The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

by Willie James Jennings

Fabian notes another kind of time, intersubjective time. Intersubjective time is time shared, shared by object and observer, shared by the referent and the speaking subject. The term he uses for this shared reality is coeval: “In fact, further conclusions can be drawn from this basic postulate to the point of realizing that for human communication to occur, coevalness has to be created. Communication is, ultimately, about creating shared Time.”83

In a real sense, whiteness comes into being as a form of landscape with all its facilitating realities.

Acosta’s four-year program—(year 1) infirma, (year 2) media, (year 3) suprema, and (year 4) rhetoric or Latin compositions and poetry writing—immersed him in the study of Latin, Greek, and their classical literatures. The student so formed would exhibit the ability to speak and write with great eloquence and power. This was the goal of humanist education: articulate intellectual performance that bespoke of a life ready to be lived in virtue and public service. This was similar to the kind of Bildung (formation) that Hegel would envision two centuries later; yet with Hegel it would be without the deep Aristotelian and Thomist, that is, theological, underpinnings.5

when the Spanish arrived, they did not arrive alone. They brought pathogens, plants, and animals: wheat, barley, fruit trees, grapevines, flowers, and especially weeds; horses, pigs, chickens, goats, cattle, attack dogs, rats, and especially sheep. The world changed—the landscape became alien, profoundly disrupted. Daily patterns that depended not only on sustaining particular uses of certain animals and plants, but also on specific patterns of movement, migration, and social practices in certain places met violent disruption or eradication. This environmental imperialism was shaped around what environmentalists call ungulate irruptions. Ungulates, “herbivores with hard horny hooves,” when introduced to lands with an overabundance of food, reacted to this wealth of food as the Spanish themselves reacted to the wealth of gold and silver: “They increase[d] exponentially until they [overshot] the capacity of the plant communities to sustain them.”31 They ate everything in sight, decimating existing crops, destroying cycles of food growth and harvest, changing the biological regime of the New World, and altering the spatial arrangements of native life.

“Persons of mixed blood were usually regarded with suspicion, dislike, and disdain, due to the erroneous belief that the colored blood [sic] contaminated the white, as the history of mesticos in the Portuguese empire and of mestizos in the Spanish empire shows. There were exceptions in all times and in all places. But both Iberian empires remained essentially a ‘pigmentocracy’ … based on the conviction of white racial, moral, and intellectual superiority—just as did their Dutch, English, and French successors.”38 One must, however, keep in mind the act that very often stood behind the appearance of so-called mixed blood people, namely, the rape of Indian women and, before it and with it, the rape of African women.39 Michele de Cuneo, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, left an account indicative of the sexual violence of conquest. Columbus had given a captured woman to him as a gift: “I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the aforesaid Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having brought her into my cabin, and she being naked as is their custom, I conceived the desire to take my pleasure. I wanted to put my desire to execution, but she was unwilling for me to do so, and treated me with her nails in such wise that I would have preferred never to have begun. But seeing this (in order to tell you the whole even to the end), I took a rope-end and thrashed her well, following which she produced such screaming and wailing as would cause you not to believe yo...

It would be a mistake to see his intellectual work as simply a reflex of colonial power. It is a manifestation of colonial power, but it also reveals in a very stark way the future of theology in the New World, that is, a strongly traditioned

experiences.52 The most fundamental alteration was a split between geography, philosophy, and theology. In effect, theology and philosophy could no longer lay claim on a sure grasp of the creation. Acosta was one of the first theologians in the New World to sense this necessary alteration: I shall tell what happened to me when I went to the Indies. As I had read the exaggerations

Acosta’s redeployment of Scripture and tradition yields another, equally important conceptual maneuver. He articulates a vision of providence with an incredible new elasticity. He discerns the guiding hand of God in the way the Spanish arrived and remained in the New World, while discerning no such divine involvement in the lives of native peoples. Divine providence, however, could be seen in everything, from the technological advances that made travel to the Indies possible to the alleged discovery of the silver and mercury mines: “Since Heaven decreed that the nations of the Indies be discovered after lying hidden for so long, and that this route had to be made familiar so that many souls would come to know Jesus Christ and attain his eternal salvation, Heaven also provided a sure guide for those who follow this path, which was the guide of the compass and the virtue of the lodestone” (Historia, I:17). To tie providence to the happy use of the compass (although it was not invented by Iberians) was exquisite theological improvisation, and the idea was to be repeated by countless theologians and Christian intellectuals in the centuries that followed.64 It indicated how a doctrine of providence was to become a powerful tool not only in situating European presence in their mysterious and inexplicable new surroundings, but also in calming fears of being in the midst of the unknown, both physically and conceptually. However, Acosta understood that the central mystery of the Ne...

Native knowledge exists beyond the limits of Acosta’s imagination. It exhausts his theology. So he concludes that “it is not very important to know what the Indians themselves are wont to tell of their beginnings and origin, for what they relate resembles dreams rather than history” (Historia I:25). He cannot imagine a theological appropriation of native knowledge as an act of theological reflection itself. Such an act is prohibited by his deep commitment to a Western episteme that is emerging at the precise moment of colonialism’s emergence.65 To say Acosta’s theological conceptuality has reached exhaustion does not mean it ends his discursive project. He describes without hesitation native objects and the native as object, both formed in native silence with Acosta beginning a discursive procedure that will mark Western reflection on nonwhite flesh for the next several hundred years—he speaks for them.

Acosta’s careful Aristotelian sensibilities allow him to envision the working out of the divinely placed telos in all the multiple varieties of plants and animals. While his theorization had implications far beyond theology, it never left the hermeneutic of providence—God had prepared the Spanish and this New World for their intercourse.

He calculates the dramatic increase in wealth to Spain and the church as irrefutable signs of the workings of God through them not just for the propagation of the gospel but also for the financing of wars against the enemies of Christianity. The fact that Acosta entered Peru during Spain’s most lucrative years of conquest shadowed his theological reflection and enabled a way of seeing the specifics of the New World while not seeing its specific suffering. Acosta seemed oblivious to the suffering of the people who did the mining, the Indians and Africans. He describes the work of mining in great detail, except one thing is missing, the humanity of the miners:

The central question that attends Acosta’s narration of Indian moral history is this: how does a hermeneutic of providence modulate into a hermeneutic of idolatry? The answer may be sought in the theological performance of De Procuranda (see below). However, the Historia exposes the essential steps in this modulation because it gives the conceptual mapping that enabled Acosta’s reading of native practice. Acosta deploys a scriptural logic—the worship of the true God excludes and then discerns the worship of the idol (facilitated by the devil). Here Acosta stands solidly and precisely within the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, like the tradition he has inherited, he reads this scriptural logic backward: church has replaced Israel as the bearer of the vision of the true God, and all those outside the church are pagan.

Acosta perpetuates the supersessionist mistake, but now in the New World the full power of that mistake is visible. Acosta reads the Indian as though he (Acosta) represented the Old Testament people of God bound in covenant faithfulness and taught to discern true worship from false. Acosta reads the religious practices of indigenes from the position of the ones to whom the revelation of the one true God was given, Israel. Christian theology contains at its core a trajectory of reading “as Israel,” as the new Israel joined to the body of Jesus through faith. Yet by the time Acosta performs his reading, this christological mediation has mutated into the replacement of Israel as the people that make the idea of idolatry intelligible as a primarily Christian insight.74 From this position of holding an idea of idolatry resourced solely by a supersessionist Christian vision, Acosta speculates as to the possibilities of whether Indians as pagans under the control of the devil may be led to the light.

Acosta is cut off from a simple Gentile remembrance that would enable a far more richly imagined possibility of movement toward faith from within the cultural logics and spatial realities of Andean life. That is to say, he is cut off from active remembering that he and his people were also “like the Indians.” Such remembering does not exclude discerning “the demonic,” yet it surely opens up analogies, analogies of both synchronic (that is, relating native worship practices to the formation of new Christian possibilities) and diachronic (relating possible transformations in Christian worship practices in the New World to historic transformations of Christian worship that took place in societies of the Old World).

Las Casas argues in chapters 34–38 of his Defense that the native peoples cannot be persuaded to end their current religious practices simply by being told by the Spanish that they are morally wrong, because the horrific behavior of the Spanish living among the natives is the first deterrent to any Indians taking seriously Spanish ethical admonishments.

Las Casas on Christian theological grounds argues for the coherence and integrity of non-Christian religious practice. His four reasons for recognizing the theological coherence of native practices are that (1) all peoples operate out of some knowledge of God, even if little or confused; (2) all people are led to worship God by their capacities and cultural ways; (3) the highest way to worship God is through sacrifice; and (4) sacrifice, no matter under what custom, is always offered to the true God as that god is understood by the native peoples. All Las Casas’s points flow out of the logic of natural law theorization. Yet each makes space for a sui generis religious reality. He suggests that native peoples are worshiping God “as they understand god.” This understanding is through the natural light of reason and not through grace or doctrine.

Las Casas overcame what I am calling a hermeneutics of idolatry by moving the examination of native religious practices away from its two points of comparison, ancient (false) religions of classical antiquity and Christianity, and toward study of “the origin and nature of human perceptions of God.”80

The obsession to understand the New World joins with the assessment of whether native peoples understand what they are being taught, each reinforcing the energy of the other. In Acosta, the Augustinian-Anselmic dictum faith seeking understanding mutates into faith judging intelligence. The former is not merely a theological slogan of faith; it is a way of perceiving proper Christian intellectual activity as rooted in a faithful response to the revelation of God. That response defines Christian identity not as a quest to verify divine existence or activity in the world, but as an endeavor to understand the world and humankind from the standpoint of belief in God. Faith generates the seeking and enables through grace the understanding.107

In De Procuranda, Acosta wishes to juxtapose two disciplinary realities: the holy minister, who embodies and performs doctrine, and a holy community that echoes back that performance, but now made native. Discipline in this sense is not punishment (though punishment is included); rather, following Foucault, discipline is the formation of docile bodies: “Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).

Theologians must strongly reject the current pedagogical schemas that separate missionary texts from theological texts, missiology from theology, both historical and systematic. The current practice of teaching systematic theology (and all its varieties—dogmatic, pastoral, and so forth—and all its historical epochs) and then of teaching missions (historically conceived) or intercultural studies or both as separate realities only slightly related may in some instances be pedagogically defensible, but ultimately it is immoral in the current situation. The immorality here lies in the loss of historical consciousness: the world of theology and the theological world of Christianity changed with the moment of discovery of the new worlds.

One sees in Shepstone the outcome of linking language mastery to whiteness. In one way, his mastery of native dialects joined the work of the missionary and that of the colonial agent in the colonization of language. Yet in another way, his language mastery shows the growth of colonialist operations from missionary roots. It would certainly be unfair to paint these missionaries as nothing more than colonialists. However, one must not miss the point of the unintended consequences of language acquisition and the cultivation of intimate relations. Personal (missionary) knowledge is put to colonialist use. As he transitioned from a missionary translator and helper to colonial interpreter to colonial agent to the central power running the colony, Shepstone was poised to build the colonialist system on top of existing native networks. This was the heart of his system.

Colenso could be appropriately construed as the spiritual father of a particular moment and region of African literary consciousness. However, all his efforts were under the canopy of preparing proper colonial subjects.

in Colenso’s time comparative procedures were being decoupled from their theological moorings and were in effect reinventing the religions of the world through racial and cultural taxonomies.39 This meant that by Colenso’s time native religions were increasingly read outside of such Christian theological frameworks as, for example, manifestations of the demonic. Rather, native religions were read as affirmations of racial character and indicators of civilization and human development.

Europeans perceived Africans as having the most bestial, debased forms of religious practice. Colenso’s time also saw the continuation of another aspect of the vision of deficient black religion: that lack of religion was bound to a lack of any inherent claim on the land. The designation of native religious practices as superstition rather than religion became an important discursive practice within this stratagem of denial.

Central to the creation of a cultural Bible was the dismissal of Judaism and Jewish people from any claim, not only to the Bible, but to any cultural heritage which might undermine the articulation of the Bible as Christian literature. The presence of Jewish people was hermeneutically sealed off from the vision of the Bible as a national treasure, as the cultural expression of the national spirit, and, in the case of Germany, the German soul.

Colenso’s vision evacuated Christian identity of any real substance. All theological identity is essentially the same, Jewish, Christian, or Zulu—an internalized struggle of the religious consciousness to hear the word of love and acceptance from God the Creator-Father and his son, Jesus, and to follow the dictates of the moral universal inherent in all people. What looks like a radical antiracist, antiethnocentric vision of Christian faith is in fact profoundly imperialist. Colenso’s universalism undermines all forms of identity except that of the colonialist.

Colenso’s role as a missionary bishop in Natal was to promote commodity production and capital accumulation through the propagation of the standards and expectations of the Christian way of life—the Christian way of life as perceived by the Victorian middle class, of course. The purpose of his mission was to produce the scrubbed, well-dressed, properly trained African family, living in a square house, separated from other households, faithful to the precepts of individualism, hard work and the Bible, the husband selling his labour, spending his income wisely, and thereby advancing the economic progress of the colony and his own social status, his wife in the home, his daughters in service, and his sons in training and preparing to marry monogamously, to reinforce and repeat the process.76

From 1707 until 1808, over seven hundred thousand Africans gave their lives to the Atlantic plantation complex, laboring in the British Caribbean colonies. During the same period, more than five hundred thousand Africans perished on the march to the slave ships; four hundred thousand died on board the ships; and a quarter million died shortly after the ships docked.

Equiano captured in his narrative the power of rendering life theologically. The language of spiritual autobiography sometimes conceals the more profound subject position illumined by this interpretive practice. Such a subject position does not release the self or others to space outside the divine drama. It resists the bracketing of theological reflection from the world created within the master-slave relation: “One Mr. Drummond told me that he had sold 41,000 negroes, and that he once cut off a negro-man’s leg for running away. —I asked him, if the man had died in the operation? How he, as a Christian, could answer for the horrid act before God? And he told me, answering was a thing of another world; but what he thought and did were policy. I told him that the Christian doctrine taught us to do unto others as we would that others should do unto us” (104–5). Some commentators would attribute this subject position to an African intellectual framework that operates with theological holisms that shun secular/sacred dualism. It could also be the result of the intensity of the scriptural imagination at work in Equiano. What is important here is the synthetic character of Equiano’s imaginative gestures. This propensity to join things that others kept distinct will reemerge repeatedly in expressive cultures of disaporic peoples.

“One Mr. Drummond told me that he had sold 41,000 negroes, and that he once cut off a negro-man’s leg for running away. —I asked him, if the man had died in the operation? How he, as a Christian, could answer for the horrid act before God? And he told me, answering was a thing of another world; but what he thought and did were policy. I told him that the Christian doctrine taught us to do unto others as we would that others should do unto us” (104–5).

If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.64 One must remember that this is the Christian Equiano recounting his entrance into “a more excellent way.” That is, he offers his readers a theological account of his missteps toward understanding what it means to be a Christian. Without a spiritual guide in his search to direct him to salvation, he inquired among the Quakers, Roman Catholics, and Jews, all to no avail. All this was played out against the backdrop of the horrors of slavery and the vulnerability of his own life as a free black. Equiano realized that the social status of a free black was even more precarious than that of a slave because a free black had no legal protections and no master to protect him from assault, robbery, or reenslavement. Fears of dying attended him while he remained in what he called “nature’s darkness,” that is, the natural state of fallen humanity.

Equiano entered a Christianity constituted without belonging. So he was left to perform a Christian life filled with the surrogates for that loss, God and the Scriptures: “Every hour a day until I came to London … I much longed to be with some to whom I could tell of the wonders of God’s love toward me, and join in prayer to him who my soul loved and thirsted after. I had uncommon commotions within, such as few can tell aught about. Now the Bible was my only companion and comfort; I prized it much, with many thanks to God that I could read it for myself, and was not left to be tossed about or led by man’s devices and notions. The worth of a soul cannot be told” (191). It may seem counterintuitive to suggest a relationship with God and a strong desire for the Scriptures as surrogate forms, given their constituting centrality for the Christian life. But here one must grasp the deepest tragedy for the formation of Christianity in the racial West: belonging was racialized. Equiano could not overcome this and therefore imagined Christian belonging along the only lines of thought available to him: he belonged to God, and the Scriptures belonged to him. The true worth of his soul was established between those boundaries.

Once biblical literacy began centrally to aid the building of national consciousness, the Bible and its important pedagogical trajectory for forming faithful Christian identity became compromised.

An interesting example of the ideological transposition of vernacular work that sought to aid biblical literacy was the work of Isaac Watts (1674–1748), the famed English pastor, poet, and hymn writer. In his translation of the Psalms, Watts hoped to present English readers with a more Christianized, common vernacular rendition.9 His deepest concern was aiding the worship life of Christians by offering a new version of the Psalms, one more useful for singing and one that would “prepare the way for hymnody.”10 Yet Watts also offers a powerful recommendation of Christian reading strategies in service to a nationalist imagination. Watts did his work at a time when the British Empire was beginning to take the shape that would become familiar to Equiano and, later, to Colenso. Its colonies were multiplying, and it was beginning to reap the spoils of its ventures in commodities. Watts, as a member of the dissenting congregations, was eager to affirm his loyalty to the nation. Watts writes from within the Christian tradition, having received the customary training in theology and the classic languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Like Acosta, Watts was concerned with forming Christian identity, especially in the worship practices of the church. He was deeply dissatisfied with the versions of the Psalms that had gone before his own because they insufficiently Christianized and strengthened Christian piety. In addition, he thought those renderings did not fully engage the everyday ne...

Watts did not present problems that could have been easily solved if only he offered his readers more historically accurate renderings of the Psalms. He understood literal accounts. He also understood the Jewish matrix of the texts. His point was that such knowledge was irrelevant to the proper execution of a Christian identity in a particular place precisely because such identity never points beyond itself to any other people. Israel was the beginning point, the ethnic arche of a process of instantiations of a people living in communion with God. Their imperfect reality in both knowledge of and communion with God was more clearly grasped in Britain. Watts offered Christianity as the propagation of a modularizing process. Christianity engenders models of collectivity, of nation, all beneath the one true kingdom of the Lord Jesus. Note the following verses from Watts’s version of Psalm 72 (his Part 2). Jesus shall reign where’er the sun Does his successive journeys run; His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, Till moons shall wax and wane no more. [Behold the islands with their kings, And Europe her best tribute brings; From north to south the princes meet, To pay their homage at his feet. There Persia, glorious to behold, There India shines in eastern gold; And barb’rous nations at his word Submit, and bow, and own their Lord.]16 Central in this psalm is the positioning of the Pantocrator, the ruling Christ, over all nations.17 Watts entitled this section of the psalm, “C...

The comprehensive reach of Latin not only indicated Rome’s power, but also signaled its monopoly on the channels of official education and scholarship.31 For theologians, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew constituted the languages of scholarship, yet Latin enabled the “sacerdotium—things of faith—to include studium,” everything concerning the intellectual life.32 Latin represented a universal and cosmopolitan reality for the church, a language that joined multiple peoples to the thinking of the church. Scholars from diverse ethnic backgrounds were compelled by the church to use Latin as the appropriate linguistic medium for expressing their ideas in texts. Theological treatises wanting to be seen in their important illuminating light had to be written in Latin to be recognized as worthy of serious intellectual attention.

The seizing of land by colonial powers such as England parallels this superimposition in the conjuring of a new spatial vision of land. This is much more than simply the bringing of land into national territorial spheres. Rather, land itself would be drawn into a new dimensionality that rendered former spatial designations and coordination of ways of life meaningless or at best marginal to the entrance into a civilized sphere of existence. With the Land Survey System suggested by Thomas Jefferson in 1784 and enacted by the Congress of the United States in 1785, Jefferson and others “devised a plan whereby all the vacant unclaimed land in the young republic could be divided into an almost infinite number of squares, each of them a square mile, or 640 acres—more than enough to satisfy the average would-be settler.”46 This grid system became fundamental to the way Americans would imagine actual living space—its divisions, borders, and limits.

The interior life of the black body was never the guiding concern of slave society. The guiding concern was the black body’s performance.

Christianity and Christian theology are unintelligible without Israel. While very few Christian writers and Christian communities have historically disputed this, Christians have interpreted Israel as an antiquated element in the wider revelation of the Christian God who has elected a new people, the Christians.

Israel’s history is first its theology. It exists only by the will of God: “It is significant that the Torah’s promise to Abraham predates the existence of a people Israel, which indeed comes into being only as a result of YHWH’s mysterious grace and the equally mysterious but edifying obedience of Abraham. By making the theology earlier than the people, the Torah underscores ! ‘the necessity of viewing the greatness of the nation in light of the greatness of her God.’ Indeed Israel exists only because of God’s choice, and apart from God, it has no existence at all…. Israel has no profane history, only a sacred history, a history of redemption, of backsliding and return, punishment and restoration.”17 The idea of Israel’s election, however, quickly destabilized inside Christian thought. The fact that Israel’s election was a matter of prevenient grace, of divine initiative, came to signify the freedom of God from Israel, detachable from Israel and thereby attachable to other peoples. With the colonial moment, the idea of election entered the currencies of the new transatlantic economic order with its burgeoning nationalist operations energized within vernacular biblical translation. Divine election bound to the church trickled down to its various nation-state subjects, so that their prosperity and unchallenged power yielded an irrefutable conclusion: we are chosen by God.

the election of Israel never significantly entered into the social imagination of the church. Israel’s election has not done any real theological work for Christian existence. Israel’s election, however, announces more than the disclosure of divine freedom. It also disrupts the connection of all peoples to their gods, drawing their attention to this drama. Israel’s life in its land will be the stage upon which the Creator will speak to the creation. Unfortunately, by emphasizing divine freedom in Israel’s election, Christian theology was able to decouple divine disclosure from the specifics of Israel’s life and land and thereby help make possible a novel reading of Israel—not as God’s people but as an ethnic group.

The struggle for biblical Israel was one of identity. As T. F. Torrance noted, it was the struggle to live into their destiny and calling as God’s people, rather than to enter the logic of being just another people trying to establish its eternal existence, an ethnic Gentile destiny.29 We have failed to read Israel’s story as in part a struggle against internalized Gentile identity precisely because we have read their story as Gentiles who have forgotten that we read as Gentiles. Thus, we have misapprehended our participation in the story. We have failed to see their story as the struggle for the emergence of a people beyond the agonist vision of ethnic destiny.30 Thus, reading Israel’s life is also profoundly reading our own unacknowledged plea for help and the unanticipated answer from God. Israel suffers because they are not Gentiles. Torrance suggests three senses in which they suffer. First, Israel suffers through the illumination of their sin and faithlessness. Second, Israel suffers because the light of righteousness cast on it by YHWH reflects outward upon other peoples. If Israel is a light to other nations, it is a light that occasions unwanted exposure. Third, Israel suffers because other nations reject Israel’s theological claims for the sake of their own gods.31 Torrance’s threefold sense of Israel’s suffering is a highly suggestive reading of a more complex and multileveled history of Israel’s interactions with its neighbors and other peoples.32

The devil, the prince of this world, enacted a direct line to worldly power through himself. Now, he presents to Jesus a straight shot and a short route to world victory. This is a temptation too powerful to pass up for almost any people. If given the chance, any people would want to rule the world and guide all other peoples in its own national vision of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Any people could rationalize its purpose for world domination and leadership—for the sake of world safety, world peace, for the good of every people, we must lead. Every people wants to stand on the world stage “in splendor,” as a global player, and not be ignored, mistreated, or disrespected. Jesus’ response is a flat denouncement of Satan’s power. If the one danger is to collapse Israel’s life into Jesus, then the reciprocal danger may be to rob Jesus of his own temptations.

We are there in failure, as the ones who have succumbed to temptation. Again and again we have fallen, joined gladly in alliance with the tempter’s desires. The temptation narrative does not underwrite a Manichean vision of an eternal, divine struggle against evil. The narrative draws us to the awful condition of our collective weakness, yet the wilderness struggle and victory anticipates a possibility: a people joined to the body of Jesus who can overcome the temptations of evil.

Jesus’ ministry was aimed at the lost sheep of Israel, not at the goyim, not to us. This is a reality of his story that never truly did its work in the social imagination of Christians. Israel was constantly read as a permeable reality of the gospel story, allowing us to completely read through Israel to imagine divine direct address to us, the Gentiles. However, to weaken the connection of Jesus to Israel is also to miss the actual mode of connection he draws to us.

All peoples become the Canaanite woman and her tormented daughter. It would be a profound theological mistake to seek to escape the ugliness of this episode or its clear intertextual connection to the priority of Israel. We must enter fully into its scandal. All peoples face a future under the assault of the tormentor, and all peoples are in need of the deliverance Jesus brings. Jesus’ initial response to the woman is the prohibition—his gifts are of Israel and for Israel, not for (Gentile) dogs.45 The Canaanite woman stands in for all Gentiles who would presume on the grace of God. Yet, more important, she marks the path forward. She takes onto her lips the words of Israel. She enters their story, reciting their words of worship, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She is not pretending to be Israel. She is to be counted among the goyim and she knows it. Her daughter is of the goyim, and she knows it. Yet she recognizes that even those outside of Israel may benefit from the gifts of God for Israel. Through the faith of Israel in their God her daughter is freed from the tormentors and healed. The path marked out by this nameless woman in the story is the way of Gentile inclusion.

The speaking of another’s language signifies a life lived in submersion and in submission to another’s cultural realities. Nothing is as humbling as learning the language of another in which the very rudiments of daily life must be identified in the signification system of another people. Such learning inevitably involves learning either directly or indirectly the land out of which the language came to life in the operation of everyday practices. Language is bound to landscape as the essential context of identity. The disciples performed a gesture of communion, a calling to all peoples that the Spirit of God would have them join together, and together they would worship the God Jesus reveals. Just as Jesus, driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, enacted the reality of the many in facing the tempter for us, so on the day of Pentecost the Spirit descended on the disciples and drove them into the languages of the world to enact the joining desired by the Father of Jesus for all people. This is the coming of the one new reality of kinship. This is not only the continuation of Jesus’ work of forming the new Israel in Israel, but the full disclosure of the desire of Jesus for the entire world. This in effect is the Creator reclaiming the world through communion.

This event was fundamentally counterhegemonic, holding within itself the potential to reorder the world. If a centurion and his household could be drawn into a new circle of belonging, then its implications for challenging the claims of the Roman state were revolutionary. If Israel could be drawn into a new circle of belonging, then the implications for how it might envision its renewal and restoration were equally revolutionary. If a world caught in the unrelenting exchange system of violence was to be overcome, then here was the very means God would use to overcome violence—by the introduction of a new reality of belonging that drew together different peoples into a way of life that intercepted ancient bonds and redrew them around the body of Jesus and in the power of the Spirit.

It would be a mistake to call this a sinful failure on the part of the disciples in Acts 15. It was simply the exposure of the tremendous challenge toward intimacy created by the presence of the Spirit of God.58 It would, however, not be a mistake to say that the church has failed to capture this trajectory coming out of the New Testament toward communion. The tragedy here is cumulative. If the struggle toward cultural intimacy was not faced by the church as inherent to the gospel itself, despite the constant work of the Spirit to turn Israel and Gentiles peoples toward one another, then over time the only other option was the emergence of a Christian segregationalist mentality. The best Christian theology has been able to suggest this side of the epochs of conquest and the Shoah is a return to the original social imaginary of the earliest church groping to articulate separate yet faithful existence, a theological Jim Crow existence for Jews and Christians.59 Christian theologians are still unable to capture the spatial implications of life with the Jewish Jesus, that is, a Spirit-directed joining of peoples constituting a new space for Israel, but drawing out of Israel a new identity for both Jew and Gentile. In effect, there would be a rebirth of peoples in the expression of a new cultural politic.

“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it” (Eph 2:13–16). The spatial dynamic metaphorically at play here is of spaces (for example, temple space or land) separated but now joined by the removal of a fundamental boundary. This transformation of the space from two to one implies the transformation of peoples from two to one. This does not happen simply in the removing of the boundary but in the reconfiguration of living space itself around a new center.