After Whiteness (Willie James Jennings) -- A Review
AFTER WHITENESS: An Education in Belonging (Theological
Education Between the Times). By Willie James Jennings. Grand Rapids: Wm.
B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. X +165 pages.
I am a product of theological
education in America. I have a bachelor's degree in Bible and Ministry from a
Christian college. I also have a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) and a Ph.D. in
Historical Theology from a leading seminary. I've taught church history at a
seminary and theology and Bible at a Christian college. For the past twenty-two
years, I've been a pastor, drawing on that education. Over the years, I have
thought a lot about theological education. For the most part, I've been
satisfied with my experiences. But, I have to confess that I'm a white male,
and the system that I participated in, the system that formed me as a
historian, theologian, and pastor, was designed with me in mind. That is, it
was designed to form white men for an educated ministry. But what if you are
not white or male. How might you experience the system that seemed to fit me
like a glove?
In After Whiteness, Willie
James Jennings addresses this question. The answer reveals that those who do
not share my background did not find the experience to be nearly as
satisfactory as I found it. Indeed, most found that belonging was a challenge.
Thus, we need a consciousness-raising experience so we can better understand
the situation and perhaps make the kinds of changes necessary so that all might
find their theological education to be satisfactory.
Jennings comes at this question
from the position of being a theologian who has spent his career in theological
education. Among his accomplishments is service for ten years as the academic
dean at a major university divinity school. Thus, he speaks from within the
inner sanctums of the seminary experience. He continues teaching theology at a
different divinity school, no longer engaged in administration. We’ve never
met, as far as I know, but we are both graduates of the same seminary (Fuller
Theological Seminary). We likely overlapped as Jennings began his tenure as an
M.Div. student at Fuller during my final year as an M.Div. student. He
currently is a trustee of the seminary. What makes us different is that I'm White
and he is Black. Thus, while both of us appreciate our tenures at Fuller, we
also experienced it differently. While experienced seminary life as a student
and as an adjunct professor, Jennings has experienced theological education as
a student, as a professor, and as an administrator, while being Black.
It needs to be noted that After
Whiteness is subtitled An Education in Belonging. That is an apt
description of the book because the core question has to do with belonging. Jennings
writes in the prologue that the most important word that we will encounter in
the book is "formation." While formation is the goal of all education
this is especially true of theological education. (p. 4). Unfortunately,
although this is true, the act of formation in theological education has been distorted
by a White colonialist ideology. His goal here, in this brief book, which
includes his poetry and stories drawn from his experience as a teacher, dean,
and student, is to point us beyond this distortion.
The second chapter is titled
"Designs." It is focused on the way that theological education is
designed—things like curriculum. Design, he writes, has to do with organizing
things around attention, affection, and resistance. The problem here is that
theological education is designed in such a way that it distorts creativity. Jennings
writes that the "deepest desire that should drive our educational designs
is to cultivate people who serve, but that requires us forming them in a vision
of people being formed to a people. Such a vision articulates servant
leadership through the desire to be a place of communion and in doing so to
follow our savior informing Jesus space." (pp. 75-76). From here we move
to buildings, which includes institutions, and the way they are formed. Jennings
understands that there is a need for institutions, but he raises the question
as to how they are designed and operated. He suggests that the institutions
have been designed and operated in a way that serves White men, but not people
of color. Part of the problem is that the institution is not set up in ways
that one can recognize understand the racial components of the system. That
blinds those involved to the persons who enter the buildings.
Chapter four is titled
"Motions." Here he talks about the need to transform the way those
engaged in theological education can reshape and reframe the operations of the
school "inside a new vision of edification" that "builds people
toward each other." (p. 105). This involves assimilation, but in such a
way that people are healed and not harmed. This leads to chapter 5,
"Eros." Here the focus is on desire. He writes that the "urgent
work calling us in theological education is to touch the divine reality of
longing, to enter into its power and newness as the logic inside the work of
gathering and inside the formation that should be at the heart of theological
education." (p. 143). The problem is that this goal is thwarted by
whiteness and a form of greed that destroys the communal metaphysic. Thus, we
come to the point of the book, belonging. If the system is designed to form
white male pastors who are self-sufficient, then those who do not fit do not
belong. Truth be told, none of us is self-sufficient and all of us wish to
belong. Unfortunately, the system isn't always designed for that.
This is a compelling book that is
written for those engaged in theological education, what we call the Academy.
While these institutions might be the focus of the book and the series, I think
it also speaks to those of us who have gone through the system and have been
formed by it. Jennings invites us to look at the system and important questions
about how we were formed. Perhaps it will challenge the way one understands
one’s experiences. As I read After Whiteness, having gone through the
system and even taught in it, I recognized how that system was designed with me
in mind. My teachers, many of whom I regard highly, were mostly White men. I
went through Fuller in the 1980s. With few exceptions, everyone I studied with was white. I think the
only person of color who has been my professor was my Korean Old Testament
professor in college. We read White theologians and White commentators. I did
take a class in Latin American Theology so I could read Liberation theology,
but my professor was a White man. Yes, I enjoyed seminary. I learned a lot. I value
my experiences. But not everyone fared as well as did I!
For a number of reasons, many
institutions of theological education are rethinking and re-envisioning their
offerings. They have heard that people need more practical learning. My fear
has been that seminary would become a vo-tech school, with the theological and
biblical disciplines being displaced. Willie James Jennings reminds us that
there is another component that must be addressed and that is the role of
belonging. It’s important that as we rethink and reconfigure theological
education we do so in a way that includes and empowers rather than excludes and
disempowers. As Jennings writes in the final chapter, “theological education
could mark a new path for Western education, one that builds a vision of
education that cultivates the new belonging that this world longs to inhabit.
But we cannot give witness to that newness if we imagine that our fundament
struggle is one of institutional survival, or the challenge of educational
delivery systems, or the alignment of financial modeling with our desired
outcomes or the expansion of pedagogical models. All these matters are
important, but they are not where the struggle meets us or from where the
vision of our futures will come” (p. 154). It will take wisdom to move forward,
but it appears that wisdom is present in people like Willie James Jennings, as he reveals it in After Whiteness.
Comments