The task of prophetic theology today includes dismantling whiteness and following the Jewish Jesus who is leading an intercultural movement of love and justice. While the colonial imagination viewed white Europeans as God’s elect in the New World, the Scriptures repudiate this hierarchical racial logic and ground Christian identity in the election of the Jews. Israel, understood as the covenant people of God, offers the roper horizon of Christian self-understanding because it roots identify in the God of Abraham, instead of the modern state apparatus that was forged through the flourishing of the white masculine ideal. God’s covenantal history with the Jews offers a robust theological alternative to modernity’s narrative of progress.
-Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation.
I’m just a chapter into the book and already considering who I’ll recommend it to. Heltzel is drawing here from Cater’s Race, a book I worked hard to understand, though a large percentage of it surely went right over my head.
David W. Swanson 