WHO IS WILLIE JENNINGS?
Public Domain.
In 2017, I set out to create an anti-racism education program for my parish. The intent of this program was to explore issues of race and racism with theology as its starting point. One of the guiding voices in that process was Willie James Jennings. Jennings’ work crafts a clear-eyed, hope-filled, and compelling picture of the tangled knot of theology and race. Put another way, I see Jennings’ work as a theology of belonging. In a thread that weaves through his writings, he demonstrates how Christians have failed to live up to the vision of belonging rooted in the life of Jesus and pushes us to imagine how we might get closer still to realizing that vision today.
First, let’s go back to the beginning of the church with Jennings in his commentary on the book of Acts. The scene opens in Acts 15 on Paul and Barnabas arriving in Jerusalem with great joy over the conversion of the Gentiles. This news was welcomed by most but some were insistent that this Gentile conversion meant they must follow the Mosaic laws, including circumcision. There is a great debate. Peter urges them to see beyond this requirement since God had given them the gift of the Holy Spirit, while James crafts a compromise where the Gentiles are encouraged to follow certain Jewish dietary restrictions. This compromise would essentially allow Jews and Gentiles to enter into fellowship with one another around the table. (1) But here’s the rub: this news is shared with the Gentiles from a distance and are essentially sent to go their own way. Any movement toward greater communion is thwarted.
In reflecting on this moment, Jennings writes: “The single greatest challenge for disciples of Jesus is to imagine and then enact actual together life, life that interpenetrates, weaves together, and joins to the bone.” (2) Instead of communion, the church substituted an approach of segregation between Jew and Gentile. Differences, rather than being celebrated, are tightly managed on one end and ignorantly collapsed on the other. Jennings argues that we are inheritors of this “seduction of segregation” and have substituted belonging drawn along other lines—race, culture, nation, etc.—as opposed to the belonging offered through Jesus. (3) For Jennings, this problem is a theological one. It’s a failure to properly understand the incarnation. It is in the very body of Jesus, fully human and fully divine, that the church is formed and where the desire of God to interweave Jew and Gentile is revealed. Belonging is achieved only when we yield to the Spirit and “turn in relentless embrace of one another,” seeking to form an intimate space together in all its complexity. (4) Being a disciple means leaning into this difficult work of belonging, not retreating to our silos where we serve God separately.
In Jennings’ earlier (and ground-breaking) work, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, he traces historically how this struggle—and the failure to achieve belonging—has resulted in a modern world with an enduring “Christian segregationalist mentality.” (5) Though rooted in the issues he articulates in his Acts commentary, they take on a particularly pernicious form during the era of colonialism and beyond. As a result, “Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination.” (6) The essence of Jennings’ argument is this: Europeans take on a supercessionist logic—the idea that the church replaces Israel—and apply it to themselves, positioning themselves as the new elect in contradistinction to non-European peoples. When this new elect encounters the new world and its peoples, they place their white Christian bodies at the top of a racial hierarchy. This re-organization of social space—that is, the entire colonial project—results in the forceful and violent displacement of black and indigenous bodies. Land and bodies became something to be possessed and commodified. “Whiteness replaced the earth as the signifier of identities,” and narratives of peoples with identities bound to geography no longer held sway. (7) Their removal meant that the identity of these peoples was no longer tied to the lands from which they came and was measured now only by their proximity to whiteness. And since land was no longer a reliable marker of identity, “people would henceforth (and forever) carry their identities on their bodies.” (8) Racialized kinship is the new form of belonging that replaces communion with God, with one another, and with the rest of creation. In this racial imagination, to be white is to be at the top of the hierarchy and therefore closer to God.
Again, for Jennings, this problem is a theological one, a distortion of the work of incarnation. In the incarnation, the Creator enters creation. However, in this racial hierarchy, whiteness reconfigures and recreates space to its own ends. “Whiteness is co-creator with God.” (9) To be white is to be close to God. This distortion puts whiteness—and the theology it generates—in an evaluative mode, where the very notion of salvation is defined by proximity to whiteness and where belonging is (partially) achieved through assimilation. This theological problem formed the basis of part of the anti-racism program I designed, which was intended to be an experiential, aesthetic approach. One of the experiences I curated for that program essentially brought Jennings’ work to life, where parishioners were able to engage with these ideas in tactile ways. Jennings reflects on a 15th century papal bull, Romanus Pontifex, written by Pope Nicholas V, where he authorizes the colonial endeavors of Portugal, making clear that people seized during raids across the globe were considered possessions. Nicholas uses imagery of “the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ” as a kind of seal of approval. (10) As I was reading this phrase over and over, I was struck by its similarity to a phrase folks in my parish hear regularly when offered the chalice of wine during the Eucharist: “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” (11) So, to bring these ideas to life, I had parishioners reflect on the idea of salvation, and then they were presented with short excerpts from Nicholas V and from Jennings about the racial hierarchy. All of this was placed on a table with a map of the world from the 15th century stained with wine from an overturned chalice. The idea was to have them confront the distortion of the sacraments and of theology in a visual and visceral way. The image was meant to evoke Jennings’ idea that whiteness became the marker and agent of salvation, replacing the Savior in the process. The blood poured out from the body of Christ seals the white body in this position of power.
This power, this evaluative mode of whiteness, is persistent and pervasive. In his most recent work, Jennings demonstrates how this mode animates theological education, in particular, and actively works against belonging. It has been shaped by an “overwhelming white masculinist presence that always aims to build a national and global future that we should all inhabit” through the process of assimilation. (12) The specifics of how this applies to theological education are beyond the scope of this article, but Jennings does argue that belonging must be the starting point from which we (re-)think education—and everything else, really. (13) The image that Jennings evokes to make this argument is drawn from Scripture: Jesus and the crowd. Jesus is at the center of the crowd, “reflecting God’s desire for the gathering,” where people who would not normally be together are all drawn nearer to one another as they draw nearer to Jesus, where “we see what God wants: communion.” (14) There’s an intimacy and a joining that takes place in the crowd that works against the segregationist logic that has long seduced the church, a logic that reached its tragic fulfillment in whiteness. In short, to be in the crowd is to create belonging.
This crowd is by no means homogenous. It’s a crowd marked by diversity of all kinds. However, this crowd has to meet certain conditions in order to achieve that belonging. First, the crowd must be willing to enter into and learn from that diversity. The crowd breaks down boundaries between peoples and refuses to stand as gatekeepers for the boundaries drawn up along lines of race. The crowd seeks to be shaped by the others in its midst as opposed to trying to shape them in their own image. The crowd sees Jesus as the center of its social life and operates with an ethic of love, refusing to organize along other patterns of belonging. (15)
In effect, the crowd is also an apt metaphor for Jennings’ work. His work crosses the boundaries of disciplines and is suffuse with his own voice alongside the voices of others—biblical and historical figures, students, colleagues—all gathered around Jesus. That makes his work a powerful theological resource. Jennings at once recognizes that racism and the forces of whiteness that undergird it must be faced head on, even as he calls for a new kind of belonging, a new communion that breaks down those forces. Jennings draws on the riches of the theological tradition even as he reimagines and reinvigorates it in light of the challenges of today. Jennings renders critique in a melody of hope.
That anti-racism program I’ve referenced a couple of times? I chose to call it “Creative Belonging,” in part an homage to Jennings’ influence. It’s also a reminder that belonging takes work, bringing theological imagining to life in the church, urging us to take our place in the crowd around the One that makes true belonging possible.
Willie Jennings, Acts (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 143.
Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 145, 156.
Ibid., 157.
Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 271.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid. 58.
Ibid., 59.
Ibid., 62.
Nicholas V, “Romanus pontifex,” Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/nichol05/romanus-pontifex.htm
Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1979), 365.
Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2020), 82.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 13, 152.
Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 253.
