The Christian Imagination: Reading Notes and Chapter Summaries

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

Willie James Jennings

64.Ivory-father; Mary-Mother.  Both story-tellers.

77. Jennings raised in a devout family that could best be described as “abiding in Christ.” Biblical figures and extended family seemed woven together.
78. His family’s life was embedded in the Bible and the Bible in them.
79. Jennings’ great grandmother was a slave. What he is describing is what an organically grown Christian family looks like.  They inhabited the Bible and the faith.

My hunch is that the description of the mutual interpenetration or mutual merger of the family world and the Biblical world is going to come close to what this book is about.

184. Author argues here that Christianity in the West exists in a “diseased social imagination.” What is a social imagination?  I would guess that it is an array of church and community practices that accept as normal the denigration and oppression of hard-living people.
185. Additionally, we haven’t thoroughly understood how we got into this. Maybe it takes the form of the question, “Why, for example, are there virtually no Blacks in my church?”

Isn’t the “social imagination” something in people’s heads?  The practice of their Christian faith can not break

188. Basically, what he is saying is that the new vista of possibilities resident in Christianity isn’t being realized.

We know this, Church leaders know this, but struggle to explain it.  Their theological talk and idea system is the warmed over system that spoke to previous generations.

And nowadays we’re thinking about our faith in such a way that reinforces the social context (church) that engulfs

196. He moves on to cite the origins of our theological imagination. He cites seminaries.
197. He thinks that seminary students limit themselves by behaving intellectually like scholars or maybe even preachers. Like all professionals, the practitioners begin to look alike.
198. He’s saying that the refusal to think theologically (whatever that means) is an equal reluctance to embrace the basic contours of Christian faith. It is as if you need to be a disciple of Jesus in order to think theologically.
199. The dry work of the scholar, the work of organizing, clarifying, explaining something has a way of etherizing the good news and seeing it as a patient on a gurney.

It is a tad ironic that Jennings moves nimbly around in elegant abstractions which criticize the intellection of the academy.

He also sees in this some linkage with a superior even colonializing stance towards anyone or group who might be experiencing Christ differently.  Bluntly, you can’t talk about your born again experience with your pastor because you’re afraid that he’ll think you’re an idiot.

219. He draws a fascinating parallel between academic theology and the colonizer. The colonizer moved into the space of the natives and confronted the locals with an invitation to change…to be converted.  Usually the host and guest are reversed.  The local invites the visitor to convert.

There is a principle, however, that traditional peoples take on the religion of their conquerers.

His list of theological projects is united under the heading: “Stuff they don’t talk about in Sunday School.”

Translation.

There are aspects of Church life that reliably resist the problems he talks about.  Mission.  Spirituality.  Worship (minus preaching).

227. I think he could better say that we’ve entered into a post-constantinian, post-Christendom reality where you can’t say a prayer at high school football games.
228. In other words, just because students aren’t signing up for a class in post-modern ecumenics doesn’t mean that Christianity is dead in the west.

Christianity possesses qualities that cannot be captured by the traditional academic theologian.  God can surprise, be intimate, change.  These are both needed and enjoyed by an oppressed population.

239. This opening is about the diseased social imagination. This book is devoted to understanding the diseased social imagination.

So, like Kendi, Jennings will let a few individuals, Christian, illustrate.

Excursus: Maybe progressives don’t understand themselves.  There is hand-wringing.

271. So he is going to determine why we are in a “diseased social imagination” through the experiences of a few historical individuals.

While this is theology it may not be the familiar “exercise of retrieval and comparison.”

Analysis…He’s going to look long and hard at certain historical Christians to see just how it is that they took the offramp from what should have been the main drag of Christian faith.

271. He loves the word, “performance.” Oh no.  Now he’s introduced “modality.”
272. Translation of long sentence. “People are now talking about breaking out of their tribes and becoming kin with everyone.  To do this, however, is no cinch.  We’re going to have to break out of our little worlds.  We’ll need to travel or set aside what our clan thinks and learn how to work with all kinds of people.

I think we can do this not simply because we’re progressives, but because we’re Jesus followers.

We’re going to have to open the front door, traipse across the lawn, pound on the neighbor’s door, and figure out how to strike up a conversation.

Introduction Summary:

The book’s introduction begins with an episode in Jennings childhood, an instance when a couple of White church members invite Jennings’ mother to come to their church.  The irony of this incident lies in the fact that his mother was an ardent Christian and church member.  The unremarkable incident of Christians oblivious of another Christian’s faith and church encapsulates a broader problem in Christianity, which Jennings’ calls its “diseased social imagination.  This is the church’s cramped thinking that prevents it from taking in and enjoying the greater vista that is directly before us in Jesus Christ.  At the heart of Christianity is an exhilarating encounter with God.  Meeting God in Christ reverses the “world’s” stultifying grip on people, especially those at the bottom of the social order.  The Church, sadly, enjoys a limited participation in the excitement and refreshment of this encounter.  Part of the problem is the way Church trains its leaders.  Seminaries mimic secular graduate schools and produce academics preoccupied with issues, which have little to do with the excitement of the life Christ came to bring.  A secondary culprit is the church’s heritage of theological reflection. Challenges that Christian ancestors faced often produced solutions that have limited applicability for today.    What is missing Jennings summarizes as “encounter.”  One should think of falling in love and the release of creativity and well-being that flows from that experience.  The church has managed to miss its spiritual equivalent to following in love.  Like a lost motorist studying a map, Jennings sees a series of wrong turns in the church’s past that have left it in its current muddle.   The balance of The Christian Imagination will explore these wrong turns.