The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

by Willie James Jennings

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