Faith Rooted in the Ground
Willie James Jennings in conversation with Jason Myers
When it comes to mapping the sacred, few practicing theologians combine the breadth, creativity, and historical insight of Willie James Jennings. Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, Dr. Jennings won the American Academy of Religion Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion for The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). He is the author of After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020) and a commentary on the Book of Acts that received the Reference Book of the Year Award from The Academy of Parish Clergy in 2018. We had the pleasure of speaking in September.
Jason Myers: At the end of The Christian Imagination you write, “I hope to open up a new dialogue between disciplines that rarely interact: geography, theology, postcolonial theory, race theory, ecology, Native American studies, and so forth.” I would love to hear why you think these disciplines haven’t been in dialogue and what are ways that you imagine convening such important conversations; and are there particular fruits that you imagine that suchconversations might produce?
Willie James Jennings: I want these various disciplines to be in conversation because all of us who have been trained in the western academy and all of us who continue to inhabit academic places, we’re all shaped in fundamental displacement. And so we’ve all been taught to think and imagine the work of thinking, disconnected from place. Disconnected from the land. And so, that fundamental problem, the distortion in our thinking, means that the way in which our thinking ought to always involve and revolve around places and being not simply in a place, but being always situated on the ground, is lacking. And so these disciplines I’m naming and many others that are there, they all have various ways of looking past earth, looking past the place, and at the same time perpetuating ways of thinking and living in which place is fundamentally inconsequential. Now, why this is so important is because in the university, one of the great concerns that so many people have is aiming all knowledge toward the common good, asking the question, “What good is this?” It is a very wise question to be asking. I’m so glad so many institutions are now asking it with more energy and vigor, but the problem is that you can’t really get at that question as long as you understand place to be inconsequential, as long as you don’t imagine the common good or your moral compass to be rooted in the ground.
I learned this a long time ago from Native American witnesses, that one’s sense of relationality, the kind of ethic that one imagines you should have and how you relate to people, respectfully and carefully, that that relationality would be hollow and shallow as long as your sense of connectivity is hollow and shallow. And so part of what needs to happen is that by bringing these disciplines together, we challenge displacement but also reinvigorate all the disciplines, including theology, to take place seriously. And by taking place seriously, I mean not just noticing where you live or noticing where you are, but understanding, so that we learn to sense our presence in the place and to sense others in that place and to live in ways that show those sensibilities. That awareness opens up toward a way of being considerate and living in reciprocity not only with land and animals, but with other people. That’s why we need it.
JM: How has the move from Duke to Yale changed or accentuated any of those considerations for you being in a new place?
WJJ: I’m closer to the kind of environment with the seasons that I grew up with in Michigan here in Connecticut. It’s very much like grammar in terms of the way the seasons function. It feels a lot closer to home than in the Carolinas. My colleagues like Mary Evelyn Tucker and Dorceta Taylor and the students at Yale have been excellent company as I continue to pursue the thinking and writing I’ve been working on for so long about place and displacement.
JM: When did creation become crucial to your understanding of who God was and can you tell us a little bit more about the landscapes that you’ve known and loved?
WJJ: I grew up in Michigan. I still go to Michigan, where you experience the intensity of four seasons; short intense summers, decent falls with the brilliance of the multiple leaves. And then, you know, long winters. Michigan winters, by the time you get to March and April you’re ready to go someplace. What I still remember more than anything else was the intensity of the beauty of the I love overcast days and I love the sun, but there is something beautiful about overcast days, and I really want to write a poem about the grey on green.
I had parents who were gardeners in the beautiful southern tradition of growing your own food, and eating your food, and so there was a sense of which I always knew how important creation was in labels, but it wasn’t an essential element of my work, even though I appreciated its incredible power over people’s imaginations.
Then I began to see the connection between creation and the distortion, the reduction of creation through empire and colonization, that’s how I wound up starting to see the importance of it. I began to consider what God is aiming at with us as creatures of the dirt, and so it became clear to me that I have to think more carefully now about the sustaining redemptive healing realities of life with dirt, with animal life, life in the world.
I learn so much from the wonderful work of Eduardo Kohn. He captured so many of things I was trying to find a way to articulate, that there’s something in the symbiotic relationship of trees, a grounding of self.
JM: I understand that your next project is a doctrine of creation. Can you tell us a little about where you’re at with that?
WJJ: The basic argument of this next book is that the doctrine of creation started wrong for Christians, and it started wrong because of the Christian supersessionist vision. What I’m arguing about in this book is that supersessionism set us in the wrong direction for thinking about creation; it taught us to try to read creation from the Genesis narrative as though Israel did not exist. And that means we messed up the very beginning.
The argument I’m looking at in this book is that adopting creation for Christians comes out of one fundamental position that we are second readers, we read after others. That’s the starting point, and so if that becomes the starting point of the doctrine, then everything you can say about creation has to be rethought from the position of looking through the way others look at the world, looking next to theirs. It’s a pretty ambitious text, but my hope is to get it done within another year or so.
JM: I love where you write in The Christian Imagination about the incarnate life of the son of God who took on the life of the creature, a life of joining, belonging, connection, and intimacy. I’m curious to hear where and how you are finding your own creaturely life satisfied these days and how you’re forming your students to join along and connect with intimacy.
WJJ: This is a very challenging season to try to carry it out. We were just moving in those directions to reimagine the classroom [when the Delta variant emerged].
Everything is centered in belonging. To invite students to start to see their connection as it is not simply just a kind of sentiment but as a kind of centering, intellectual reality. So that was the plan, Jason, but with the pandemic, the Delta variant has thrown all of that into a bit of disarray.
My teaching last year was really interesting because I encouraged students—even though they had to stay kind of sheltered in place, as they say, and socially distant—we encouraged them to go outside. It showed me that that is not sufficient, you have to be with others as well. So what I was able to do was to help them diagnose more precisely the need for others in ways even through zoom, they could try to make connections. So it helped to establish for a bunch of students the importance of belonging as crucial to their education.
JM: You write that the poverty of desire continues to live inside Christian intellectual life and especially Christian theology. The first time that I had the occasion to hear you speak, I heard you refer to gardening as a therapeutic intervention and I love that expression. I’m wondering what interventions of desire might be offered to revive Christian intellectual life and theology?
WJJ: I try to name a few things. So much theology doesn’t understand the trajectory of Gentile existence that is present from the beginning. What do I mean by that? Christians, as we came to the new world, we placed on indigenous peoples the responsibility to be flexible and malleable, adaptable, changeable. We said to them, “cultivate those abilities in yourself so you can become Christian,” rather than, “we exemplify flexibility and changeability as Christians that know and enjoy entering into the ways of life of other people.” It begins by entering other stories not to take them but to share them and then to enter into the wonderful struggle of figuring out how deep must our love go? How deep must I go? How much must I enter? Should I enter deep enough to allow for the movements, the ways of these people to become part of me? I’m not doing this as a kind of missionary ploy, I’m falling in love.
At another level the question is: how from the depths of a people and culture that you join that you love, how might you show the depth of your love of Jesus? Weaving together those two loves is crucial to reinvigorating theology as a compelling intellectual exercise. In order to be reinvigorated theology needs to rediscover what the disciples were on a trajectory to discover: God ascending into an expansive terrain, not expansive in terms of you going to take something over, but the expanding of your own life, your own existence, inside the lives of others and with others.
JM: At the end of After Whiteness, you write about God who dreams of a mountain for us all to make a home together. I’ve been holding that dream in tension with the nightmares of the climate crisis and wondering how theological communities and faith communities can better respond to both the dream and the nightmare?
WJJ: What separates the nightmare from the dream comes down to two crucial words: private property. We live in a world in which boundaries
have been materialized in an absolute sense. It is a world that cannot afford boundaries and borders in that way. We can’t afford to have land owned by any individual to the detriment of all. Unfortunately, that is the world for so many Christians, especially in the West. We are not hearing the call of our God because the West defends all forms of the affected market. Sharing, which is fundamental to the Christian identity, is denied to so many Christians by privatization.
The difficulty is that there has not been the will or the imagination to imagine a different economy that allows people to live in a place where ownership is understood as a communal responsibility.
