A fuller realisation of the Seventh-day Adventist vision of wholeness for racial justice: a counter-vision to the invisibility of whiteness

This thesis examines the Seventh-day Adventist vision of wholeness using the social location of people of colour who are situated on the underside of America’s racial divide. Specifically, the thesis addresses the problem of the invisibility of whiteness, the norm in which racism has been perpetuated in America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The main argument of the thesis is: the Seventh-day Adventist vision of wholeness ought to be modified, so that it is not susceptible to the dominant norm that perpetuates racism. Instead, the Adventist vision is realised more fully when it becomes counter-visionary and anti-racist to the on-going saga of racial injustice in America. To develop the main argument of the thesis further, several sources are placed creatively and imaginatively in relationship with each other, for the purpose of integrating theology as ethics by using a typology from below, in conjunction with dialogical attunement and the moral imagination. The sources I use in the thesis are: Seventh-day Adventist studies, African American theology, religion and ethics plus whiteness studies. Together they create a synergy between the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Black protest tradition that is theologised and actualised in relation to the legacy of interracial conflict, social change and reconciliation that the history of Selma has bequeathed. By using these sources to construct a theological ethic that modifies the Seventh-day Adventist vision of wholeness so that it becomes a counter-vision, this thesis makes a contribution to Christian ethics that is antiracist in its approach to making the invisibility of whiteness visible, and contesting it as a norm, so that racism is eventually overturned and no longer perpetuated. Thus defended in this thesis is a Seventh-day Adventist counter-vision of wholeness that reveals a God working in the midst of history to redeem all of his children and gather them into the good news of the harmonious shalom of Jesus Christ; especially those people who are socially located on the underside of all-encompassing visions and scripts of superiority that are reproduced by oppressive conquerors, enslavers, unjust authorities, corporations, powers and dominions.