He completed his Ph.D. in religion, with a concentration on theology and ethics, at Duke University in 1993, supervised under Geoffrey Wainwright.

His Ph.D. dissertation topic is "Reclaiming the Creature: Anthropological Vision in the Thought of Athanasius of Alexandria and Karl Barth.

In 2010, Yale University Press published Jennings's The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

[5] Syndicate editor-in-chief Christian Amondson considered it a "bold, creative, and courageous critique" of supersessionism and its entanglement in socially constructed ideas about race.

[6] Carroll College professor Eric Dayl Meyer called the book "a significant contribution to academic theology".