in the earth and open to diverse peoples. Jennings unwraps an exciting narrative of God’s presence in the world at a time when the various official Christian narratives have become unbelievable due to their distorting closeness to white colonial culture.
Len Baglow, member of the management committee APCVA
