Life After Leaven w/ Tamice Spencer-Helms
As a follow up to her debut book, Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd, Tamice Spencer-Helms is joined by folx from all walks of life and society to talk about picking up the shattered fragments of a faith we used to know. Life After Leaven is a podcast for those seeking to heal from the damage caused by toxic Christianity and rebuild something new and life giving in its place.
Life After Leaven w/ Tamice Spencer-Helms
The Christian Imagination w/ Dr. Willie James Jennings
Embark on a profound exploration as we welcome Dr. Willie James Jennings to discuss the transformative insights from his books "The Christian Imagination" and "After Whiteness." Prepare to uncover the unsettling reality of how racial identity and the concept of whiteness have infiltrated and often taken precedence over our Christian belonging. In a world where whiteness operates not just as a phenotype but as a societal architect, Dr. Jennings guides us through the necessity of reimagining our spiritual and educational frameworks to foster inclusivity and diversity, reflecting Jesus's revolutionary way of uniting people.
Wrestling with the intricacies of Christian faith and its practice today, we uncover the challenges of revitalizing doctrine through lived experiences. We probe the unique obstacles encountered by those from evangelical backgrounds, striving to disentangle their faith from the historical threads of colonialism and the quest for power. Our conversation journeys through the painful schism within Christianity, as we seek to distinguish between the distortion of a faith bent on supremacy and the genuine pursuit of a Christ-centered community that nurtures justice and collective well-being.
Concluding with a pressing discussion on the housing crisis and the theological implications of our built environments, we grapple with the call to intentionally design spaces that reflect our faith commitments. I share insights from my upcoming book, which draws from lectures on these very issues, urging us to consider how education and architecture can inspire hope and equity, particularly for black students. Join us for an episode that transcends mere discourse, fostering a robust dialogue on how we can live out a faith that not only acknowledges but actively works against societal disparities.
Life After Leaven is sponsored by Sub:Culture Incorporated, a 501c3 committed to eradicating cultural, social, spiritual, financial, and academic barriers for Black College Students. If you are interested in giving a tax deductible donation toward our work with black college students, you can do that here. Thank you for helping us ensure temporary roadblocks don't become permanent dead ends for students with marginalized identities. You can follow us on Instagram: @subc_incorporated, Facebook: facebook.com/subcultureinco, and Twitter: @subcultureinco1.
Our episodes are written and produced by Tamice Namae Speaks LLC.
Don’t miss out on what Tamice has planned next! Follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or subscribe to her Patreon page.
What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Life After 11. I'm your host, tamise Spencer Helms, and I am talking with one of my heroes. This is Dr Willie James Jennings, who significantly changed everything about my walk with God, and so I'm very honored to have you. Welcome, dr Jennings.
Speaker 2:Thank you, tamise, glad to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Let me just jump in. I know that a lot of my listeners some of them are just getting into some of the decolonization work, some of the deconstruction work, and so what I really would love for you to talk about at the outset of the interview is kind of the diseased imagination that you talked about in Christian imagination. On a lot of my shows and in a lot of my social media work I definitely show off Christian imagination as one of the primary books that really helped me get free. So for those who haven't read it, could you summarize that what you meant by diseased imagination?
Speaker 2:I'd be glad to so. In my book the Christian Imagination, theology and the Origins of Race, I talk about the thing that plagues Western Christianity, especially Christianity in this country, and that is it is a diseased imagination, which. What I mean by that? It's a sense of belonging that is racially in the racially form, so that, even though people call themselves Christian, their racial sense of belonging is more powerful, more decisive, more compelling than Christian belonging. And so we are inside that racial imagination, as a special effect on people who identify as white, that whiteness becomes an organizing center of their imaginations. Even as they call themselves Christian, they are yet bound by more, far more decisive reality than their Christianity it is whiteness.
Speaker 1:And it's so interesting because the way that I've been thinking about whiteness, obviously as Levin, as this sort of subtle, pervasive agent that gives rise to everything else, I've also lately been thinking about it as a technology, that whiteness functions like a technology in society. What are your thoughts about utilizing a term like that when it comes to whiteness?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you could call it a technology in the sense that it's, that it operates in ways that form people and continue to form ways of life. So, very much like a technology helps to enable a particular way of life, so whiteness functions like that. The challenge for so many people is to try to understand whiteness as not first phenotype, as not first a matter of appearance and certainly not a part of God's creation. Whiteness is a way of being in the world, a way of seeing the world and the way of being seen in the world. At the same time, Whiteness is a way of organizing the world, giving a logic in an order to the world. And here's what's crucial whiteness is having the power to carry out that vision, to order a world by that vision, and so whiteness becomes a compelling way to imagine how one can operate and control and master one's world. And so in that regard you can call it a technology, because it really works to help people make sense, to come and to control their world.
Speaker 1:Well, that's really helpful and I'm glad I got the okay from you on that. I've just been kind of like conceptualizing it that way and wasn't sure if that made sense. I've been like secretly asking you whether that term makes sense in my head.
Speaker 1:So now I've gotten to ask you. But then you wrote, you went on and you wrote another book I follow everything that you do and you wrote After Whiteness, which was a little bit of a different flavor, which I kind of like. The style and the cadence of the book was a lot different. But I would love for you to talk about how the formation of whiteness shows up in theological education. I think right now we're dealing with we're going to talk a little bit more about what's happening with university presidents a little bit later but how are you seeing that show up in theological education right now? What do you think is the future of theological work if we are going to sort of resist and divest the whiteness?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are yet in the midst of a huge problem of formation, and by formation for your listeners, let me explain what I mean by that is the direction of cultivation, the direction of creating what people ought to be once they've been educated. And it's, you know, the larger reality in Western education. But there's also the slice of it, the big slice of it, that is theological education. And that ongoing problem is that we have all been formed into one particular kind of persona, one particular kind of identity, one particular form of being in the world, and that is what I call the white, self-sufficient man who operationalizes three, what I call a dismal virtue possession, mastery and control. And all of us in education has been shaped to move us all, no matter how we identify, toward becoming that man, as a sign of showing that we have been educated. And so theological education, like all Western education, is struggling now and has always struggled with what it means to aim human beings toward that one particular profound image of what it means to show the educated state. And so what we are, what we are in the midst of, is a rethinking of it, and what I suggest in every whiteness, especially for theological education, especially for Western education that claims to want to be Christian, is that our proposal is a different image that should drive us forward, and the image is not basically one image, but it's an image that opens up new possibilities of multiple energies. But what is it?
Speaker 2:And that image is of Jesus gathering a crowd, and that crowd is people from all walks of life, people who don't know each other, some who do know each other and would never want to be with each other, but they are drawn together by Jesus because they want to find out who he is, learn something from him, get something from him. So Jesus forces, if you will, people to be together who would now want to be together. And so the way I put it is that Jesus gathers a crowd. So we want to know what our education and for forming people, cultivating people in the educational and intellectual life, is that they form people who, in whatever work they want to do, whatever things that they think they want to be about, they gather people together, and they gather people together who would normally not want to be together. So they form, they gestate what I call communion. They gestate a life together of justice and peace and equality. Because they are together, because they want to be with you, the one who has brought them together, whatever they do.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm so intrigued by that. I'm taking classes right now and leadership and I've been thinking about what kind of an adaptive collaborative leadership model might be and thinking about. There was someone I read and it's blinking because I'm nervous, but they said that the next Buddha is the Sangha, the community, and that there's some sort of a shift taking place where the and Phyllis Tickle talks about this a little bit too that the question of authority and who is in charge and hierarchy it always kind of tends to be question. But how do you think society looks when we have less of a hierarchical structure in terms of leadership and leadership is more communal? What kind of society would be created and what would be the steps towards that, towards really having this sort of revolution of the intimate and this crowd mentality when we think about faith and spirituality? What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:on that.
Speaker 2:Well, what you're pointing toward would be a society that's shaped by some very powerful, very powerful characteristics of listening, that's, first, of being able to listen to one another and facilitate the listening deep listening to one another.
Speaker 2:It would also be a place that we're talking about as a society, as a whole organization, where there is an ongoing practice of learning from one another, where people listen and learn from one another, and then there is a shared project of living together, and that comes out of the ongoing desire to listen and to learn and to draw on as I like to say when I talk to various faculties and institutions to draw on the collective wisdom, collective creativity of a group.
Speaker 2:That is something that's allude, that alludes so many institutions where people are treated as cards in the machine, where there is no sense of drawing on the collective voice, the collective wisdom, the collective creativity. I'd like to say what any organization wants is to see itself as a great band. In a great band, everybody can hear everybody else play all the time, even when they're soloing, because their solos are built on knowing how their colleagues in the band play, and so there is something incredibly important about forming people who, in terms of their leadership. Understand that facilitation means that we come to know our sound, what we sound like and, as you know, every great band has a sound.
Speaker 1:This is really interesting when I think about kind of where things are going. I'm wondering about I've had some questions recently about what do we call ourselves. I think that there is so much conversation about whether or not we want to identify as Christianity, what is the meaning of Jesus and things like that. I'm wondering, as you talk about the sound and this sort of band mentality, do you think that now, kind of moving forward, the gathering impulse would be more around values and ethics as opposed to morality and doctrinal agreement? Do you see that being more foundational to the communities that are coming towards us in the next generations of the faithful? How do you see us making that shift as people who are people of faith but may not know which camp we belong to? For those of us who feel like exiles, how would we begin to create our own sound in our own bands after being in such a rigid structure.
Speaker 2:That's a great question, especially for people coming out of evangelical contexts, because evangelical contexts often front load a certain kind of ascension to various doctrinal themes. As a theologian, I can say there's nothing wrong with doctrine. The problem is that it's front loaded in a way that extracts it from its living reality. When you extract something from its living reality, what you present to people is something that's dead because you've put it out of the living thing. What has to be presented to people? Let's come back to this analogy of the band. What does the band do? The band plays, the band practices.
Speaker 2:What we're doing is drawing people into a set of wonderful practices that we do together, that we deepen with each other over time. When we are inside those practices, we are inside the logic of them, but we're also inside the effect they have upon us. What is that effect? They help us see the world in a particular way. That's what's so great about Christian practices.
Speaker 2:What we wind up doing is we wind up putting all that doctrinal stuff that has been extracted back into the living reality of it. We live inside what it means to be a follower of Jesus. We live inside what it means to yield a life to the Spirit. We live inside the community that is God, father, son and Spirit. We live inside what it means to share a life one little another. We live inside the reality of baptism and so forth and so on. We live inside of it. At that point, is that a question of have I extracted the beliefs that have held them in your face and said you have to believe these Exactly? It's like taking a base and putting the strings in front of somebody and saying you have to believe that these strings actually make music.
Speaker 1:Wow yeah.
Speaker 2:I believe the strings make music, but now what? So what we want is put the strings back on the base, put the base back together to give people the whole base and say, god, let's play this together. And then, at that point, I'm not asking the question what do you believe? I'm asking the question how do you believe in a way that allows life to flourish? That's a different question. And so you know, I think, at this moment, what so many people coming out of the even, especially in the evangelical context, are struggling to find a set of practices in the faith that actually make any difference, because they've been so woven inside whiteness, so woven inside the colonial situation what I mean by that for your listeners so woven inside of a world in which the colonial, settler mentality of coming to possess, control and master people in land has been a part of their Christian faith, has been so woven inside of that that for so many people they don't have anything to do with Christianity because they're not sure what's real in it.
Speaker 2:All of it seems to be so suspect. There are a lot of folks who are evangelical, formerly evangelical, now who are struggling to figure out what is Christian faith. And my dear, my dear, my dear, my dear sister. Here's the thing about it. The reality of it is that what is happening in the Western world, but especially in this country, is that there is a very painful process of separation happening that many people are not clear about. And what is that process? There is a white, nationalist vision of Christianity, and it's been the dominant reality of Christianity for many evangelicals, and that reality of Christianity is not in a fundamental sense. It doesn't worship Jesus, it worships a white man, and that white man is imagined as Jesus, but that ain't Jesus, and it worships power.
Speaker 2:As I like to say, there are many Christians in the Western world. They don't want Jesus, they want Jesus's power. So they don't believe in the resurrection, they believe in the power that the resurrection chose, and so they can kill us about Jesus. All I want is that power, and so, at the end of the day, they're not following Jesus, they're trying to get his power, and so what's happening right now is that there's a separation happening, those people who call themselves Christians, who really just want power. The former president says I'm going to give you power. Various leaders who have money and resources says here's power. And they're going in that direction because that's what they worship. They worship power. But there's another reality of Christianity that's always been there, that's not trying to be inhabit a world of power, light that world. They don't want to be powerless, but they understand power to be something different. They understand power to be in the gathering, in the following, in the light together, in the searching out together a way of not only surviving but thriving.
Speaker 2:And those Christians are trying right now to figure out what this Christianity looks like. But they're in the midst of the unprecedented tearing of a heretical form of Christianity from within. And that's the most difficult part about it. What do you do when you realize that there is this foreign substance that's in your body, but it's been there forever and you think it's a part of it. And all of a sudden the doctor says no, that's not a part of it, we got to take that out. And the doctor says and it's going to hurt, so we're going to give you some pain medication but it's still going to hurt.
Speaker 2:Like H-E-L-L, and there's some in this country there are a lot of people who are raising the church. They have church hurt but they hate the church. But they're not sure what exactly they're hating. They're actually hating this form of white nationalist Christianity that's present across the colonial terrain, so that white nationalist Christianity is present wherever the colonial imprint was, all over the world, and so many people are struggling against that. And so what we're in the midst of? We're in the midst of a great shaking, a great pulling that we haven't yet seen the full reality of it. Because, as I said a moment ago, for so many people Jesus is a white man, and I don't mean this in terms of his appearance, I mean in terms of his reality. He is the white self-sufficient man and he was power, and that's what, of course, they want his power.
Speaker 1:Golly, there's so many questions popped up in my head just now. Okay, let me see if I can. Hmm, okay, so I let me put this on the show. I want to talk about how we embrace the meaning of resurrection if we divest of whiteness. I want to have that conversation, but let me ask this you talk about possession, mastery and control, and to me, I keep getting an image of Genesis three in my mind.
Speaker 1:Right, I keep getting an image of exploitation, even of the tree right to take the knowledge as opposed to just remaining curious and learning, and to have to possess rather than to share, and I see those things coming up as I've been reading Genesis three. I don't want to oversimplify things, but I think about what, what empire does, how empire functions, and I think about the sort of the way of Cain. Do you think I mean, do you think that things simply boil down to like whether or not, when faced with the choice to love, we will either, you know, be a murderer or a martyr, so to speak? Right, like the choice for everyone, or that the garden choice is coming for us all the time? What are your thoughts about that?
Speaker 2:Well, you know it's. That's an interesting possibility to think about. The garden choice. I prefer to think about that choice that comes out of the other garden, the garden of the city, and it's the choice of following this Jesus and that, see, the thing that we want to keep in mind is that, from the very beginning, the disciples of Jesus struggle to follow him, and when the spirit comes out, struggle is intensified. Right, because when the spirit comes, the disciples of Jesus are being asked by the spirit to do what they don't want to do, and that is to build a new kind of community with people they would prefer not to. And so that's that, and to many ways, that's what it boils on to at this moment. It boils down to can we actually follow him? Right?
Speaker 2:Following Jesus, especially in the Western world, has never been so serious, because what it means right now is we have to say no to as usual word familiar a set of technologies that would establish control, weapons, guns, violence, the use of resources to continue to create grotesque disparities in wealth and magnified poverty, homelessness. Because the follow Jesus now is to say no to the configuration of an economic system and not only will continue to strangle the planet, but will fundamentally show that the world is not just a place for us to live, but a place for us to live, that there is no hope in the kind of Christianity that is being presented as in support of that. So I think it comes down to that crucial matter and I do think there are many people who are struggling to follow Jesus, but I think they're hoping in many ways that there'd be more light for the past. That's a little bit narrow, but I think there's more people who would love some more light on the path I'm giving.
Speaker 2:What's happening in this country, especially with so many Christians supporting policies this is not just a matter of supporting the former president, but supporting policies I want to keep that in mind supporting policies that are diametrically opposed to the way of Jesus Christ. Exactly, until we get Christians who will not support policies that are diametrically opposed to the life of Jesus Christ, we are going to struggle. We're going to struggle deeply and again there'll be more and more folks disaffected by not only evangelicalism but disaffected by Christianity, who just threw their hands up and said I don't want to have their faith in the Virginian, but knowing that there is something in them that needs that faith that they will form, and some part of them knows that they need it, but they don't know how to access it without all the toxins Gosh.
Speaker 1:I've helped that deeply in my soul. Okay, since we're talking about policy, let's just talk about this. Obviously, this advent I am thinking very deeply about what it means to have a particular fondness for a baby born in Bethlehem and what is happening in Bethlehem as we speak. I'm wondering how you see the American project that you've talked about, how you see the sort of whiteness, how you see that playing out right now with regard to what's happening in Gaza. I mean, I'm not sure if you can speak on that, given what's been going on with universities.
Speaker 2:Well, I can, I'm totally free to speak on these matters, but for us we are Christian this brings what's happening in Palestine and Israel, what's happening to Palestinians, what's happening in Gaza, but what has been happening in Israel. Palestine is the culmination of the long history of settler colonialism. For your listeners it's important to understand that the nation state of Israel is a nation state that is inside the operations of colonial settlerism that is, to come in and occupy and take over and drive out the people of the land. Now the difficulty for Christians is that we have not thought through the reality of our relationship with Israel, theologically speaking, biblical speaking. And so what has been the way that many Christians have been taught to think of that relationship is inside a particular evangelical vision of Israel, as the people will return to their country, return to the Middle East, return to that world, and that would be a trigger within evangelical thought for what God is doing in the world. And so then a text has been taken out of context and it's turned into a kind of fetish, and by that for your listeners it's like trinket. They will say they dangling some funer Christians and say to support Israel is to ensure that any nation that supports Israel will be blessed by God. It's a little trinket and therefore it has been the basis for the unrelective support of the nation state of Israel and the refusal to make a proper distinction between support of Jewish people and support of Zionism and support of the nation state of Israel. So many Christians, they have not thought at all about the distinction between the nation state of the people. But there was a time when nations did not exist and there was a time in which people did not understand themselves inside of nationalist logic. But because we are inside of that, it has limited our vision of how we might think about life in the Middle East, life in the Holy oil.
Speaker 2:So I bring you to Acts 1 and 2. Acts 1 and 2 is a perfect example of how we might think about what should be the case. In Acts 1, jesus was risen from the dead and the disciples asked what I call the proto-nationalist question, a kind of nationalist question before nationalism. They asked Jesus when will you restore the kingdom of Israel? He has risen with all power in his hand and, as I mentioned earlier, some folks just want their power. He's with all power in his hand and he says I will give you power. Go to Jerusalem and you'll get power. But now remember, these followers of Jesus have on their mind the kingdom of Israel restored, which they for them is to get these Roman boots off their neck to overthrow Rome. But in Acts 2, what happens is that they receive the spirit, they make a long story short, they speak in the languages of others. What God gives is not power over people, but power for people, power to build life together. And so what's supposed to be the case is that these followers of Jesus, these Jewish followers of Jesus, there in Jerusalem, are to build life together with others, not build a segregated, exclusive, racially based nation state that excludes, pushes out power states, that turns Arab, jews and others into second class citizens.
Speaker 2:And so what we're watching is the ongoing we're not watching two problems at the same time. This makes it difficult for people to understand. We're watching the ongoing operations of a colonial logic in the way the nation state of Israel functions, and we're watching a terrible theological vision of Christians in the West being deployed, being used there to cover up, to excuse unbelievable violence against Palestinians. So what does this mean? It means that the way forward is for a shared world, a shared land where people can live. People can live together and it also means for so many Palestinians reparations to have homes doing this and land doing that. It means the end of violent and radical gentrification of Palestinians are being pushed up. It means the end of a kind of segregation that is the most brutal the world has ever seen, built into the very broken Bible.
Speaker 2:But the difficulty for Christians, I mean I want to underscore this we don't know how to think theologically about Israel. We don't know how to think logically about land, and so we think that in both those cases we don't know. We've come to the end of our theological negotiations and so we have to think there. That has to do with here and, as I like to say, we Christians do not have a real doctor of creation. We don't know how to think about life together in the land and we don't want to think about life together in the land here. We can't think about life together in the land there. If in the city of Boston, like people are steel treated, second-class citizens and there's many Christians in the city of Boston, then of course Christians here can't think about the life of Palestinians in the real Palestine because we are not, as I said, we will think be illogical. Think from the roots of our faith into what it means to live together.
Speaker 2:In Acts 2, the disciples and I want to make sure your listeners hear this in Acts 2, as they were waiting for power to overthrow their enemies, god gained them the mother tongues of those very enemies, and so those other Jews listening to them said how is it that we hear them speaking in our mother tongues?
Speaker 2:And I translate that mother tongues, because it's not just that they spoke their languages, but they spoke the intimate reality of the language, the way mama talks to her babies. And so they hear these folks, who are not a part of their cultural reality, speaking as though they are part of it, and this was the sign of the Spirit's coming People being drawn together into an intimate reality of life together. And that is what should be the case, should have been the case and might yet be the case if Christians stop supporting violent war in the Middle East and they stop supporting the constant, re-ominent and deep-in-ominent of the Jewish state. But this is always a difficult moment for us. You can support Jewish people, care for Jewish people, be completely upset about Hamas' taking and killing of Jewish people and yet not support the Jewish state.
Speaker 1:You can do that. It's okay, we can do that.
Speaker 2:They cannot see the difference. And why is that? Finaries maybe? Well, that too. But for so many of us, we are so wedded to the collective image of the nation, so wedded to nationalist vision that for us to imagine ourselves outside of nationalist vision is an impossibility. This gets back to the very first thing I said to you in terms of a diseased imagination, nationalist existence is more powerful, more compelling, more palpable than Christian existence. For so many people, being a part of the Church is the most decisive collective reality for those of us who are Christians, but in this country, the vast majority of Christians have never gotten that memo.
Speaker 1:My goodness, I'm wondering about having a conversation as we kind of come towards the end. I wanted to ask you kind of what brings you hope. But I want to couch it in talking about framing of resurrection, because I think about the story of Jericho and reading that differently now that I'm realizing that I was theologized to be complicit in what's happening in Gaza and so I am wrestling with that. I am grieving that, but I'm thinking about stories like that that we are told in the way that stories like Jericho and the taking of Canaan are held out to us when we come into the faith. So for folks like me who are struggling with stuff like that, I'm watching what's happening in Gaza and remembering how I learned these stories, these Bible stories.
Speaker 1:How can I reframe those in a way that is about sort of the intimate, the collective voice, the community? How can we reframe resurrection? How can we reframe some of these stories of conquest, even in Scripture?
Speaker 2:That's always a very important question and it gets back to in many ways, how we were all poorly educated into them. That is, we were given what I call a supercessionist vision. And for your listeners to explain that it meant that Christians were given this idea that we replaced Israel, and so all those stories became our stories. God gave them to us until Israel goes someplace, I'm proud of y'all. And so that supercessionist logic meant that we could take those stories and make them applicable to our own political desire. We could take all of that and read it, not as an allergy, but read it as literally a logic for the nation state, how the nation state can justify its actions. Because just as God gave ancient Israel conquest, god can give us conquest. Just as God gave ancient Israel somebody else's land, god gave us somebody else's land. So the first thing we have to do, we have to recognize that we're stuck in a disease reading of those texts that somehow thinks that we can apply them. So I always say the most, the first thing I realized that was a one time only reality. Now, even as a one time only reality, we still have to wrestle with what it means to speak of conquest. And so what most biblical scholars who have been thoughtful about these things. We never ignore what is happening in those stories, but we can see a line of witness moving through all those stories that brings us to this reality God is shutting down through all those things, shutting down the possibility of doing violence. See, and here's the thing you always want to remember, my dear sister, when you read those stories, there is violence, but here's what God is doing. God is positioning God's self, god's self, as the logic behind it, and what I mean by that is God is saying kill and God is saying don't kill. And I do it outside of what I'm saying. But as we read, as we continue to read through those stories, guess what's happening? The opportunities to do that are diminishing. God is saying less and less kill. God is saying more and more don't kill.
Speaker 2:By the time we come for those of us who are Christian and we read this with the New Testament by the time we read the New Testament, those options have been completely shut down. When we come to the New Testament, god ain't saying us at all kill. And in fact, the only reason we don't kill now, we shouldn't kill now, is because we believe that the same God who said then made you insure of kill and they obeyed. And we are the followers of that same God. That same God says to us you cannot kill. Now that doesn't mean we go back and say killing was all right because God said it. We go back and say the God who now tells us not to kill teaches us how to read these texts and never glorify the killing. We can see it. We can see war, we can see death. We can see God giving victory. But we're not glorifying killing. What we're glorifying is that God is God, but that by the time we come to the New Testament and somebody says, take this handgun, what we should be saying is God is God. That said no the killing.
Speaker 2:What I want to say to your listeners is let's worry less about what happened to the Canaanites Though we should see that.
Speaker 2:Let's worry more about us acting like people who can kill Canaanites today. Let's worry more about having handguns. So I said anybody who's disturbed by the Canaanites, they should be more disturbed about living in a country in which more weapons are being created than any place else in the history of this planet. Anybody concerned about what happened to the Canaanites and the Amorites are to be more concerned about a country that has written into its constitution the right to kill someone if they step on your property. That's what I'm concerned about, because, until we face the fact that the only reason there are some of us who is used to owning guns, it's because we believe that the God who said kill in ancient Israel, who we follow, has said to us you may not kill. Wow, and so that that's, that's the logic that we have to bring to it, and so we struggle with reading those stories and that, and I always say to pastors Glorify the God who gives victory, don't glorify the killing of people.
Speaker 1:Hmm.
Speaker 2:Who made a way out of no way. Don't glorify bloody bodies right, and that means by the time you hit the life of Jesus and when it takes up that sword, you understand who this God is put away that sword.
Speaker 2:Let me heal the man that you just cut his ear off. That's what we are thinking about. But now what you, what you brought up is them, is, I think, the most important thing for your listeners to keep in mind. We live in a country that believes in the gun. We live in a country that exports the gun, and by gun I mean all weapons, mean this country has given to the nation state of Israel more weapons than Than any other country in the history of this planet, and so what we have to understand is that, as long as we are comfortable living in a country, a Washing weapons, it's fundamentally. And once I once wrote up essay and I began it with, with a play on that John. One text was in the beginning was the word and the world was God. I said in the beginning was the gun, and the gun was with God and the gun was God. So many in this country.
Speaker 1:Wow, I Thank you for that. I am, I'm feeling full, I guess my my my last question for you, and something that I've always wanted to ask, if I ever got the opportunity, which was which is? What are you intrigued by right now, what, what is, what are you pondering? What are you thinking about writing on or speaking on? What's intriguing you? And I'd love to know, I'd love to know what's keeping you up at night Theologically, right now?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm. I'm finishing up a book on the built environment. This is based on my banter lectures I did a few months ago, and so I'm thinking about the relationship between race, theology and the built environment. What's keeping me up is thinking about the connection between the body, the building and design, and Trying to get my mind around and help Christians get their minds around I'm not just Christians, everyone get their minds around the problem of housing in our moment. This is what's keeping me up. We have, we have reached the great crisis that is in the middle of every crisis. What is that? Housing, homelessness, habitation. We are in crisis and the world, unless we can think through this matter of housing, this matter of where we live and how we live together, then so much, so much is at risk, and so I've been spending my time a lot about that.
Speaker 1:I cannot. I Can't wait to read. I am so very grateful for your time. I know that it's very valuable and some very honored that you would spend this 44 minutes with me. I think one of the things that I asked all my guests before we go is if you had some words to live by, or are the audience? What would they be? And that's usually how we close the show, so I'll just leave it with you some some, some words to live by.
Speaker 2:I I would like to say to folks these days, especially folks who seem so Much in despair, without hope Always remind them, especially in this season, as we're coming to that season, that the God who was born in manger, who Was assassinated, he survived a successful assassination, he got up, and so there is no reason not to follow him. That's what I want people to keep them.
Speaker 1:Thank you so very much, dr Jennings, I really appreciate.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to pick your money in your heart is donate to Subquature.
Speaker 1:Inc and clear the path for black students today.