The Christian Imagination

1. The Christian imagination became diseased, birthing race.

Indeed, I argue here that Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination.

A profound illness. The Christian imagination, meant to foster connection and belonging, developed a deep illness in the Western world. This disease manifests as a distorted relational imagination, hindering Christians from truly seeing and embracing others. It's not just about different Christianities (white/black) or cultural expressions, but a fundamental theological problem.

Origins in colonialism. This diseased imagination took root during the age of European colonialism, woven into processes of dominance. Christianity, wherever it went in the modern colonies, inverted its sense of hospitality, claiming to be the host and demanding native peoples adapt to its ways. This historical formation resisted the realities of submission and transformation, thwarting its deepest instincts of intimacy.

Theological blindness. Theology itself now operates within this diseased imagination, unable to discern how its practices reflect and fuel the problem. It lacks the ability to see profound connections between embracing strangers and theological meditations, or between connecting to the earth and forming identities through such actions. This isn't due to intellectual gaps, but to the soil in which modern theology grew.

2. Colonial displacement severed identity from place.

Displacement is the central operation at work here.

Reconfiguring space and bodies. The dawn of European colonialism marked a catastrophic theological tragedy: the auctioning of bodies without regard to human connection, carried out within Christian society. This act drew ritual power from Christianity while mangling its narratives, establishing a pattern of displacement where displaced slave bodies came to represent a natural state, relocated into Christian identity against the backdrop of the market.

A distorting vision. This moment brought into view a distorting vision of creation, lodging itself deeply in Christian thought and damaging doctrinal trajectories. The newness of the world, coupled with European power and greed, drew this distorting form out of Christian theology. People were seized, land was seized, people were stripped from their space, and Europeans described themselves and others simultaneously.

The earth removed. The deepest theological distortion was that the earth, the ground, spaces, and places were removed as living organizers and facilitators of identity. This profound and devastating alteration meant that native identities, bound to specific land, animals, and arrangements, were constricted to simply their bodies, leaving behind the ground that enabled their articulation.

3. Racial scales replaced place-based identity.

The ordering of existence from white to black signifies much more than the beginnings of racial formation on a global scale: it is an architecture that signals displacement.

A new scale of existence. Zurara's description of the slave auction introduced a racial calculation, an aesthetic scale of existence from white (fair, well-proportioned) to black (ugly, deformed), with others in between. This aesthetic, growing in power with European expansion, became a scale for seeing and touching multiple peoples and their lands at once, thinking them together.

Theological operation. This comparative thinking was not just a product of burgeoning nation-states but a theological operation, ecclesial in nature. Church and state enfolded each other, establishing a framework for interpreting peoples encountered through exploration and conquest. This framework, drawing from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, rendered all peoples as contingent, without necessary permanence of place or identity, subject to alteration for the sake of salvation.

Whiteness as landscape. With the emergence of whiteness, identity was calibrated through possession of, not possession by, specific land. Racial agency rendered unintelligible narratives of the collective self bound to geography. Whiteness became a social and theological way of imagining, evolving into a method of understanding the world, transcending peoples as a means of seeing all peoples while realizing itself.

4. Supersessionism fueled racialized theological discernment.

That distortion was the replacement of Israel, or, in its proper theological term, supersessionism.

Israel replaced. Supersessionist thinking, where the church replaces Israel in God's mind, became a decisive distortion. This thinking positioned Christian identity fully within European (white) identity and outside Jewish and Muslim identities, creating a conceptual vacuum filled by the European. The process of becoming Christian took on new aesthetic and racial markers.

Racial calculus. In the age of discovery, supersessionist thinking burrowed deep inside evangelism, emerging joined to whiteness in a sophisticated form. European Christians reconfigured the vision of God's attention to Israel's election, migrating that visibility to a new home shaped by new visual markers. The white body became the compass marking divine election, a discerning body able to detect holy effects and saving grace.

Reprobation and capacity. This racial calculus informed the classification of peoples based on their salvific possibilities and capacity for ecclesial service. Africans, like converted Jews and Moors, were chained to suspicion and doubt, seen as incapable of gospel life, even as a "sterile reprobate land." In contrast, "white" races like the Japanese showed potential for deep Christian formation, reflecting a vision of election reconfigured around white bodies.

5. Theological education became pedagogical imperialism.

From the moment Acosta (and all those like him) placed his feet on the ground in Lima, the Christian tradition and its theologians conjured a form of practical rationality that locked theology in discourses of displacement from which it has never escaped.

A new groundlessness. José de Acosta, a brilliant Jesuit theologian in Peru, entered a Spanish world in the making and a native world in collapse. His theological vision was formed in this transformation, but it was detached from the land and oblivious to native ecologies. This created a new groundlessness for Christian theology, enclosed within Iberian whiteness.

Epistemic rupture. Acosta faced an epistemic rupture: his Old World conceptualities clashed with New World realities. He had to slice geographic authority from ancient texts and replace it with his own experience, but his goal was to reestablish ecclesial authority. He brought the New World inside his theological vision, rendering it intelligible, but this totalizing gesture became a harbinger of Western conceptual hegemony.

Pedagogical inversion. Theology became encased in an evaluative form, a pedagogical imperialism. Faith seeking understanding mutated into faith judging intelligence. Discipline became the formation of docile bodies for colonial production. Acosta's vision transformed the New World into an ever-expanding classroom where natives were perpetual students, their intelligence constantly gauged, laying the groundwork for ideologies of white supremacy.

6. Missionary translation enabled nationalist and racialized identities.

His work of translation exposed an unbroken thread that tied his life together, from his early days as the principal caretaker of his younger siblings, through his years of struggle at Cambridge, to the summer house: unrelenting hard work.

Translation as mission. Bishop John William Colenso, a 19th-century Anglican bishop in Natal, saw translation of the Bible into Zulu as central to his mission. This work placed him in intimate contact with Africans, but also exposed the contradictions between his theological vision and the colonial project. He believed the gospel must be in the vernacular, a hallmark of the Protestant Reformation.

Enlightenment Bible. Colenso worked within the tradition of the Enlightenment Bible, which transformed Scripture through scholarship and translation, moving it beyond theology and into domains like philology, pedagogy, poetry, and history. This cultural Bible became foundational to national identity, seen as the Ur-text of civilization, but often dismissed Judaism and Jewish claims.

Flight to the universal. Colenso's theology, influenced by Romanticism, emphasized a universal, loving Father-God, whose righteousness was a free gift to all, regardless of faith or culture. This universalism, while challenging narrow views of damnation, was also a flight from particularity, masking colonialist domestication and racial hierarchy. It rendered cultural particularity theologically inconsequential, useful only for describing potential development.

7. The slave ship embodied a remade, racialized world.

The slave ship positions itself next to creation, next to the creating act as creation’s recapitulation.

A new creation. The slave ship was a sign of a world remade, a moment of metaphysical theft ambushing the divine creatio continua. It performed translation, displacement, and disordered creation, embodying a new story where the first family was reborn as familia oeconomicus, formed by economic realities.

Cosmopolitanism of violence. The ship brought together diverse peoples (captain, sailors, slaves) but its cosmopolitanism was constructed through violence, built on the foundation of the African slave whose body marked the accumulation of profit. The diverse languages of the crew were subordinated, and the languages of the slaves used against them to prevent rebellion.

Racialization at sea. The slave ship was a pivotal identity destabilizer, drawing peoples into racial performance. Everyone aboard became racialized, white and black. Sailors, regardless of origin, became "white men," gaining status and the right to dispense violence to the enslaved, marking them as distinct from the black bodies who were property.

8. Literacy became a tool of racialized spatial control.

Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion, to the manifest injury of the citizens of the State.

Prohibition and fear. In slaveholding America, laws prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, fearing it would lead to dissatisfaction, insurrection, and rebellion. This pragmatic justification was rooted in the perceived threat to the social order and the economy, but more deeply, to the security of the white household.

Household as spatial unit. The household, centered on the white male landowner, was the core social unit, organizing slaves and free women/children in dependency. Land was private property, an extension of the owner's body, over which he had absolute authority. Literacy threatened this order by potentially giving slaves tools to argue for freedom or organize resistance.

Mangled space. The struggle for black literacy occurred within a mangled space where literacy signified fragmentation. Slaves learning to read worked in secret, forced to imagine Christian community and biblical literacy alone or in hidden groups. This created a compromise: a black church forced to read in fear, receiving a Bible chained to white hegemony, where racial difference was read into the text.

9. Whiteness became an architecture of distorted intimacy.

White flesh presents intimacy and invites everyone else to enter.

Extending whiteness. Over time, whiteness extended over space, layered with each generation of landowners, creating a racialized spatial geography. To be a slave was to be subject to white flesh, dictating relationships and affecting how they were perceived. Slaves sensed the fragility of these relationships, knowing they could be sold, leaving no doubt who was at the center: the white master.

Cultural intimacy in the white house. Slaveholding society put in place horrific patterns of cultural intimacy. The plantation established a house where white intimacy set the stage for all other forms. Slaves and immigrant groups occupied "rooms," stepping out of white corridors into private cultural spaces, but always within the larger structure of white intimacy.

Global architecture. This architecture of distorted cultural intimacy is discernible globally, from media images presenting white bodies as archetypes of humanity to advertising suggesting pleasure through white approximation. It exists in social spaces where land is private property, distinct from identity, and race is the only concept strong enough to anchor relations, subtly signified by whiteness.

10. A new cultural politic requires returning to Israel and the Jewish Jesus.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

Beyond fragmentation. The question of how to imagine space and peoples together, given modern fragmentation, points to the constitution of the people of God. This requires confronting the racial imagination and returning to the original relationship of Israel and Gentiles, seeing the Jewish Jesus as the site of a new cultural politic.

Israel's scandal. Reading Israel's story is disruptive for Gentiles, revealing a God who chose Israel and demanded obedience, even conquest. This scandal is not repeatable, but it shows God's claim on all land and peoples. The deepest scandal is that Gentiles may never claim for themselves what was true only for Israel, yet Jesus, by his life, opens a path for Gentiles to be brought near.

A new communion. Jesus, by his death, broke down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, creating one new humanity in his flesh. This new space is a kinship network, challenging old allegiances and resisting the power of the tempter. It's a space of possible joining, where cultural differences are turned toward a new determination, a new social performance of identity, enabling resistance to violence and power.

Last updated: June 1, 2025