Jantzen’s careful work is a model for how theological recovery can be liberating: by joining theologians of the past in the ongoing work of discerning God’s action in the past and present.
— Reformed Journal
In God, Race, and History, Matt R. Jantzen capably explores these two faces of providence, analyzing both how the doctrine has been deployed to support colonialism and racism, and how it can be reclaimed to counter the same.
— International Journal of Systematic Theology
Here lies the real strength of God, Race, and History: it prompts one to pause and consider precisely how best to frame God’s providential actions in the world, and thus to consider the impact of one’s own decisions and actions in response.
— International Journal of Systematic Theology
God, Race, and History makes a genuinely novel, and much needed, contribution. This is a creative and worthwhile study that reenergizes and perhaps saves the Reformed doctrine of Providence from the scrapheap of history.
— Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Saint Louis University
Matt Jantzen not only provides a fresh reading of Barth he makes possible an account of providence that has been absent in much of modern theology. Hopefully, this book will attract a wide readership for no other reason than this is what theological work should look like. Theologians may actually have something to say about the way things are.
— Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University Divinity School
Where is the Spirit working in the world today? With clarity and thoughtfulness, Matt Jantzen explores how three outstanding thinkers—Hegel, Barth, and Cone—have answered this question. Carefully recovering their insights as well as drawing attention to their blind spots, Jantzen leads the reader to his own constructive proposal: that attending to divine providence today requires attunement to how 'the Spirit is giving life to ordinary, overlooked, and oppressed bodies.' Jantzen’s book is an important read for scholars in systematic theology and political theology.
— Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University
Insightful to the point of groundbreaking, Jantzen’s book helps us understand the horrors a doctrine of providence can create in the wrong hands. Unfortunately, that doctrine and the vision of history it has spawned has harmed countless peoples. This book places in our hands a precise accounting of the ways racial reasoning was informed by and in turn formed ideas about God working in the world through whiteness. For all those trying to diagnosis and address a Christianity joined to whiteness by means of a sick idea of providence. Here is its antidote.
— Willie James Jennings, Yale University