Can "White" People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission (Missiological Engagements Book 12)

by Willie James Jennings

wherever racial categorizations are rooted in society, they function to render some peoples outside of the category of human. As one of our authors puts it: “Racialization is the process by which the marker between human and nonhuman is biologized.”46 As we collectively maintain herein, race, racism, and white supremacy together define a spiritual condition that shapes and orders our lives and worship, consciously and unconsciously, much more than many of us know.47 But these discourses are undertaken not simply for the purpose of indulging in navel gazing or intellectual gymnastics but for the purpose of building a new missiology for race relations in the twenty-first century—an intercultural, interconnected missiology of race relations grounded in mutuality. Instead of making the locus the past, our eyes are on the future, a future that belongs to the Holy Spirit. This intercultural missiology of race is grounded on Holy Spirit kingdom building, a kingdom of the Spirit that upsets a “bullock-cart” type of missiology as named by the Indian theologian Sttīphan.48 Sttīphan defines bullock-cart practice as that which involves an everyday person’s enterprise. The missiology toward which we aim is neither the enterprise of empires nor the work of the everyday person; it is the work of the Holy Ghost, done with, from, and through the common person. We are aiming toward a missiology that goes beyond a focus on the postcolonial past and instead sets its eyes on an apocalyptic fut...