WHEN I WAS in divinity school, we had cliques. And what often separated these cliques, these little theological gaggles, if you will, was what each prized as the decisive foundation of Christian faith. For some it was scripture; for others, orthodox or anti-orthodox tradition; for still others, charismatic revelation, or the experience of the marginalized, or some cocktail of all the aforementioned. Sometimes we said Christ united us, but then we’d wonder, with charity or suspicion, “Who is ‘Christ’ to them?” Isolated on our little islands of perpetual disagreement, we nonetheless seemed secure.
In After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Willie James Jennings has written a love letter to theological institutions, warning against the pursuit of such security. Our knowledge of ourselves, our God, and our world comes to us creatures only in fragments, he writes, and it is in those fragments that we must always work together. Jennings weaves story and poetry to expose how the allure of “white self-sufficient masculinity” has tempted Western educational institutions, especially theological ones, to use knowledge and people to establish control in the face of fragments. Theological education may initially crack the foundations of budding ministers, but it often aims to form self-confident possessors of particular truths. This vision proceeds from whiteness, what Jennings calls “a way of being in the world that aspires to exhibit possession, mastery, and control of knowledge first, and of one’s self second, and if possible of one’s world.” Such whiteness “strangles,” he writes, “the possibilities of dense life together” for Christians.
“Dense life together”; communion; paying constant, full attention to one another; even “an assimilation that does not harm but heals”—these are the hopes Jennings pursues in this book. Such hopes cannot be achieved by mastering Christian virtue, nor by overlaying some tolerant democratic spirit upon the world as it is. Neither can “education as emancipatory weapon” prevail, as it draws its advocates into endless critique and exhausting isolation.
In his more academic book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Jennings hints that “the concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable,” before clarifying how colonialism rendered Christianity incapable of imagining reconciliation.
I see After Whiteness as an attempt to retrieve the possibility of a kind of reconciliation—one far richer than we typically imagine, a union not first of races or cliques, but of all humanity and God. It depends upon institutions and persons removing their hermeneutical armor, accepting creaturely insecurity, and receiving God’s gift of life in the fragments.
It is not just division that plagues our institutions, but domination. Jennings knows well how white Christianities continue to bind and bully. And yet for him, dominating or fleeing the dominators will not yield the divine life toward which Christians are called. Instead, theological education must forever “give witness to ... the desire of God to make embrace the vocation of creatures that have yielded to the Spirit.”
Ryan Stewart is a teacher in Springfield, Mass., and graduate of Yale Divinity School. You can find him on Twitter @RyanMcStew.
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