"a greater hope"

Yale Divinity School

"Not everything can or should be made Christian, but too many peoples never got the chance to do that discerning work before everything was shattered into pieces.
     "Some have always worked to turn these fragments against the faith in hopes of finding what was lost and securing a vision of a world fortified against the formation of a Christian and freed from its derogatory logics and suspicious gazes.  These fragment workers believed against Christianity, not within it.
     "I have watched many a student become converted to this quest while in the midst of their theological education, become secret agents for the fragment, looking and hoping for ways to put together an alternative to a Christian world or an alternative Christian world to the Christian one that they had inherited.  This is the perennial struggle at the site of this fragment work. . . .
". . . Yet I wanted for them all a greater hope than only restoring a sense of indigenous worlds now in pieces.  I wanted a drawing of those pieces together, a throwing of them into the air, an allowing of the Spirit of the living God to take those pieces and fit them together in new and life-giving ways that would be familiar, singing familiar songs, remembering people and lands, struggles and hopes, but also new, with new songs, new futures that would mark a path toward what Christianity could be at the site of fragments."

     Willie James Jennings, After whiteness:  an education in belonging (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2020), 37-39 (chap. 1, Fragments), underscoring mine.  One might argue that this is precisely what Aquinas—though roundly criticized for it on pp. 30-31—was (and some, if indeed not many, "missionaries" were) doing, when he sought to reconcile Graeco-Roman insight into "human grandeur" with Christian humility, arguing that "there is no competition between man's grandeur and the humility he must have in relation to [the Christian] God."  I would stress also that the ultimate object of Christian theology is hardly a "fragment," however dimly it sees and partially it knows him.  No, "in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily" (Col 2:9; cf. Heb 1:1-3a, as interpreted by St. John of the Cross and Simone Weil (she of the no small change); and many other passages as well).  And that this is no mere quibble, given that the ultimate object of theology is not this or that theology, not even [1] "the [very] fragment formed by faith itself," every trace of which is said to be available to us "in slices and slivers" only (32), but the triune God.  Etc.
     But I did like this, at least.