The Christian Imagination by Willie James Jennings

The question of how one should imagine space is by far one of the most complex questions facing the world today. Space continues to be ever further enclosed inside the economic and political calculations of nation-states and corporations. Yet how one imagines space is inseparably bound to how one imagines peoples and their places in the world. Although the history of Christians in the colonial West shows the difficulty of people imagining space and peoples together, Christianity itself offers hope of their joining [1]

To capture this new possibility I return to an old theological question. How are the people of God constituted? How is their identity established, given the boundaries that attend group identities today, whether they be nations, ethnicities, or peoples? Who are the people of God? Attempts to define the people of God always open up deeper confusion [2] If space and race go together in the making of modern peoples, then what would be involved in the spatial and racial unmaking of modern peoples, that is, the remaking that should be the constitution of Christian people? This question poses a seeming impossibility, the transformation of social imaginations shaped in the fragmenting of place as private property and the slicing of human existence in racial vision. While neither race nor space is an easily abandoned imaginary [3] the constitution of the people of God points to a remaking that could move the world away from historical uprootedness and discontinuity [4] Walter Brueggemann offers some of the key notions involved in this remaking: "Biblical faith begins with the radical announcement of discontinuity which intends to initiate us into a new history of anticipation. It challenges and contradicts a consciousness of land loss and expulsion as false consciousness. That is not the way life is intended to be or can finally be, because the power of anticipation rooted in the speech of God overwhelms the power of expulsion. A new history begins in that discontinuity and initiation. " [5]