The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

by Willie James Jennings

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.