Brief Presentation of Jennings’ ORS Thesis
The Connection Between Supersessionism and Theory of Race
Let us begin with some key sections of Jennings work on the connection between supersessionsm and theory of race. Jennings (2010) analyzes various Iberian Catholic supersessionist texts from the colonial era, one of which is the writings of Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano. Writing in the 16th century, Valignano was concerned with whether colonized peoples’ adoption of Christian practices came from the effects of salvation or was a mere facade to cover either ulterior motives or impregnable ignorance. Not only in question was the natives’ possibility of salvation, but future candidacy for ecclesiastical office. Jennings argues that supersessionism was foundational to such questions related to race in Iberian Catholicism. He sees supersessionsim as “a distortion that was growing in power and extension with each new generation”, but that had reached an inflection point during the early colonial era. Jennings goes as far as to describe supersessionism as “the most decisive and central theological distortion” existing not only in the church of Valignano’s time, but also today (Jennings, 2010).
According to Jennings (2010), during Valignano’s time the predominant theology claimed that for God Israel has been replaced by the church. This meant that Christian identity was encompassed by the white European race. As such, the people of God were wholly removed from Jewish and Muslim identity. In Iberian Catholicism, these were the two deeply suspect groups related to Christian conversion. The converted Muslims were referred to as moriscos (“moorish”) and converted Jews as conversos or marranos (“swine”). But the legitimacy of Jews and Arabs conversion to Christianity was suspect from the time of the Reconquista and the Inquisition. This suspicion was rooted in the theology that had discarded Israel from its constitutive place in Christianity. The result was a vacuum that was filled by the white European. Israel’s election had now been transferred to a new geographic home with its visual contours and symbols. Just as Israel had been chosen as the fulcrum from which Christianity projected, supersessionism established Europe as the fulcrum from which salvation emanated (Jennings, 2010). Jennings states that during the age of discovery and conquest,
supersessionist thinking burrowed deeply inside the logic of evangelism and emerged joined to whiteness in a new, more sophisticated, concealed form. Indeed, supersessionist thinking is the womb in which whiteness will mature. Any attempt to address supersessionism must carefully attend to the formation of the racial scale and the advent of a new vision of Christian social space (Jennings, 2010)
The Emergence of a White-Black Binary
During the colonial era, Iberian Catholicism’s self-perception was as the agent of redemptive, divine change ordained by God. The churches of Spain and Portugal saw their position as those who condition the world rather than those who are conditioned by it. And in this way Iberian Catholicism mirrored the role and action of God in creation (Jennings, 2010). Jennings argues that the decisive point here regarding the origins of Western race theory is that “creative authority, a creative regime” was “channeled through white presence”. And all peoples involved in the colonial project were touched by this creative administration. Thus, racial being was conceived of as an act of continuous interaction where becoming is oriented around whiteness. The white colonialists imagined a world of interlocking cultures which they were somehow separate and distinct from (Jennings, 2010).
Jennings (2010) describes a white-black binary representing opposite ends of a spectrum. Therefore, just as the colonial landscape must be refashioned, ethnic identity must be refashioned as well. The indigenous peoples needed to be brought from “chaos to faith”, just as the colonial territories had to be “cleared, organized, and brought into productive civilization”. The only stable state possible from such a perspective is one of transition founded on racial attribution. Jennings states that “reciprocity of racial being was in play in the formation of the New World racial order, but that reciprocity must never be construed as creative equality”. Racial being existed in its becoming within the dual realities of “conference” and “creativity”. And this becoming is not mere assimilation, but an agency that arises in the racial imagination made possible by whiteness. As I understand him here, Jennings is saying that whereas white race was a fixed reality, all other races developed upon a continuum related to whiteness. And upon this continuum each non-white race upgraded or degraded in relation whiteness (Jennings, 2010).
Key to understanding the importance of the emergence of Jennings’ (2010) concept of whiteness is the new order let loose by colonialism. The identity that comes from the “life-giving collaboration (…) between place and bodies, people and animals” is lost. Jennings describes this as the “reimagination of bodies”. This does not presuppose that native existence was unchanging prior to colonialism. Jennings describes this loss in the present tense as a consequence that continues till the present. Thus, what is lost is the possibility of identity developing in engagement with new spaces. Indigenous peoples are beckoned towards a progressively narrowing identity and narrative (Jennings, 2010).
According to Jennings (2010), modern populations ever since have lived in a “dual trajectory of constantly shifting geographic spaces made more mutable by the dictates of capitalistic logic and racial identities that are free-floating and changeable, yet constantly stabilized through the reciprocity of racial being”. Without land as a root of identity, historical racial classifications continue to provide a rationale for collective intervention in the former homelands and traditional cultures of indigenous peoples (Jennings, 2010).
The Disappearance of the Gentile
Jennings (2010) also explores the writing of Jesuit missionary to South America José da Acosta Porres. Acosta thought of himself as representing the Old Testament people of God adhering to covenant and teaching true worship from false. Israel had received the revelation of the one true God. Acosta saw Iberian Catholicism as replacing Israel and assuming the role of denouncing all non-Christian religious practice as idolatrous. As such, Acosta is unable to remember both himself and the Spanish people as Gentiles that were once in the same position as the indigenous Americans. To remember oneself as a former Gentile ignorant of the gospel does not imply acceptance of idolatry and denial of demonic presence in indigenous religion. But remembering his own Gentile origins could have made Acosta open to points of contact between indigenous religion and Christianity. Supersessionism, therefore, blocked Acosta from seeing the possibility of new expressions of Christian life emerging in the Americas. Such expressions could have introduced the gospel while accepting compatible contributions from indigenous culture. According to Jennings,
What triggers this demonic imagination and conceals redemptive cultural analogies is Acosta’s vision of native intellectual and cultural inferiority. The symbolic Christian imaginary within which Acosta functioned believed Indians lacked intelligence because they lacked European languages and especially their signifiers for God. (Jennings, 2010, p. 97-8)
I end this section on Jennings’ ORS theory transitioning to its contextualization within academia and racial activism. Not only because Jennings is a black US-American theologian speaking against racism, but because of antecedent ideas he draws upon, I propose seeing ORS within the lineage of US-American civil rights theory and praxis.
davidjdawson 