The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

by Willie James Jennings

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.