Longer Tables, Shorter Walls: Every Gentile Belongs
Reflections
So let us repent of pretending to decide who is “truly” the people of God and who is not, of a politics of construction and policing mythological borders of peoplehood between ourselves and others who remember the God of Israel as their own. Such is a politics that involves disowning our sisters and brothers, as well as doing violence to others who are by extension “not us”. Let us read the Bible more carefully, so as to tell the gospel as a story of deepest solidarity rather than violent supercession. And let that story of God’s love inform ways of mingling our flesh with those from whom our current borders divide us, be they territorial or deeper boundaries.
— Tommy Givens
- [The West’s] accomplishment was one in which Western, mainly Gentile, Christians no longer had to interpret their existence inside another story—Israel’s. [. . . .] Stated differently, whiteness is the accomplishment of interpreting the self simply by reference to oneself, and in this respect it is the uniquely “Christian” accomplishment of no longer having to understand Christian identity as unfolding within another reality, the reality of Israel’s covenantal story with YHWH. In other words, insofar as it is a distinctly “Christian” phenomenon, whiteness is the accomplishment of no longer having to leave behind a prior reality so as to enter into another one, although this is precisely what Abram, Hagar, Jacob, Ruth, and the Ethiopian Eunuch, to name just a few, had to do. — J Kameron Carters, from Race: A Theological Account
