Religion and Power (Theology in the Age of Empire) 9781978703544, 9781978703551, 1978703546

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PRAISE FOR RELIGION AND POWER “Postcolonial, liberative, and transgressive in orientation, the chapters in Religion and Power critique the imperial power structures and challenge the theological frameworks that undergird the status quo of empire and sustain its exercise of power and control. Religion and Power is essential reading for anyone interested in cutting-edge scholarship by both established and emerging scholars representing the diverse breadth and critical depths of emergent decolonial scholarship, subaltern movements, indigenous communities, and marginalized voices on decolonizing empire and imperial structures.” —Jonathan Y. Tan, The Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan Professor of Catholic Studies, Case Western Reserve University “I cannot reiterate too strongly the importance and significance of this text. For too long now, the issue of power, particularly as it relates to the substantive role exercised by religion in the promulgation of empire and colonialism, has remained the ‘elephant in the room.’ Whether in terms of the embedded nature of colonialism within sacred texts or the extent to which the agency of indigenous and subaltern peoples has been compromised by the collusion between religion and the machinations of imperialism, there can be no doubting the often symbiotic relationship between religious traditions and power. This text offers important insights in our understanding of the dynamic between religion and power that cross disciplines, cultural contexts and epochs. As such, Religion and Power is a must-read.” —Anthony G. Reddie, Extraordinary Professor and a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa “Religion and Power gathers together an exceptionally perceptive and daringly prophetic collection of timely essays by feet-on-the-ground theologians and biblical scholars from across the world. Probing and compelling analysis of the empire of Mammon is complemented with imaginative and credible alternatives for advancing the kingdom of God. I would want this book in the hands of all twenty-first-century Empire resisters and kingdom activists in churches and seminaries around the world.” —Sathianathan Clarke, Bishop Sundo Kim Chair in World Christianity and Professor of Theology, Culture, and Mission, Wesley Theological Seminary

“CWM has proven that when you gather purposively many of the world’s finest radical thinking activist theologians and ask them to reflect on the omnipresent evil of imperial power then inevitably what results is a truly stunning series of similarly focused but differently themed volumes of which Religion and Power is the forerunner. A veritable literary treasure thus awaits for every seminary library, every teacher of theology, every person with a heart for reclaiming the prophetic calling of Jesus to be as agitator and rabble-rouser, as healer, as thinker, indeed to be as one inexorably committed to calling out and acting against injustice to anyone, anywhere, anytime.” —Jenny Te Paa Daniel, co-director Ohaki Educational Consultancy, Te Mareikura, National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago “This is the first of a five-volume series on Theology in the Age of Empire. It constitutes an excellent beginning. The volume, Religion and Power, addresses, in multiple ways and from multiple perspectives, the highly fraught intersection between imperial-colonial projects and movements, on the one hand, and religious-theological institutions and discourses, on the other. This it does in highly informed, highly creative, and highly sophisticated fashion throughout, including an introduction that brings the contributions together in pointed and suggestive fashion. I await the volumes to come with great anticipation.” —Fernando F. Segovia, Oberlin Graduate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, The Divinity School, The Graduate Department of Religion, The Center for Latin America Studies, Vanderbilt University

Religion and Power

THEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE Series Editor: Jione Havea In these five volumes, an international collective of theologians interrogate Christianity’s involvement with empires past and present, trouble its normative teachings and practices whenever they sustain and profit from empire, and rekindle the insights and energies within the Christian movement that militate against empire’s rapacity. Titles in This Series Religion and Power Forthcoming Scripture and Resistance People and Land Vulnerability and Resilience Mission and Context

Religion and Power

Edited by Jione Havea Foreword by Collin Cowan

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Havea, Jione, 1965– editor. Title: Religion and power / [edited by] Jione Havea. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books-Fortress Academic, 2018. | Series: Theology in the age of empire | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046311| ISBN 9781978703544 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978703551 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and politics. | Religion and politics. | Imperialism. Classification: LCC BR115.P7 R434433 2018 | DDC 261.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046311 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

This book was made possible through the kind contribution of the Council for World Mission

Contents

Foreword xi Collin Cowan  1 Stand Down, Sit Up, and Talanoa Jione Havea

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PART I:  DARE TO DISCERN  2 Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire Deenabandhu Manchala

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 3 Transforming Discipleship: Faith, Love, and Hope after Empire Jooseop Keum

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 4 Turn to the World: A Mandate for Orthodox Theology Eleni Kasselouri-Hatzivassiliadi

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 5 Appropriation of Religious Symbols as Political Capital M. P. Joseph

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 6 Empire, Deep Solidarity, and the Future of Resistance Joerg Rieger

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PART II:  DARE TO DISTURB  7 chanting down the shitstem—resistance with Anansi and Rastafari optics Michael Jagessar

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 8 The Chicano Student Movement as Religious and The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán as Scriptural and Utopian Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

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 9 Religion as the Ethico-Political Practice of Justice: Ambedkar as Guide Y. T. Vinayaraj

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10 Babblers to the Rabble, Prophets to the Powerful: Mission in the Context of Empire Allan Aubrey Boesak

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11 (Global) Climate Crisis and (Detroit) Water Struggle: “Re-Schooling” Christianity through Indigenous Challenge James W. Perkinson

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12 Redeeming Country: Indigenous Peoples under Empires and Nation-States Mark G. Brett

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Bibliography 183 Index 203 About the Contributors

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Foreword Collin Cowan

This collection of essays is one of the first-fruits of the Discernment and Radical Engagement (DARE) program of the Council for World Mission (CWM). In a time when imperial powers exploit, divide, despoil, and threaten our world, CWM offers the DARE program as a voice of counter-imperial consciousness. CWM is an international mission organization that has wrestled, since the 1970s, with how to decolonize mission—its theory, theology, and praxis—and how to proclaim fullness of life at a time when all of life is threatened. CWM, through DARE, clarifies its prophetic role in the present political and social landscapes and in allegiance to the God of life who, according to the prophet Mary, brings down the mighty from their thrones. Empire is always anxious to silence the prophets who dare to confront power, challenge status quo, and call for justice. DARE brings together many of these prophets, as you will see in these pages, and gives them a platform. Elijah did not set out to be a troublemaker but to speak truth to power. Amos did not aim to be a trouble rouser but to challenge the systems of injustice and to call for a more equitable socioeconomic arrangement. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah defied the order of the king of Egypt, not because they did not fear him, but because they feared God and honored life more. Jesus himself was crucified on claims of being a traitor, but his intent was to gather and move people to the way of life. Peter and his colleagues were concerned about testifying to the resurrection of Jesus rather than to disturb the prized and protected sanctuaries of the Sanhedrin council. Through DARE, as discernment and radical engagement, CWM partners with the prophets of our time, sending a clear signal, to ourselves and to the world, that our loyalty is to the God of life, who calls us to take on the lifegiving mission for which Jesus lived and died. DARE declares that we are xi

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on the side of the radical, communitarian Jesus who dared to name “thieves and robbers” as the destroyers of life and presented himself as God’s mediator and messenger of life in fullness—an alternative to the eternal Rome of his time. If people become uncomfortable because we proclaim this message of life, so be it; but let it be said that CWM is committed to offering an alternative way of looking at the current social order, and to promote the good news of Shalom and justice. If people become disturbed by that message then I would regard that as part of the impact of the message, and there is nothing to fear. It is then that we join Peter and John in their question to the Sanhedrin: “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you or Jesus?” The contributors, in different ways, reclaim the prophetic calling Jesus places on our lives to be agitators of a new epistemology, rooted in an understanding of God’s love for the world that is relentless in making all things new. There is evil, despair, and injustice in our world, but this work and CWM’s witness is all about defying this reality with hope: hope which is audacious and daring, like these texts and the further work that CWM’s DARE program will bring to fruition.

Collin Cowan General Secretary, CWM April 13, 2018

Chapter One

Stand Down, Sit Up, and Talanoa Jione Havea

Empire sucks. Like an octopus, empire has suckers on tentacles that strike, cling, and lynch; both octopus (though much smaller in size) and empire (with many more tentacles and a much slimier body) mangle and squeeze life out of their prey. Empire also preys; it grows big by consuming the bodies of its victims and it thinks big in the drone of their prayers. Empire, too, changes color to make its prey think that it is native to the scenery, then inks the environment when it needs to flee to blend into another context. Ready to lynch, to suck, and to prey. Again. And again. And to be prayed to. Lauded. Worshipped. Sanctified. Lorded. Over and over again. Intending no disrespect to the octopus (feke, wheke, he‘e), which has a special place in Pasifika (for Pacific Islands and Oceania) legends, the comparison helps visualize the workings of empire as well as brings me to the task for this chapter—to reflect on, and invite talanoa1 around, different responses to the workings of empire. The same responses are offered to the companion and most blessed of the collaborators with empire, religion. Empire and religion, jointly but also in different ways, roam the surface of the earth and over the seas, seeking to save the world through conversion, education, medicine, and civilization. They roam, land, and blend in. They take the color of the local settings, and fool many of the natives that they are (good for the) local. They spill a lot of ink, to make their workings accepted. But not all natives are fooled. And not all locals are naïve. From the not completely post-colonial2 Pasifika, four responses to the empire are critical for this reflection: collaboration, submission, protest, and surfing. To set the stage for my four-fold reflection, i3 make two qualifications: one, i base my reflection on colonization as evidence of the workings of empire, but empire does more than occupy land and control the affairs and 1

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relations of nations and governments. Empire also converts and controls people’s values (ideologies, theologies) and their ways of knowing (epistemology) and instructing (pedagogy), for its own sake and protection. Joerg Rieger’s understanding of empire as “conglomerates of power that are aimed at controlling all aspects of our lives, from macropolitics to our innermost desires,”4 works for me also. For its own interest, as can be seen in the ongoing struggles of the peoples of Palestine and West Papua, for instance, empire restrains dissension, protest, and resistance. Empire removes and incarcerates, if not assassinates, rebels and extinguishes any flicker of revolution. When rebellion takes place, empire responds swiftly to crush it, then humiliates the rebels, for example, with public execution and disseminating their dead bodies to deter any who may be inspired to carry on the rebellion (see also Judg. 19:27–30). And many times, empire removes or rewrites evidences of rebellion from its history. And two, empire is more than one, and they often collaborate, but empire is experienced on the ground in one form, one entity, one arm, one tentacle. Empire is many experienced as one, and the ability to hide its many-ness enables empire to change form and color, to hide and to blend in (see the chapter by Y. T. Vinayaraj). Empire is at its best form when it is perceived as necessary and acceptable, and when its exercise of power is welcomed as if it is a blessing with no disguise or with no strings attached. But in fact, empire inspires its subjects to wear masks. Political masks. Religious masks. Class masks. White masks. Native masks. And many other masks. It appropriates cultural and religious symbols and values for its own sake. The involvement of religions, specifically Christianity, in the collaboration with empire, is what troubles as well as motivates the contributors to this work. The chapters are arranged in two sections—Dare to Discern, and Dare to Disturb—but each chapter does some of both. Discerning and disturbing intersect, and inter-feed, so that one needs the other for sustenance and (re)direction. There is inter-feeding also between the four generations of activist-theologians, involved in struggles against different forms of empire in different parts of the world, who contributed to this collection. As expected, responses to the workings of empire vary. Extending the mask imagery, some subjects like their imperial masks and some don’t. Some modify their masks, and some design new ones. Some refuse to wear masks, and some raise issues about the empire’s mask production. And a few set out to trick and surf the empire (see the chapter by Michael Jagessar). The forthcoming presentation and discussion of the different responses to empire are invitations to talanoa—referring to the three-in-one of story, telling, conversation. Why talanoa? Simply, to borrow from one of the signature songs of reggae, because half the story has never been told.



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COLLABORATION The authors in this collection affirm that religions, Christianity in particular, have collaborated with empire in the mugging, mystifying, and masking of peoples and nations, north and south, and in-between. Religions continue to reap the benefits from their land acquisitions (to be more precise, land grabbing), un- and low-paid labor forces, and ministries that baptize adherents into spiritual dependency and mental slavery. The painting by the Filipino artist Emmanuel Garibay titled The Arrival (see figure 1.1) depicts this collaboration. At the center is a complex figure: his outfit is that of a joker, but he wears a kingly crown and holds a picture of himself with a crown of thorns and with the stigmata sign on the back of his hand. A king, a colonialist, a jester, and a resurrected Christ, all in one body. His eyes look away from the viewers, both the native viewers on land

Figure 1.1.  Emmanuel Garibay, The Arrival (in his own image); oil on canvas, 2004. Used by permission of the artist.

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and the viewers in front of Garibay’s canvas/image. This colonialist-Christ figure is at the center of the image, but he seems unconcerned about whether and what viewers see in him. “Who do people say that I am?” is not a question that concerns him. Hanging around his right shoulder is the limp arm of the red-hooded, cross-bearing, Pinocchio-nosed older clergy person, whose eyes do not show. Was he blind? Shy, maybe? Ashamed? In any case, he appears disinterested. And he does not look very healthy. He appears to need the support of the colonialist-Christ in order to stay up. He leans on the colonialistChrist, who is obviously virile, for he stands on only one leg. What is critical in the joining of these two male bodies is the assertion that there is no separation between empire and religion, state and church, in this image. Garibay portrays both as jesters who don’t see. Do they care? To their immediate right, a faceless, half-naked native approaches with a gift. The left knee of the colonialist-Christ figure is raised in front of her, and behind her floats the many-masted vessel that brought the colonialist-Christ figure and the missionary. There is no connection between the European men of “the arrival” and the native. She is smaller in stature, and she is there and not there at the same time. Her being there, with a gift, suggests that the colonialist-Christ and the missionary are welcomed to come ashore. But they don’t look at her. They don’t recognize her being there. They don’t recognize her. They make her not there. The colonialist-Christ figure is poised to knee her away. This native character invites reconsideration of the story of Daniel and his friends, and their refusal to accept the food from the local king’s table. How rude! Garibay has no question that empire and Christianity collaborated in the defacing and disempowering of the native peoples of the Philippines, in their home grounds and waters. This was true across the seas as well, over (is)lands of all sizes and densities. Empire stands on the collaboration of powers, and empire appropriates religious and cultural symbols for its own interests and security (see the chapter by M. P. Joseph). These are not new insights, and those are not new practices. In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, from Egypt to Jerusalem, to Babylonia and to Athens, to Rome and, beyond the Bible but scriptural in their own ways, to Nürnberg (Nuremberg) and to London, to Beijing and to Tokyo, to Moscow and to Washington, and to other corners of the modern world, empires collaborate under different banners of civilization. So (returning to my octopus) the stings and inks of collaborating empires are supposed to be for the common good. But truth be told, the wealth of the common people ends up in the coffers of, and gaining interest for, the “Commonwealth” of empires. As master in the art of collaboration, empire wields and attracts powers. In the case of Pasifika, empire came with its religion, Christianity. Christianity



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assisted the empire with its moral justification, language, and doctrine of discovery (see the chapter by Mark G. Brett). Together, they draw local powers under their arms: religious powers and cultural powers. So local powers line up, like the native in Garibay’s artwork, for the blessings and commissioning by the newly arrived imperial power collaboration. They line up with Isaiahlike zeal: “Here I am, send me.” But not all who line up are welcomed. And not all who are sucked in are treated the same way. The recently arrived imperial powers suck the local powers in, but they do not always live happily ever after. Powers collaborate, but they also butt heads. The imperial power collaboration has preferential options and many discriminations. So the cultural and social location of local powers do matter, given that the empire is not color blind. Local powers that are high up on the native cultural ladder have better chances of being elected for the empire collaboration. They are the chosen ones. They add another tentacle to the empire. The dis-elected, on the other hand, have limited options. SUBMISSION When the going gets tough, some of the local powers give in. Their submission, in the religious eyes of the empire collaboration, is their salvation. For their submission, they are declared to be saved. Indeed, submission is a religious value. Those who submit are ticked as converts, and their names are registered in the annals of the church. “Your sins are forgiven.” This also applies to those who die in their submission. Their names too are entered in the annals of the church. But that does not mean that they are therefore remembered. Registration does not mean recognition or remembrance. On the cover of this book is the artwork Life in Fullness, a collaboration by four artists: Emard Cañedo, Kim Min Jung, Crawford Kayombo Mandumbwa, and Barbara Mulenga. At the center of the artwork is a church, with a cross struck down (like a dagger) on the head of the building; blood drips and flows, down the cross, onto the roof and out of the door of the church. The altar and floor of this church must be bloody, and that hidden space is in contrast to the pristine background behind the church. A waterfall. Cleanliness. The landscape is wet. And moisture is in the air. A rainbow. The waterfall pours water away from the church, from which blood streams toward the viewer. Water is around the church, but the artwork holds the water back from coming to wash the blood away. The artwork poses a critical question, whose blood spills from our churches? The question is simple, and invites different answers depending on one’s context. The Eucharistic cup of the new covenant, and the figure

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nailed to the cross behind many altars, are not the only bleeding “bodies” in churches. The blood of many people have spilled in church buildings and church grounds, including the courageous Oscar Romero of El Salvador, assassinated while offering mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence (in 1980); the Tutsis in Rwanda, who sought refuge in church compounds but were exposed by church officials to Hutus, who hacked them to death (in 1994; see Lorch 1994); the victims of mass shootings at churches, including members of the predominantly black Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, Florida (in 2015), and the predominantly white First Baptist Church in Sutherland Sprints, Texas (in 2017); the too many children whose bodies and spirits (still) bleed from sexual abuse by pastoral caregivers and church leaders; the young islanders who commit suicide in church buildings or other places, including a young woman who hung herself over the altar, in response to oppressive church teachings (especially on sexuality and alcohol) and church demands (especially financial drives that commit poor families to give first to the church before the needs of the children); and many more bloodied church situations. But i believe that i have made my point. Their blood also spills through the doors of churches. At the bottom left of the artwork is what appears to be a fusion of a waterwell and a tunnel. This hole in the ground invites the viewer to look further, and so i add to my list above the blood of victims of attacks on synagogues, mosques, temples, and other public places of gathering and worship. Their blood too flows in the stream of blood in the artwork, streaming toward the viewers, as if to demand that they be remembered when we dip or sip the blood of the Christ. The artwork and the talanoa of these victims are recent, but Christianity as collaborator with empire has been in the business of spilling blood for many years. Might it be time to challenge the church to “stand down” so that it could be transformed (see the chapter by Jooseop Keum) and rescued (see the chapter by Deenabandhu Manchala)? For those to happen, Allan Aubrey Boesak calls for prophetic “Babblers to the Rabble” (see Boesak’s chapter). How might transformation and rescue be accomplished, if the church is not willing to repent and be converted? In other words, when and how will the church swallow its own medicine? These are the kinds of questions that motivate the chapters in this collection. The artwork prompts me to extend an invitation: that Christian theology take account of and for its bloody church, if they are serious about seeking and establishing “life in fullness” (the title of that artwork) on earth as it is supposed to be in heaven. There are two twists in this invitation: first, that mainline Christian theology and the church (as institution) are intertwined. For so long, mainline theology has masqueraded as an independent, objective,



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systematic, orthodox, academic discipline separate from the church. However, the saying is true, that when theology sneezes . . . the church catches a cold. But when the church is sick, and spreads its diseases, theology looks away, oftentimes upward, away from “the crowd” (like those who followed Jesus around). There is linguistic connection in the Samoan language between islanders (tagata o le motu) and the crowd (motu o tagata), so in calling for attention toward the crowd i am calling for engaging with local peoples. I have in mind the crowd who give in when the going gets tough, and those who are marginalized by and in the church and theology. In my eyes, they are represented by the two bodiless, black heads in the artwork. This call is therefore, simply put, for practitioners of mainline Christian theology and guardians of the church to also “sit up” and work out, through talanoa, how best to play their roles in the “life of fullness” (see the chapter by Eleni Kasselouri-Hatzivassiliadi). My call is also in response to this radical invitation in “Get Up, Stand Up”: We should not expect “great God” to come from above and take away all our troubles, and “make ev’rybody feel high.”5 What we look for is already on earth. In order to find what we look for, we need the guidance of the crowd. The second twist is the affirmation that there is blood in “life in [its] fullness.” Christian theology and church cannot step around the blood and cries of the fallen in their histories, traditions, scriptures, rituals, and doorsteps. Theology and the church are not just for smiling, happy, and privileged church members (as in the happy group of people in the artwork, on the left of the church building). Rather, theology and the church are also for the abstracted, fenced, and bleeding (on the top right of the canvas), and for black, bodiless faces. And most important, in my humble opinion, theology and the church are called to consider the possibility that the hand that bears the stigmata mark, today, everywhere, is both black and left (on the top left of the canvas). This collaborative work by four international artists thus presents an alternative to the imperial white right hand bearing the stigmata in Garibay’s work (Garibay was at the event where “Life in Fullness” was produced). Put more directly, the subjects who have been submitted and committed due to the roaming of the empire-collaboration, are bearers of resurrection, hope, and the future of theology and the church. PROTEST Prior to joining the empire collaboration, religions gained currency, integrity, and power as protest and resistance movements. Some religions emerge in protest against other religions, but the current atmosphere of interreligious

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relations and political correctness has tamed the protest and resistance heritage of religious institutions. Protest and resistance ripple in religious scriptures, including the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Among my favorite protestors are Ishmael, who caught God’s attention with his cry (Gen. 21); the Egyptian midwives, who talked their way through and out of the Pharaoh’s punishment (Exod. 1); the daughters of Zelophehad, who took their case to Moses and the elders and consequently became property owners (Num. 27, 32); the Gibeonites, who outwitted the invading Israelites for their survival (Gen. 9); Jonathan, who loved his friend over against his father’s throne (1 Sam. 20); Jonah, who had a run from and a go at God (Jon. 1, 4); and the adulterous woman, who gave Jesus an opportunity to write on the ground and to teach the keepers of tradition that they too are sinners (John 8). These protestors succeeded in different ways, and to different degrees, and their talanoa (story) are scriptural. But not many tell (talanoa) or converse (talanoa) over them. Protest is not just for those who are fluent with words (like Aaron, for Moses). Protest takes place in one’s actions as well, like when Cain presented fruits of the land (Gen. 4), thus showing that he has broken God’s curse on the ground (Gen. 3), and the people building a tower so high from any flood water (Gen. 10), thus exposing problems with the story of God destroying the earth with water (Gen. 6–9). And protest involves negotiation, like when Abraham spoke up for Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18), and the people waited for Miriam to return to the camp before they continued their journey (Num. 12). Protest takes place with words, with actions, and with presence. Whereas empire is a champion in drawing collaboration and submission, protest materializes in people’s movement for recognition and emancipation (see chapters by Michael Jagessar and Jacqueline M. Hidalgo). Protest is infectious, and inviting. In the United States, protest is at the heart of the #BLM (Black Lives Matter) and #MeToo movements. Once these movements started, they rippled within the United States and across the seas. In these movements, protest is a form of resistance. Protest seeks negotiation and the changing and transforming of traditions and practices. In Pasifika, the empire collaboration came expecting to find savage natives who needed to be saved from the dark ways of our ancestors. And they saw what they expected, in Pasifika and in other (is)lands. To the contrary, HaSatan went out to discover how blameless and upright Job was. And he found Job to be so. In the case of Ha-Satan, the saying is true, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I suspect that the Christian mission might have been different, even be open to transformation, had the empire collaboration learned something from Ha-Satan. In other words, Ha-Satan could have taught the



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empire collaboration to look for how the natives may be blameless and upright. If this had happened, Ha-Satan would have transformed the traditions and practices of the empire collaboration. While protest and resistance complement and presuppose each other, I highlight protest because it is situated in the world of talanoa. Protest is an opportunity for stories (talanoa) to be told (talanoa), and conversations (talanoa) to be held. Protest shows that wounded and bleeding subjects have will and wisdom (see the chapter by James W. Perkinson), they have voices and they can speak,6 reason, and convince. Moreover, protest can be done nonviolently and effectively by a small group of individuals whereas resistance (against major powers) requires numbers and aggression. Protest is an opportunity for traditional intellectuals to engage with the wisdom and directions of organic intellectuals.7 This includes putting down the traditional scriptures in order to learn from organic scriptures (see the chapter by Jacqueline M. Hidalgo), like the two artworks that i privilege in this chapter. SURFING I return to the sea, the world of the octopus, and to a practice that has w[h]etted my reading biases and theological orientations, surfing.8 Surfing is the sport of riding waves, usually on some kind of board. One uses the power of a wave to escape being rolled and mangled by that wave. The wave is powerful, and the surfer takes advantage of its power for one’s interest, entertainment and enjoyment. And at the end of a ride, or after being dunked by a wave, one paddles back to the deep to catch another wave. And another. I use “surfing” as a metaphor for riding on the authorities and powers which, within the frames of this chapter, refer to the empire collaboration. Surfing is when someone like me, a native Methodist pastor, takes advantage of theology and the church for the interests, entertainment, and enjoyment of our native people. The bite of the previous sentence is not in taking advantage of powers that be, which is what the empire collaboration has done throughout the world, or in speaking openly about it. Altruism is never complete or genuine, anyway. Rather, the bite in my statement is in the reversal of the expectation that our people provide entertainment for the enjoyment of global theological and ministry agents. Since days of old, we have been expected to be hospitable—like the native in Garibay’s painting—and to dance to the songs of our land, for the enjoyment of the empire collaboration. Here, i suggest that it is time for the empire collaboration to dance for us. That is part of what surfing means in this chapter.

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The empire collaboration was established on the shoulders of the poor, and they have registered the prime water-front “real estates” (as if there are unreal estates) locations of our lands (as in the location of the church building in “Life in Fullness”). They build on stolen land, using free or cheap local labor, and they dare to justify their land grab and labor practices on the basis of a stolen Bible.9 Exposing the thieveries and injustices of the empire collaboration is part of what surfing means in this chapter. In the circles of the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA), where i served for fifteen years, the church (at least at the leadership level) is aware of its colonial and settler legacies. It is common to acknowledge the traditional custodians (rather than owners) of the land at the beginning of church meetings and worship services, and to discuss in theological halls the problems of serving ministry and doing theology on invaded space.10 Yet, this church is not prepared to give its land back to their traditional owners. Nor is the socalled Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, or other church bodies who are aware of their role in the invasion of the land. In the case of the UCA, it is not enough that it established and supports the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC) for the oversight over Aboriginal and islander communities (in Australia) especially in the areas of worship and education. UAICC is almost like the vessel from which Pilate took water to wash his hands (Matt. 27:24). It is an opportunity to declare innocence, but that does not justify the spilling of innocent blood—of Jesus, and of many indigenous Australians in mission homes throughout the land. Addressing these enigmas is part of what surfing means in this chapter. Te Haahi Weteriana O Aotearoa (the Methodist Church of New Zealand) does not have as much anxiety about being located on invaded and stolen land in part because Te Taha Māori (members who are tangata whenua, indigenous people) has equal authority as the Tauiwi (those who are not tangata whenua including pākehā/white, islander, Asian, African, and other communities) on the conference floor, at decision making, and in the running of the church. Te Taha Māori is strong and effective at the church front. They are good at surfing. But lacking is the materializing and translation of the strength and wisdom (in the life of the church) of Te Taha Māori, in the construction and querying of theological positions and theological arguments. Finding opportunities for that to happen, in the interests of Te Taha Māori as well as of other minoritized communities, is part of what surfing means in this chapter. Today, the majority of members of mainline churches on other Pasifika islands are not mindful that their church arrived along with the empire collaboration. The churches have independent conferences, and native people have held the leadership and administration positions for several generations.



Stand Down, Sit Up, and Talanoa 11

And in the case of some islands, like Kiribati and Tuvalu, the churches were established by the help of native missionaries from other Pasifika islands. For those islands, the colonialists and the missionaries had native faces. For the majority of churches in Pasifika, no matter who established them, Christianity has become inseparable from native cultures. It is in fact a form of Christianity that is stuck in the missionary era. Our churches have not learned, for instance, to value Cain, the builders of the tower at Babel, Ishmael, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Egyptian midwives, the daughters of Zelophehad, the Gibeonites, Jonathan, Jonah (as runagate and protestor), or the adulterous woman before Jesus, the scribes and Pharisees. Moving our native churches to value these disfavored subjects is also what surfing means in this chapter. I quickly qualify: the island churches (as institutions) are (in public) stuck in the missionary era but many members, especially in Bible study groups and in village fellowships, are more open-minded and liberated. Like other mission fields, the officials in Pasifika churches are the ones who are trapped in the tradition. The everyday, normal people, on the other hand, are free to surf. They may be “sick and tired of your ism and skism game,” to appropriate the lyrics of “Get Up, Stand Up.” “You can fool some people sometimes,” after all, “but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Stopping the church and its theologians from trying to fool people, but instead listen to the views of everyday normal people (who have their own ism and skism game), is also part of what surfing means in this chapter. In the modern and communication era, surfing has come on shore (to crowds at concerts, and revelers looking for action) and into cyberspace (where public space is accessible in private). When the concerns raised in this chapter, from a specific location, Pasifika, are engaged by church and theological minds in other parts of the world, surfing has taken place. Then we paddle back to the deep, to catch another wave. RAT One of the Pasifika legends about the octopus involves a rat. This talanoa claims that the rat was on a canoe when a storm came. The wind and the waves tossed the canoe around, and it broke into pieces. The rat was afraid, but then saw an octopus in the water. The rat asked the octopus to take him to shore, and she promised to pay the octopus for saving her life. The octopus agreed and invited the rat to sit on his head. When they came close to shore, the rat jumped and ran off without paying. The octopus called

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her to come back and to pay up, but she sang back (in the Tongan version of the legend):                             Fekenā koefē ho kave-valu                             Ko kumā ‘eni ‘oku lau atu                             Fā ki ‘olunga he ‘oku ngangatu                             Ka ko vaihi ē ha’o ma’u au                             (Dear octopus, where are your eight tentacles                             Rat here, ridiculing you                             Reach up, something is smelling                             No way will you catch me)

The rat had pooed on the octopus’ head, and that explains why octopi have ink! This legend also explains why the native lure (maka feke) used for catching octopus is shaped like a rat. The octopus is still looking for the rat, and when it sees the maka feke it comes up from hiding to grab it. That’s how our ancestors used to catch octopi—with the image of a rat. In the context of this chapter, the empire collaboration could be fooled, lured, and pulled out of hiding. What is needed is a theological, ecclesial, cultural, local, distressed, and wise “rat.” That’s my (invitation for) talanoa . . . NOTES 1.  Talanoa is a word in several, but not all, native Pasifika languages that has three meanings: story, telling (of story), and conversation (around stories and tellings). In inviting talanoa, i invite all three; and i expect countering-talanoa. 2.  I use the hyphen (post-colonial) when referring to the period after colonial occupation, and without the hyphen (postcolonial) when referring to a way of thinking. Because there are many occupied islands in Pasifika still—Papua (western part, by Indonesia); Marshalls, Micronesia, Hawai’i, Tutuila in Samoa (by the United States); Kanaky and Maohi Nui (by France); and Rapa Nui (by Chile)—Pasifika is not fully post-colonial. And i show in this chapter, Pasifika churches and theologies are not yet fully postcolonial. 3.  i use the lowercase because i also use the lowercase with “she,” “he,” “you,” “it,” “them,” and “other.” My i finds i’self and meaning in relation, so there is no reason to capitalize it as if it is/has more capital than the others. 4.  Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), vii. 5.  “Get Up, Stand Up,” by Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, recorded at Harry J. Studios, Kingston, Jamaica, 1973.



Stand Down, Sit Up, and Talanoa 13

  6.  See Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; and Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 2003), 35.   7.  See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Books (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 9.  8. Jione Havea, Elusions of Control: Biblical Law on the Words of Women (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 6–8.   9.  Gerald O. West, The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon (Leiden: Brill; and Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2016). 10.  Chris Budden, Following Jesus in Invaded Space: Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009).

Part I

DARE TO DISCERN

Chapter Two

Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire Deenabandhu Manchala

Acknowledging the devastating implications of the connivance between the powers of empire and religions to the sanctity of life and the earth, I explore religious resources to inspire radical engagement for the celebration of life. I make such an attempt by drawing on the experiences of the marginalized and excluded communities in contexts of my engagement, especially in India and Asia. I will also draw attention to what is happening in other parts of the world. I hold this exercise important and necessary for two reasons. One: In a world where religious beliefs and expressions are constantly abused and misused to cause division, violence, destruction, and death, religious communities have the responsibility to be the moral voice and conscience-keepers. This is all the more necessary now in view of the absence of any just and inclusive social ideology, or a world vision that guides our generation that seems to be in the grip of a pathological pursuit of wealth. This attempt to interrogate and reimagine at this moment in time is, therefore, distinct because much of our Christian faith traditions were shaped in contexts of empire down through centuries. This indicates that this theological reflection is primarily a corrective exercise. Two: We make this attempt by consciously rejecting the interpretive tools of empire and, instead, opt for the vantage point of millions around the world who are marginalized, excluded, and persecuted by its agents and effects. The reality of their suffering and struggle is both an indictment of our collusion and indifference as well as an opportunity to be faithful witnesses of God’s justice in the world. Furthermore, the vantage point of the marginalized and the excluded is also a necessary resource for any exploration of alternatives.1 However, we also acknowledge that much of what we may want to say about resistance and alternatives is already a reality, as seen in the movements of 17

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hundreds of people around the world, each with its own hermeneutical and analytical tools and strategies. The challenge, therefore, is this: What would our reflections mean to these communities and movements of people who are pushed beyond margins into exclusion and dehumanization; who are resisting injustice and oppression despite pain and losses; and who persist in solidarity with the struggles of the marginalized and the excluded? People on the margins are not a nameless, faceless broad category. They are: people discriminated against because of their color, ethnicity, religion, language and sexual orientation; people, especially women and children, trafficked for labour, sex, organs, and begging;2 stateless people;3 refugees;4 forced migrants;5 Dalits in India;6 Indigenous peoples;7 child laborers;8 and people with disabilities, most of whom are women and in developing countries.9 They are both marginalized and made “no-people,” silenced and made invisible. Many among them are also resisting and confronting the forces of their marginalization despite suppression and victimization. In India, those who resist caste discrimination and oppression are raped, killed, lynched, paraded naked, economically boycotted, have their houses burnt, or are incarcerated for disturbing “social harmony” or on charges of sedition. Many such marginalized groups in different parts of the world are organizing themselves to resist discrimination and marginalization and are articulating their visions of another world. There are also those who are punished for standing with the marginalized people. Human rights defenders are facing enormous challenges and threats of torture, detention without charges and trial, and murder in many countries around the world.10 By analyzing the current trends through these two lenses—of moral responsibility and of the struggles of the marginalized—I lift up a few challenges for our reflection. EMPIRE IS ALSO OMNIPRESENT NOW Empire now is not one, operating from somewhere through supranational institutions, but is many—multiplied, dispersed, present, and pervasive in several forms and proportions in every geopolitical context.11 Contrary to the expectations that globalization would render the traditional barriers of political, religious, and cultural identities redundant, create a global community, inspire an expansive worldview, and promote scientific temper and secular attitudes, these expressions of empire are increasingly narrow and exclusive in their obsessive pursuit to hold together the gains of market economy within their borders of control. Empire is no longer a combination of mere economic, military, and technological powers, but a more powerful Leviathan



Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire 19

with strength drawn from the dominant versions of religion, culture, and nationalism. It now has a more powerful and lasting impact, making its subjects take responsibility to protect it even if at the cost of their own dignity, rights, and freedom. Despite the fact that many, besides the marginalized and the excluded, will not find a place, the manipulative tactics of these combinations of powers constantly overwhelm their common sense. As Sathianathan Clarke warns, in his incisive analysis of religious fundamentalism: “Empires infiltrate a territory in order to transform its people’s beliefs and cultural habits into those of the agents of empire.”12 Empire is now immune to scrutiny and accountability. It grows from strength to strength by constantly distracting attention from its exploitative pursuits. It focuses on the enemy both inside and outside and the need to uphold national identity shaped by (and so it represents) the religious traditions and cultures of the dominant social powers. It thus silences all resistance to the extent that any resistance is seen as blasphemous and unpatriotic. Therefore, religion is back in service of empire, more forcefully now, making it stronger by overwhelming common sense and radically altering worldviews, attitudes, and values. Mitri Raheb, from his experience of struggle against occupation, corroborates, “Empires can’t survive by their military, political, and economic power and might alone. Rather, the justification of the empire has to be based on a higher logic; the violation of human rights needs to have something akin to divine purpose and to be set within an ideological and theological framework.”13 DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT: STRATEGIES FOR FURTHER DISEMPOWERMENT? In each of the local manifestations of empire, one begins to wonder whether democracy is on the way out, with its visible expressions being the aggressive assertion of the majority. In many Asian countries, democratic institutions are abused and misused to cater to the interests of the majority—religious, linguistic, or ethnic. One also wonders whether critical thinking is somehow under threat or lost. People’s views, attitudes, and responses toward political processes and public issues seem to be either increasingly lackadaisical or led by narrow self-interests. There seems to be a growing tendency to acquiesce in empire’s own intolerant attitude toward dissent, difference, and the concerns of the disadvantaged groups.14 Public outrage against injustice and solidarity with the victims are not as strong and forceful as they once used to be. Furthermore, passive expectations of some power or a powerful man (the proverbial rider of a white horse) who would set things right seem to shape

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public attitudes. People are at ease to buy into hero worship, cult of personality, and excessive valorization of national and cultural identities; so much so that some autocratic, authoritarian, and narcissistic leaders are also extremely popular in some parts of the world. Increasing emphases on economic growth, infrastructural development, military might, and authoritarian governance have completely sidelined the importance of the complex social realities and the need to protect the rights and dignity of the disadvantaged sections. Annual budgets keep cutting funds for welfare services and educational facilities for the disadvantaged sectors of society. For many governments and their leaders, development seems to mean economic growth, infrastructure, and fast trains. Despite its high growth rate and wealth generation, according to Global Wealth Report 2016, India is the second most unequal country in the world, with the top 1 percent owning 60 percent of the total wealth.15 There seems to be excessive emphasis on duties and responsibilities rather than on rights and dignity, especially of the marginalized and excluded communities.16 Many governments seem to prefer NGOs doing need-based work or disaster relief rather than rights education or community organization. Human rights defenders are being tortured, and social action groups are branded as antinational.17 FEAR OF THE OTHER: REACTION OR STRATEGY? Fear and hatred of the “other” also seems to have become a global phenomenon. Unfortunately for many, “the other,” the “outsider,” is a vile predator capable of harming or draining their wealth, except when he or she is one like them in class, creed, or color. It is said that more than 30,000 Americans are killed through gun violence every year, and none by refugees. But the powers that be want us to look at the helpless outsider as the main cause of everything that goes wrong. The fact that a small percentage of people own more than 90 percent of wealth on average in almost every country in the world doesn’t seem to bother many as much as the imagined depletion that some people in need could cause to national reserves. Furthermore, isolated expressions of assertion or emancipation by the marginalized evoke more resentment than the obscene display of power and wealth by some right in the face of misery and deprivation.18 Ironically, the powerful majority imagine themselves as victims by exaggerating the capacities of people in need and thus mischievously ascribing to themselves a nonexistent power. What is ironic is that the powerful nations and former colonial powers seem more in this grip of fear. The fear in the hearts of the powerful is as dangerous as their greed!



Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire 21

Because of this connivance with the powers of empire, religious traditions are turning out to be demonic, stoking hatred, gripping people with fear, unleashing terror, and legitimizing and perpetuating injustice, oppression, and exploitation in all forms.19 This is happening in Hindu India, in the MuslimArab world, in the Jewish state of Israel, in Christian-Muslim Africa, in Buddhist Asia, and in the so-called Christian West. Racism, patriarchy, casteism, and many such evils, just as we hoped would soon be on the way out, are back again in service of the hegemonic powers, and seem to be gradually finding acceptance as inerasable facets of culture.20 Realities of humans suffering— poverty, hunger, disease, malnutrition, homelessness, and displacement—are not seen as priorities over the glorification and adulation of power and pride. In fact, these are projected as inevitable in the journey toward a superior economic and political reality in some distant future. Empire, therefore, thrives by parading its power and by disempowering many. Empire is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, and nothing escapes its gaze and intrusion. THEOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVES I propose five theological tasks, which I believe can help churches to be moral communities that propose alternatives to empire, rather than being agents in the service of empire. Power to Liberate and Transform First and foremost is a thorough interrogation of Christian concepts of and attitudes toward power. Much of our theologies and ecclesiologies were formulated in predominantly Christian, western, and colonial contexts. These seem to maintain neutral positions on the use and abuse of power, glorifying power and teaching both humility and subservience as ultimate Christian virtues. The history of the church is replete with accounts of the way in which religious language and symbols were pressed into service to further the interests of the hegemonic powers by legitimizing oppressive belief systems, structures, traditions, and cultures. Hegemonic powers ensure their hold by manipulating systems of knowledge and monopolizing the power of interpretation to overwhelm the common sense of communities. Traditional as well as popular theologies, either as allies of these forces or in sheer helplessness, have served these powers by opting to pacify those who are marginalized, hurt, or suffering. Even with our experiences as fragmented minorities in Asia and elsewhere, composed mostly of the victims of various forms of power and existing among such, we preach about a gracious God, we cherish

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the images of a powerful God, and we opt to organize our ecclesial life accordingly. In contexts that glorify social and economic power, our operating concepts of power seem to be deeply tainted by our own aspirations of power and attribute the same to God and all that we do in the name of God. Some of our church structures and practices amply illustrate this reality. Many of our churches, church organizations, and their leaders are too preoccupied with their egotistic desire to parade their ritual and institutional power or to rub shoulders with the powerful and the prominent, even as they call themselves a community that belongs to the one who was killed for rubbing them on the wrong side. For some, wealth, numbers, identity, history, and liturgical traditions seem to be more valid indicators of their ecclesial credibility than their faithfulness to the mission of God. How do we then understand God as omnipotent when the powers of empire are enslaving and dehumanizing many in the name of the same omnipotent God? The images of a powerful and triumphant God used by the forces of domination and control will not help in our struggle against the powers of empire and in our solidarity with its victims. Instead, we need to reconstruct the images of God in ways that affirm the finer, life-affirming and life-enhancing attributes of God and God’s purposes for the created order. We need to go back to Jesus’s models of power and use them as benchmarks. Power needs to be defined as responsibility, as an expression of service, and not as a status or privilege. We need to draw from the self-emptying images of God in Jesus rather than the triumphalist, vengeful, destructive images of God in our “struggle against powers and principalities.” After all, the church belongs to a faith tradition that is built around the memory of this Jesus who defied the power and glory of the contemporary political and religious establishments, and instead asserted the resources of the marginalized. Jesus asks his disciples and those who came to hear him to learn from the generosity of a poor widow who gave only two small copper coins rather than those who gave huge sums in public gaze; from the penitent prayer of the scorned tax collector than the long self-righteous assertions of the glorified Pharisee; from the faith of the despised gentile rather than those of his own centuries-old religious tradition; and from the humaneness of the Samaritan who is sensitive to the suffering of the other rather than the teachers of the Law and priests in the temple. Jesus even allows himself to be taught by a woman, a Canaanite outcast at that. Further, he defies the protocols and traditions of rituals and propriety for the sake of healing the sick; upholds the model of servanthood rather than lordship and goes to the extent of washing their feet on the night before he was killed; and makes friends with the outcasts asserting that the reign of God begins with their liberation and restoration. In fact, much of the biblical tradition is driven by this counterculture, unveiling to us the locale of God’s presence and power among the Last, the Lost and the Least.21



Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire 23

Do these expressions of power suggest any alternatives in our struggle against the destructive power of empire? Superman or Victim? Second is a new Christology, one that brings Christ down to earth again. Even as we claim the roots of our faith in the revelatory event of God in Jesus of Nazareth, most Christians prefer to be believers of the superman Jesus rather than believers of what he spoke and did. By holding on to a particular interpretation of atonement that prefers a powerful external deliverer—which in effect reinforces low self-image, glorifies the suffering of the innocent, and preaches life after death—we ignore the person of Jesus, his conscious moral and spiritual choices, his message, and his denouncements and pronouncements that led him to the cross. Such Christologies have always been useful resources for unjust and exploitative powers, both at larger and local levels. In much of the non-Christian world and for people’s movements, the message of Christ and his conscious moral choices are acknowledged as powerful resources for transformation, resonating with people’s aspirations for justice, freedom, and life. The theological and experiential resources of Christians living out their faith amid many faiths offer many possibilities to discover afresh that message which we hold as unique. Mission as Seeking Justice Reimagining mission is the third task that I propose. Mission, by and large, is understood and pursued as actions done from positions of power and privilege to situations and communities in need. Many marginalized communities have been objects, in some cases victims, of the aggressive expressions of some of these mission activities. By anchoring on narrow notions of salvation and heaven, traditional mission theologies have distracted the attention from the sinfulness of structures and thus have been allies of the imperial powers. Wesley Ariarajah makes a pointed remark, “What Jesus demanded was a radical change of orientation, espousal of new values of the reign of God, and a move away from self-centeredness to a life centered in God and one’s neighbour. . . . It was a call to follow him; not to a belief in the merits of his death on the cross.”22 This reflection on empire can enable us to arrive at a more holistic, inclusive understanding of salvation as a journey together with others for the life of all and of the earth rather than an exclusionary, anthropocentric pursuit. A broader understanding of salvation could thus help us reimagine the mission of God as one of moral transformation of the world. This reign of

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God happens not at the end of time but in every here and now. God’s reign is different from the glittering visions of empire, nationally and globally. It is based on God’s justice that liberates and restores the aggressed and transforms the aggressor. Justice is not merely a value pursued in the dynamics of larger social relationships. It is essentially personal and spiritual. Being just and seeking justice arises out of one’s capacity to love the other as oneself. The neighbour, Jesus points out in the parable, is not the familiar one next door but the “other”—even if his/her face is not seen and her/his name not known. The neighbour is also the “othered”—the victim by the roadside. This love is a conscious spiritual choice that extends to the wider realm when injustice tramples over life.23 God’s love in Jesus Christ cannot be romanticized and presented as a balm that soothes our troubled minds and lives. It does not, as we find in the life and ministry of Jesus, keep quiet or turn a blind eye to deception, injustice, and oppression, but instead confronts and denounces the same, and strives to transform people and situations with courage and persistence. His message, therefore, was both of repentance and hope. It seeks the transformation of the aggressor and restores the aggressed. This also implies that mere compassion toward marginalized and excluded people, without affirming their dignity and yearning for justice, is not the kind of love that God desires. In the present context of the rise of right-wing ideologies that reinforce the hegemony of the powerful, our critique of empire must prompt a reimagination of both mission and the reign of God. Mission has consistently evoked negative responses, particularly in multireligious contexts. Yet we still hold on to it. It is perhaps that we reimagined the same, invented a new language, to affirm it more as an attitude of living out our faith humbly than as an expansion project. Conceiving mission as a process of journeying could open the possibilities for more positive relationships with other religious communities and ideological movements that are also striving to uphold and protect the sanctity of life, human dignity, and justice. In that understanding, mission becomes a transforming vocation—transforming relationships and building communities. Such an understanding offers new opportunities to uphold the uniqueness of Christ in ways that do not undermine the uniqueness of other pursuits but as a way of gathering positive, life-affirming energies that God intends for all. Mission then would not be a solely Christian project, even if we refer to it in Christian language. Perhaps a Trans-Religious Spirituality? Fourth is to reclaim the purpose of religious vocation. Almost all Asian societies have been the sites of intense struggles for political freedom, economic justice, human rights, and human dignity, and the list is long. These



Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire 25

movements and initiatives bring together millions of people across religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries to struggle for justice, peace, and life for all. People get together not because of any religious motivation or ideological orientations but because of their belief in and commitment to certain values as mentioned above. These actions point toward something very relevant. As Samuel Rayan puts it aptly: [I]n all such struggles and movements for dignity and food for the masses, a spirituality is implied. And this spirituality is liberational. . . . If we believe in God as the ultimate and ineluctable imperative of justice, love, freedom, and peace, we must hold that at the basis of every struggle and every move for liberation and life and dignity and rice for the riceless, there is a divine force, there is the Holy Spirit, there is a profound spirituality that, once made explicit, can add clarity, strength, and a sense of direction to life and to struggle for life.24

These point toward a spirituality aside from any religious trappings but is grounded in the human capacity to be good and just, and inspired by the vision of a society that is just and inclusive. It is spirituality of resistance and active hope, inspired by their collective choice of what is more decisive for life in all its wholesomeness. The church, through its top-down understanding of mission, often fails to see the presence of the Spirit already at work among the marginalized people, indicting the sinfulness of the world and inspiring new beginnings. But whether or not anybody endorses or supports them, they are a movement of people in search of life with dignity and justice for all. In fact, they are the signs of hope testifying to the movement of the Spirit amid decay, destruction, and death. Their struggles and aspirations help us understand religious vocation as a spirituality of resistance and transformation for the sake of life and God’s world. As Together Toward Life (TTL) asserts, “Through struggles in and for life, marginalized people are reservoirs of the active hope, collective resistance, and perseverance that are needed to remain faithful to the promised reign of God.”25 Shall we then say that the marginalized people are our pathfinders, calling us and imploring us to get involved in acts of transformation of the world? The collective struggles of the marginalized for justice and their spirituality in action can inspire the church to reclaim its calling to be a fellowship of partners for justice rather than an exclusive community of believers. The church as a called community is to be seen not in its structures and traditions but in locales where the Spirit is present in actions for justice and life. It lives up to its calling through its presence and participation in the struggles against discrimination, marginalization, exclusion and dehumanization, and in the coming together of partners for justice—social activists, human rights activists,

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environmentalists, and all others on the margins of this centrist world—on the pilgrimage for life, justice, and peace. To that extent, we could imagine a transreligious Christianity, even a trans-religious missiology, a missiology that vibes with the Spirit—the Spirit of life, freedom, justice, and truth, one that Jesus spoke of in the synagogue in Nazareth. Discipleship: A Much-Needed Self-Understanding Fifth is to enable a new Christian self-understanding. The WCC’s 2018 World Mission Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, identified the theme: “Called to Transforming Discipleship.” Discipleship marks a much-needed shift in understanding of faith from one belonging to a belief system to one involving a lifelong vocation. But this shift is a hard option for many who are comfortable just being believers in hope of safety, health, well-being, material wealth, inner peace, and salvation. Actually, there are sharp distinctions between a disciple and a believer. Disciples commit themselves to follow a teacher with a view to learn, believes that they can change and effect change, and look for principles and guidelines for life’s journey, and their relationship with the teacher is voluntary and based on admiration of what they are and stand for. Believers, on the other hand, look for an external agency who takes control, an omnipotent power to solve their problems; believe they can do nothing on their own; look for rules and rituals to keep themselves in track; and their attitude of respect toward the object of belief is most often either fear induced or reward driven. A focused reflection might assist in reclaiming discipleship as an authentic expression of Christian faith. The New Testament witness tells us that such a self-understanding shaped the first communities to stand apart as alternatives to the status quo. “People on the Way” was the name given to members of the movement around Jesus in the earliest Christian communities. “The Way” denoted a particular pattern of living and the instruction and training required for this (called “discipleship,” or a following in the “Way” cf. Acts 18:24–26).26 Warren Carter, in his Matthew and the Margins holds that the Jesus community chose to be in the margins and in confrontation as a way of communicating and working toward the realization of the vision of God’s reign. He lists this community’s features: Instead of the law, the synagogue tradition, and the imperial ideology, it looks to Jesus and prophets; instead of commitment to the emperor, it opts for the one crucified by the emperor; instead of the pax romana, it opts for the kingdom of God; instead of embracing, it prefers a vocation of critiquing the powers; instead of preferring to sustain the order, it wants to shake up the order; instead of the power to lord over, it desires the power to serve; instead of hierarchical and patriarchal structures, it prefers egalitarian



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and communitarian life; instead of violence, it opts for active resistance; and instead of wealth, it holds sharing as a source of prosperity and life giving.27 An active self-understanding, distinct from that of a passive believer, seems necessary not only for a counter-imperial witness but also to be true to the spirit of the gospel in our affirmation and practice of faith. SOME INTROSPECTION Last but not least, we need to honestly ask ourselves about the purpose and scope of our own theological vocation. How will anything that we say, teach, or publish effect any changes in the predicament or enhance the prospects of those in struggle? Who are our addressees? What difference does our theological reflection make to the mainstream discourse, especially in contexts where Christians are a minority, and to those in struggle? What kind of theological methodology and language can actually assist and accompany the ongoing initiatives? The transformation of our societies and the world cannot take place as per the plans and schemes of the powerful and the privileged, but as per the visions and aspirations of those who are yearning for life with dignity and freedom. This implies that our partnership with these communities needs to be incarnational, and calls for an immersion into the life-world of the marginalized. How can we be more engaged so that what we do makes a difference on the ground? I surrender the final word of this reflection to Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power: People who work for social justice, regardless of their own station in life, tend to see the world as deeply flawed. . . . Often, if these individuals are privileged people like me, they understand that they have been implicated, whether directly or indirectly, in the creation or maintenance of this structural violence. Then they feel indignation, but also humility and penitence. . . . This posture—of penitence and indignation—is critical to effective social justice work. Alas, it is all too often absent or, worse, transformed from posture into posturing. And unless the posture is linked to much more pragmatic interventions, it usually fizzles out.28

NOTES 1.  The World Council of Churches’ recent statement Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL, ed. Jooseop Keum [Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013]) privileges margins as the locales of God’s presence and action: People on the margins have agency, and can often see what, from the center, is out of view. People on the margins, living in vulnerable positions, often know what exclusionary

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forces are threatening their survival and can best discern the urgency of their struggles. . . . Marginalized people have God-given gifts that are under-utilized because of disempowerment and denial of access to opportunities and/or justice. Through struggles in and for life, marginalized people are reservoirs of the active hope, collective resistance, and perseverance that are needed to remain faithful to the promised reign of God.

Joerg Rieger’s comment also seems apt: “Truth thus conceived can only be perceived from the margins. It has to do with the underside of things, not only with the underside produced by colonial forms of dominance, but also with that produced by free market multiculturalism. Truth needs to be sought—and can be found—in the tensions and conflicts of life” (“Liberating God-Talk: Postcolonialism and the Challenge of the Margins,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera [St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2004], 215).   2.  Human trafficking is a 32-billion-dollar industry today that thrives by enslaving nearly 20 million people in about 153 countries around the world. A great majority (49 percent) of these victims are female and 26 percent are children. According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crimes Global Report 2014, the percentage of children is increasing, and they now comprise nearly one-third of all detected trafficking victims in the world. Furthermore, it is widely acknowledged that there are more people living in slavery today than all those that the transatlantic trade involved with numbers touching 29 million. http://www.ungift.org/doc/knowledgehub/resource -centre/2013/GlobalSlaveryIndex_2013_Download_WEB1.pdf.   3.  Ten million as per http://www.unhcr.org/stateless-people.html.  4. Fifty million as per https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/06/global -refugee-crisis-in-numbers/.   5.  “42 million forced migrants, displaced by conflicts, natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects”: http:// www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/pubhealth/modules/forcedMigration/facts.html.  6. Two hundred million as per idsn.org/india-official-dalit-population-exceeds -200-million.  7. Three hundred and seventy million as per www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf.   8.  One hundred and sixty-eight million as per http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/ child-labour/lang—en/index.htm.   9.  Six hundred and fifty million as per https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/ statistics/. 10.  https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017. Also see https://www.fidh.org/IMG/ pdf/obs_2013_uman_rights_defenders_english.pdf. 11.  Joerg Rieger elaborates the pervasive influence and dynamics of empire: “One of the things that distinguishes contemporary empire from past empires is that its pressure appears to be more overpowering, even as the structures of empire are less visible than ever before. . . . [T]he invisibility of the broadening influence of empire, aided by rapid technological developments in the realm of virtual reality, makes resistance much more difficult since most people never realize what it is that shapes them that reaches all the way into and creates their deepest desires. In the final analysis, the forces of marketing and cultural persuasion through entertainment and education,



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also transmitted through technological superhighways, appear to be more powerful and irresistible than highly visible military displays of power that have the added disadvantage of revealing the real face of the empire” (Rieger 2007, 5). 12. Sathianathan Clarke, Competing Fundamentalisms: Violent Extremism in Christian, Islam and Hinduism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 14. 13.  Mitri Raheb, Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014), 64. 14.  For example, India’s middle class do not want to talk about or trivialize India’s glaring inequalities, caste system, and violence against women, etc. 15.  www.hindustantimes.com (November 24, 2016). 16.  For example, the Indian prime minister “has articulated his ideas of progress in civilizational terms when he repeatedly spoke of a civilization that is coming out of 1200 years of slavery, counting Muslims as foreign invaders. Modi’s doctrine of progress in civilizational terms has proposed a new social contract in which the minorities and Dalits have limited or no place in political power. . . . No representation to the Dalits and Muslims in power. This way, the proposed social contract suggests development not as a participatory process but as a centralized one.” (Varghese 2016, 1). 17.  The Indian government has cancelled the licenses of 11,300 NGOs to receive foreign funds and has outlawed twenty-five major NGOs on charges of antinational activities. It has also cut funding for institutions doing research on discrimination and social exclusion. In late May 2017, it has also cut scholarships for Dalit and Adivasi students at the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. 18.  The attitudes of the dominant castes toward India’s Affirmative Action Policy is one example. 19.  Dalits strongly feel that a new “sophisticated architecture” of inequality is also in place. They worry caste is getting reinforced, rather than annihilated—the ultimate vision of their icon B. R. Ambedkar, Prashant Jha, “The New Dalit Movement,” Hindustan Times, June 14, 2016. 20. Clarke, Competing Fundamentalisms, 20. 21.  Deenabandhu Manchala, “Margins,” in Ecumenical Missiology, ed. Kenneth Ross et al. (Geneva: WCC, 2016), 319. 22. S. Wesley Ariarajah, Power, Politics and Plurality: An Exploration of the Impact of Interfaith Dialogue on Christian Faith and Practice (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue, 2016), 213. 23.  Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013), 167. 24.  Samuel Rayan, “The Search for an Asian Spirituality of Liberation,” in Asian Christian Spirituality, ed. Virginia Fabella et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 17. 25.  TTL, Para. 39. 26.  Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen, Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1989), 21. 27. Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 45–46. 28.  Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 157.

Chapter Three

Transforming Discipleship Faith, Love, and Hope after Empire Jooseop Keum

How might we describe the time and context in which we live today? Metropolitan Geevarghese Mor Coorilos claims: “There are ‘new King Herods,’ a new imperial age and numerous ‘little empires’ being formed in the orbit of the ‘mega-empire’ and working in hegemonic ways. In India, for example, an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalism, caste mentality and the ideology of neo-liberalism is creating a fascist empire.”1 Division, fundamentalism, violence, and discrimination are all on the increase everywhere in the world, so that it appears that we are witnessing the return of 1960s racism and of 1930s fascism. Empires are no longer sustainable in a traditional way, and they are taking extremist measures to survive in the era “after empire.” AFTER EMPIRE In our sociopolitical cultures the darker side of human nature is overwhelming and without any shame. Greed of power, money, sex, violence, and claims of jealousy are competing for victims. A crass nationalism “thrives on fear, chauvinism, discrimination and not always subliminal notions of ethnic, racial and moral superiority.”2 The top leadership of the “global empires” and “little empires” are openly creating the politics of fear based on discriminating and bullying the other, particularly the weak, the minorities, the stranger and the poor. Perhaps, the current rise of fascism does not qualify to be called an empire in all aspects. Therefore, I call it the ruins after empire. The current tensions in the Korean peninsula are one of the most painful examples of these ruins. The morally corrupted leader in the northern part of this peninsula and another spiritually misled leader in the most powerful 31

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country in the world do not care for peace, security, and the well-being of ordinary people. For instance, in May 2017, North Korea told the United States through an unofficial dialogue in Norway that it would halt all nuclear and missile testing if Washington ditched its anti–North Korea policy and sanctions, as well as sign a bilateral peace treaty that would replace the armistice and formally end the Korean War.3 However, the United States has not yet opened a formal dialogue. The ensuing missile and nuclear tests by North Korea express impatience and one of the dangers of calling for dialogue. The leaders of North Korea and the United States are competing to show off who is bigger, like unruly dictators, rather than showing true leadership. However, we cannot blame only political leaders for the corruption of leadership. A group of younger theologians who gathered as an International Theological Colloquium for Transformative Ecumenism reflected as follows: The ecumenical movement is in crisis—a deep crisis painfully felt everywhere. It is a crisis brought by a prophetic bankruptcy in terms of the movement, an intellectual bankruptcy in terms of the ecumenical spirit and vision, and a moral bankruptcy in terms of the leadership. The ecumenical movement is no longer strongly rooted in the people and it does not speak a prophetic voice which echoes in the realities of people’s struggles for life. The ecumenical movement no longer produces a new and heart-beating vision for the church and the world that are deeply divided and wounded. The ecumenical leadership has suffered from patriarchal, bureaucratic, and business-oriented mindedness that lacks the sense of calling and devotion.4

It is painful to listen to the criticisms of these younger theologians. But there is a proverb in Korea, “A good medicine is bitter,” which applies as well to these young people, for they have not given up on the ecumenical movement and the role of the global church. Accordingly, I will venture in this chapter to put forth an answer to the challenges raised by the younger theologians with the concept of “transformative discipleship,” seeking an alternative form of leadership for the future of global Christianity. REDISCOVERING FAITH AT THE MARGINS Michel Camdessus, the former director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said in a meeting with Catholic leaders in Brussels that the market is spontaneous, self-governed, and self-regulated, which provides its members the best chances to fulfil their goals, and thus the market in its essence is the best empirical explanation of utopia.5 Whether we agree with him or not, we are curious to know: where did he get such a deep-seated faith in the market?



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Do we, as Christian leaders today, proclaim such a bold utopian faith in what we believe? The incarnation of Jesus took place among the people at the margins. The people who gathered around him were outside of the power structure. They were people without any political power, nor religious authority: women, children, poor people, workers, and laborers. People who welcomed Jesus were those outside of the social hierarchy. Jesus was not born in a palace, but in a manger, a ragged cowshed, an open and unprotected place. The birth of Jesus was threatening news for the decision makers, who did not expect that God would be revealed among the lowly people. The angel announced the message “Peace among you” among marginalized people. The incarnation of God happened outside of power, money, and religion. God chose the margin—the people on the underside of history—to inaugurate the kingdom. God was and is encountered among the powerless and in unexpected locations, away from the privileged and powerful.6 This is a nonnegotiable biblical truth at the core of Christian teaching. If we do not preach the truth any longer, it is neither Christianity, nor theology. Therefore, no one can understand the good news of Jesus Christ without incarnating it in the context of the margins. Studying theology only in a classroom, or in table ecumenism, is never enough. “Jesus introduced the option for the poor and marginalized because they are created in God’s own image too to celebrate fullness of life and yet are denied the promise of justice and peace through the imposition of unjust structures, cultures and traditions.”7 Seong-Won Park claims that, in Jesus’s time, there were four different groups of Jewish traditions or restoration movements. They competed with each other, claiming that only their leadership knew the truth, the way of salvation. They each claimed they were the only hope for the restoration of Israel:8 • The Sadducees rejected the belief in the resurrection, but they were recognized for their interpretation of the written Torah. They retained religious and secular political power. • The Pharisees gained recognition for their demand for justice, and they exercised authority over the Jewish temple. What happened outside the temple was not their primary concern, and they collaborated with the Roman Empire to maintain power. • The Essenes believed that there was no hope in the world. So they retreated to the desert. They withdrew into the spiritual realm, leaving the reality and hardness of people’s daily lives behind them. • Finally, the Zealots attempted to reclaim the sovereignty of Israel by force, arms, struggle, and terrorism. They believed that all other choices had disappeared. They were liberation fighters.

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And what was Jesus doing? He did not identify with any of them. He was washing the feet of his disciples as a farewell ceremony. He chose to die on the cross. But, he did identify with one group, the marginalized. Through his cross, Jesus brings the kingdom of God to these people where they are. They did not need to climb ecclesiastical, social, and political ladders to find the kingdom. Jesus builds a community for the marginalized, based on love and service. He provides a new dignity and identity to the marginalized as the people of God through the washing of their feet. He encourages them to see a new horizon of mission. The new community goes beyond the immediate group, beyond the ethnic community and so on. The New World of dignity is there for all who will recognize where dignity is sourced. Where do we then identify as the church of Jesus Christ? The new WCC mission statement, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL), suggests the concept of “mission from the margins” as a new direction of mission: Mission from the margins seeks to counteract injustices in life, church, and mission. It seeks to be an alternative missional movement against the perception that mission can only be done by the powerful to the powerless, by the rich to the poor, or by the privileged to the marginalized. Such approaches can contribute to oppression and marginalization. . . . Living on the margins, however, can provide its own lessons. People on the margins have agency, and can often see what, from the centre, is out of view. People on the margins, living in vulnerable positions, often know what exclusionary forces are threatening their survival and can best discern the urgency of their struggles; people in positions of privilege have much to learn from the daily struggles of people living in marginal conditions.9

TTL goes further, “Marginalized people have God-given gifts that are under-utilized because of disempowerment, and denial of access to opportunities and/or justice. Through struggles in and for life, marginalized people are reservoirs of the active hope, collective resistance, and perseverance that are needed to remain faithful to the promised reign of God.”10 I suggest that this is the beginning of the renewal of authentic leadership. Without being among the people at the margins, a leader has no people to lead. The Christendom model of Western Christianity, which existed as a form of state religion, has for a long time been associated with power. It is unable to imagine how to carry out the mission of the church without institution and resources. Even in the ecumenical movement, the declining Western churches want to show their influence or to prove that they are still alive, through grasping powers in the national and international institutions, such as the World Council of Churches. However, we ought to remember



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that the way of Jesus is the only way to save the people, the church, and the ecumenical movement. Despite a short history and immaturity in some areas, Christianity in the global South has much to contribute to global Christian leadership. We work with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit and rely on God and people rather than the state’s support and protection. Although we do not have gold and silver, we have joy and commitment to the gospel and passion for justice. Bringing this dynamism to the heart of the global ecumenical movement is the first step of rejuvenating the movement. POWER OF LOVE TO DEFEAT POLITICS OF FEAR In the context of a world full of injustice and inequality that destroy the life of the marginalized, justice is the divine way to affirm and safeguard life. Faith without justice at the margins is a faith that believes in Jesus and yet at the same time believes that the unlimited accumulation of wealth can save humanity and creation. What sort of faith do we have in the ecumenical movement today? One of the key themes of the pneumatological approach in mission is the Spirit’s mission of hospitality together with charisma, dynamism, healing, diversity, and transformation. A fruit of mission spirituality is love and shalom, as in the blessing, go in peace. God’s shalom provokes a radical hospitality overcoming hostility. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “I have decided to stick with love, hate is too great a burden to bear.”11 God’s shalom introduces the mission of a transforming hospitality of justice. Justice is not only a standard that rejects the evil of hostility and hatred toward refugees and migrants but also the power to transform hatred and hostility into hospitality. God’s hospitality is unconditional and eschatological. It is not God’s mission merely to extend an invitation to the guests and treat them nicely. Rather, this is a matter of ontological mission, of being together as one family in God’s shalom—a missional vision of unity.12 How do we understand and give expression to the “power of God’s love” to defeat the culture of the politics of fear? Are we presenting God’s love as good only for another world because some of us do not want to risk losing the benefits and privileges that various forms of structurally embedded injustice bestow on us? If so, are we not limiting the power of God’s love by seeking to witness in ways that are safe and comfortable, limiting it to the realm of the purely personal, granted to or accessed on certain terms and conditions, and limiting it as one that numbs and soothes rather than as one that heals and transforms?

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We do not believe that the power of God’s love is inferior to the powers of death, and we affirm that the power of the Risen Lord subjugates the powers of death, even as the rest of the world embraces or remains indifferent to the powers of death in God’s beloved world. How then can we witness to God’s love in ways that our witness nurtures, protects, and enhances life, while confronting and transforming the denial of God’s gift of life? Nurturing just relationships is a concrete expression of God’s love in society. If the proclamation and living out of God’s love is the essence and the way of affirming the Christian faith, how do these express themselves in the ways we organize and administer our institutions and organizations? What does leadership mean when we are called to be driven by values and patterns that are different from the ways of the hegemonic powers? These questions are critical in light of the proposal by Jesus that the ultimate purpose of leadership is “to serve and not to be served” (Mark 10:43, 45). Mission is witnessing to the kingdom of God, not expanding one’s own dominion. However, since the rise of the Constantine model of mission, the distinction between the two became vague with the result that Christian mission came to be regarded as simply the expansion of Christendom, and the image of Christian mission became highly militant in nature, particularly through the influences of the Crusades and colonialism. This militant and triumphalist image of mission is becoming more and more a hindrance to world mission in the postcolonial and postmodern world. Karl Barth already declared in 1935 that this Christendom paradigm of mission was at an end.13 How then can we transform our image of mission from “winners” and “conquerors” to “mission in love and humility”?14 In 1982, the WCC Central Committee approved the historic document Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation, under the leadership of Emilio Castro, CWME director at that time and later WCC general secretary. Together with other important ecumenical missiological declarations the text affirms that our ecumenical practice of mission has to be a “Mission in Christ’s Way”: “The self-emptying of the servant who lived among the people, sharing in their hopes and sufferings, giving his life on the cross for all humanity—this was Christ’s way of proclaiming the good news, and as disciples we are summoned to follow the same way.”15 This kenotic understanding of mission is not merely talking about our mission methods but also is the very nature and essence of our discipleship. Jesus became our Christ not through power or money but through his kenosis (Phil. 2:7). We believe in God who “made himself nothing” (ἐκένωσε). Therefore, we, the disciples who have been sent by Christ, have to follow his footsteps by witnessing his humility and our humbleness in the performance of our leadership. Kenotic leadership is a concrete expression of our discipleship. Jesus de-



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feated the Pharisees, the Sadducees, King Herod, and even the Roman Empire by the power of love on the cross, not on top of the tower of the temple or the royal throne. “Mission is the overflow of the infinite love of the Triune God.”16 It is time to question ourselves as Christians: Are we true disciples of the gospel? In my view, this question is more important than any other missiological discourse in today’s context. It is not a matter of numbers or resources. It is the quality of discipleship that is decisive. It is time for the issues of authentic discipleship to be given priority attention in ecumenical missiology, given today’s context where faith in mammon is threatening the credibility of the gospel. Do we believe that the power of love can transform the world of hatred and injustice? HOPE AS AGENT OF CHANGE On May 19, 2017, the Washington Post carried an article titled, “South Koreans to Americans: We’ll teach you how to impeach a president.” Amid a massive corruption scandal, the Korean people power showed its moral quality. During the seventeen weeks of Saturday Candle Demonstrations, the biggest gathering was two and half million in one evening, and in total, 17 million citizens participated. It was more than one-third of the whole population of South Korea. Despite this massive crowd, there was neither a single arrest nor injury. I argue that the Candle Revolution was a victory of the moral quality of Korean citizens over against the immoral corruption of the elites of the “little empire.” The people never gave up “absolute peace” as the most powerful means of total resistance. Meanwhile, we should not only focus on the nonviolent nature of the Candle Revolution. The madang, created by the people in each of the seven days, provided a new vision for Korean society. Music, drama, and all means of creative cultural expressions helped convey the creativity and imagination of the people. This was an example of “democracy,” which in Greek combines the words dêmos and krátos, and literally means “people power” or “people’s demonstration”; but in a most peaceful way, deeply rooted in the concept and tradition of Daedong han madang, or a people’s festival for greater unity. In Acts 13, there was a shift of the center of gravity in mission from Jerusalem to Antioch. The Christians in Antioch elected five leaders for their mission and ministry. One of them, together with Paul and Barnabas, was Simeon from Niger. A newborn religious community in Antioch, now taking the name “Christian,” elected a black African as one of their leaders. There was neither discrimination nor exclusion from the good news of salvation. In this way, the disciples offered a powerful witness to the values of the gospel

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of the kingdom of God. Indeed, the gospel was a sign of hope and transformation for those people who were living in a hopeless situation. We believe that the gospel has a power to transform the world: personality, value, class, system, and society. The gospel of the kingdom of God challenges the world that keeps the status quo of the hopeless situation. The world was not able to silence the small group of disciples. We, as the servants of God, have a mission to share the Good News to all humanity and creation, which are longing for hope.17 We will know by the instinct of our hearts who we are and what theology we are talking about. We know by the instinct of our hearts whether we really believe in the vision of the new heaven and earth. The Holy Spirit is creating many new hopes at the margins with people. Our mission as theologians is to reveal this hope from the margins to the world like the church of Antioch, and like the Candle Revolution. Hope is resistance to a hopeless situation. Hope keeps open the horizon of the future and motivates action. Hope is good news to the poor and all who suffer.18 The bankruptcy of hope never existed in Jesus and his mission. Hope is an inescapable way of envisioning the future. “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Prov. 29:18). Therefore, our mission as leaders is to proclaim the hope of God’s kingdom, which is already among us! In the midst of agonies, despair, and cries of life, it is our mission as global Christian leaders to seek alternative values, ways of life, and communities to actualize the kingdom of God on earth. CALLED TO TRANSFORMING DISCIPLESHIP Steve Bevans insists that the mission of God is always a transforming mission. It is always a mission that calls women and men beyond themselves, transforms their sinfulness into righteousness, offers them a vision of God and the world beyond their imaginations, and transforms slavery into freedom and injustice into justice. As Christians are called to participate in this missio Dei, they must be about transformation, nothing less. Mission is not just about saving souls. It is about saving human bodies; it is about peace and justice; it is about education and health care; it is about the protection of all creation.19 In March 2018, the WCC Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) convened the 14th World Mission Conference since Edinburgh 1910, at Arusha in Tanzania, to address the theme “Moving in the Spirit: Called to Transforming Discipleship.” The first part of the theme, with its reference to Galatians 5:25—“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” (KJV)— is profound in its very simplicity. As we discern together the signs of the times it is evident that despite the chaos of human disunity in which we live and



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witness today, there are many signs of the Holy Spirit giving life and creating hope. Many places in Africa, in particular, represent sites in which the Holy Spirit is breathing life into the church. Moving in the Spirit brings the notion of pilgrimage, of an ongoing journey of all believers, led and guided by the Holy Spirit. This is a pilgrimage that is characterized by constant hope for a transformed world of justice and peace and a commitment to renewal in Christ. This theme offers a prophetic message amid the complexities of today’s world. The second part of the theme calls us to transforming discipleship. We are called to be disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, to whom we witness and whom we proclaim as we move in the Spirit. How we understand the phrase “transforming discipleship” carries three profoundly different and yet closely related meanings. We are called to live a life that transforms the very notion of discipleship as it is often understood. Such discipleship is one that is constantly transforming disciples as they open themselves up to Christ’s influence in their lives and to the formation that takes place in the Christian community. And such discipleship is one that is a commitment to transforming the world that is so full of injustice, pain, and suffering. First, the very idea of discipleship needs to be transformed. Discipleship is often understood merely in the sense of being in a loving, friendly relationship with Jesus. While this is a profound truth, the discipleship that we intend to emphasize is one that is not only a relationship but also actively engaged in continuing Jesus’s mission in the world. To know Jesus is to follow him in what he did. It calls us to witness to Jesus and to the kingdom that he preached, and, when appropriate, to proclaim Jesus’s name and his gospel as well. It calls us to an evangelism that is done in Christ’s way. Second, we are called to be disciples constantly open to being transformed, individually and communally, in our following of Jesus. Discipleship commits us to embark on a spiritual journey that will constantly challenge us and shape us into people who reflect the Lord Jesus in our actions, words, and attitudes. Discipleship commits us to disciplines of prayer, practices that shape our character and hearts, and to the cultivation of habits that give us strength and courage to live lives of Christian witness. Third, we are called to be disciples who are ourselves transforming, and as such, we are privileged to join in the mission of the Triune God, working together toward life, living out the values of the kingdom of God, and engaging in mission from the margins. In a world in which injustice seems almost insuperable, where hatred and racism seem to thrive, where suffering is so widespread and terrifying, our discipleship is costly. It calls us to put a theology of the cross into practice. It calls us to spend our energy and even offer our lives for the transformation that the kingdom promises. What will it mean for us, as individuals and churches, to be transformed in the power of the Holy Spirit? What will it mean to join the Spirit in

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transforming and healing a broken world? Deenabandhu Manchala offers a possible way to answer those questions: The call to transforming discipleship, therefore, involves seeking partnerships, forging partnerships and in living out the call to be one with others in God’s mission of transformation. One of the distinct ways in which churches have made positive differences in history is when they understood themselves as movements of people. . . . It was their ability to read the signs of the times, and to understand the purpose of their being in those contexts, that made them creative, and life-affirming forces.20

Manchala provides an authentic definition of ecumenism and our missionary calling. CONCLUDING REMARKS The world is broken. Therefore, it is imperative for the ecumenical movement to boldly witness the unity in the Triune God and to live it out for the unity of humanity. The world is yearning for a Christian discipleship that reconciles the broken and troubled world. In order to do so, unity of the church is not an optional agenda. In order that the church can be the light of the world, the role of Christian leaders is crucial. People see the vision of God’s kingdom though us. Therefore, we ought to rediscover the simplicity, inclusivity, joy, kenosis, empathy, and “prophetic imagination” of our leadership. There is no other way to follow other than the way our Lord walked. Martin Luther King Jr, in his Vietnam speech, challenges us, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”21 I believe that this is the time to “break silence” of the easy-going leadership in the ecumenical movement and the global church and call for costly and transforming discipleship! The ecumenical movement ought to be a never failing fountain for life in its fullness, for all in the world. We are called to lead this most glorious mission and costly movement, witnessing to faith, love, and hope in Christ for the divided churches, suffering people, and fragmented world. That is the reason why leadership exists. NOTES 1.  Geevarghese Mor Coorilos, Moderator’s Address, World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, Commission Meeting at General Board of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, January 12–17, 2017.



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 2. Editorial, The Observer (January 22, 2017), cited in Kenneth R. Ross, “Brexit, Trump and Christ’s Call to Discipleship,” IRM 106, no. 2 (2017): 370.   3.  Jeong Yong-Soo, “In May, North Offered to End Testing if Washington Backs Off,” Korea JoongAng Daily, September 5, 2017.   4.  Core Group (International Theological Colloquium for Transformative Ecumenism), Seoul Colloquium Concept paper, 2014, http://www.miraeforum.org/20.   5.  See M. P. Joseph, “A New Language for Divinity: Critique of the Ideology of Market,” paper presented at the Consultation on Ideology, Faith and People’s Movements in the New Millennium, Thailand, December 8–10, 2000, accessed May 2, 2018, http://www.daga.org.hk/res/dagainfo/di119.htm.   6.  Wati Longchar, “Mission from the Margins: Power and Powerless,” Keynote, WCC-CWME Latin American Consultation on “Together towards Life” and the World Mission Conference, April 30–May 4, 2017, Rosario, Argentina, 1.  7. Ibid., 2.   8.  Park Seong-Won, “What Did Jesus Have to Say about Empire?” Inside Out 44 (2005): 27.   9.  Jooseop Keum, ed., Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013), 15–16. 10.  Ibid., 16. 11.  Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967. 12.  Jooseop Keum, “Together in God’s Mission: The Prospects for Ecumenical Missiology,” in Ecumenical Missiology: Changing Landscapes and New Conceptions of Mission, ed. Kenneth R. Ross, Jooseop Keum, Kyriaki Avtzi, and Roderick R. Hewitt (Oxford: Regnum; and Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2016), 570. 13.  Karl Barth, “Das Evangelium in der Gegenwart,” Theologische Existenz heute, no. 25 (1935): 33. 14.  See Willem Saayman and Klippies Kritzinger, eds., Mission in Bold Humility: David Bosch’s Work Considered (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996). 15.  Central Committee, World Council of Churches, Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1982), §4. 16.  Keum, ed., Together towards Life, 9. 17.  Keum, “Together in God’s Mission,” 567–8. 18.  Duncan B. Forrester, Christian Justice and Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 246–7. 19.  Steve Bevans, “Transforming Discipleship: Missiological Reflections.” IRM 105, no. 1 (2016): 78. 20.  Deenabandhu Manchala, “Margins,” in Ecumenical Missiology, ed. Kenneth Ross et al. (Geneva: WCC, 2016), 10. 21.  King, “Beyond Vietnam.”

Chapter Four

Turn to the World A Mandate for Orthodox Theology Eleni Kasselouri-Hatzivassiliadi

The majority of people in Greece, where I live and work, belong to the Christian Orthodox Church, although Greek society is increasingly becoming multicultural and multi-faith, especially because of the recent flow of refugees from Syria, a fact that we endeavor to understand and embrace, but with some difficulty. Greece is considered by many as one of the centers of Orthodox theology and spirituality. It is a European country that nevertheless experiences economic instability, poverty, violence, corruption, and unemployment, especially among the youth. The empire ethos—which according to Joerg Rieger is “the massive concentration of power that permeate all aspects of life and that cannot be controlled by any one actor alone. . . . Empire seeks to extend its control as far as possible; not only geographically, politically, and economically . . . but also intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, culturally, and religiously”1—is calling churches in Greece for witness and social action and opening urgently the theological discussion on themes such as church/state relations, the question of violence and corruption, the role of religious formation and education in the public educational system, the need for historical and theological research in order to reevaluate the Orthodox diakonia, and many others. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the various challenges deriving from the dialogue between ekklēsia and polis in my Greek Orthodox context. At the end of the chapter, one main question is addressed: How far do we travel before political theologies encourage or influence Orthodox theologians and church structures to focus their work on examining the relation between church and empire or, even deeper, the mentality of the empire within the church?2

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POLIS AND EKKLĒSIA WITHIN CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY Polis for Greeks was the city, the central place of gathering as a community for making decisions and plans for the present and the future. Plato analyzes the polis in The Republic (Politeia). The best form of government of the polis for Plato is the one that leads to the common good. The philosopher king is the best ruler because, as a philosopher, he is acquainted with the Form of the Good. In Plato’s analogy of the state, the philosopher king steers the polis, as if it were a ship, in the best direction. Books II–IV of The Republic are concerned with the makeup of an ideal polis. Socrates is concerned with the two underlying principles of any society: mutual needs and differences in aptitude. Starting from these two principles, Socrates deals with the economic structure of an ideal polis. There are five main economic classes of any polis: producers, merchants, sailors/ shipowners, retail traders, and wage earners. Along with the two principles and five economic classes, there are four virtues of a just city: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. With all of these principles, classes, and virtues, it was believed that a just city (polis) would exist. Ekklēsia was the political assembly of citizens, the periodic meeting of the Athenian citizens for conducting public business and for considering affairs proposed by the council. The term ekklēsia (a rendering in Greek of the Hebrew qahal) was the one that has been chosen to express the gathering of people of God gathered together, epi to auto, in the Eucharist. The term ekklēsia “adopted by the primitive [sic] Christians to denote the new reality, in which they were aware they shared, presumed and suggested a very definite conception of what the Church really was. Adopted under an obvious influence of the Septuagint use, this word stressed first of all the organic continuity of the two covenants.”3 The relation between polis and ekklēsia was strong within Christianity from the very beginning till the end of Byzantium, and this relation is still influencing the modern Orthodoxy. On this, the observation made by the late Greek professor Savas Agouridis regarding biblical relation of polis and ekklēsia and its connection with the Byzantine reality is crucial and enlightening: In order for us to get an adequate grasp of what this is all about, we need to take note of the following: Byzantium besides inheriting Hellenistic culture and the Roman experience in administration and law-making, was also heir, through Christianity, to the Hebraic, biblical notions of the chosen people. Above all, Byzantium incorporated the belief that a result of Christ’s nativity during the reign of Augustus, the biblical hope of Christ’s eternal Kingdom



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had been actualized, as it had been predicted by the prophets; it was not in the form of the final Jewish Kingdom but in the Kingdom of the Romans. It is this religious-political ideology that remains dominant throughout the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine periods—never openly or fully declared as such but frequently alluded to in several Byzantine texts. All Byzantine commentaries on chapters 2 and 7 of the book of Daniel [. . . understand] the four kingdoms [. . . to] precede the Kingdom of the Messiah. In certain exegetical passages by Eusebius that Nikitas Heracleias, preserved in catenae on Luke’s Gospel, Eusebius uses the book of Daniel to lump together Roman monarchy, the birth of Christ, and the fourth Kingdom. For Eusebius, it was crucial—from the Byzantine and Christian perspectives—that Rome has abolished all democracies and multiple authorities and had instituted “a single sovereign state,” a political image that conforms to Aristotle’s view of the republic. Subsequent writers simply went one step further in identifying Roman rule with the rule of Christ, just as an anonymous interlocutor in Anastasius of Sinai’s Quaestiones et Responsiones puts it: “Christ brought together all nations and all languages and made a nation of devout Christians, a new and proper name held in the heart of those called Romans.”4

In this regard, Eusebius was the one who provided the theological justification for the ideas of a Christian empire and the divine mission of the emperor, the greatness of the empire, and the triumph of Christianity. His ideas, however, met with resistance, time and again, in the Eastern part of the empire where some church Fathers and monastics—without denying the sacralization of imperial power and its Christological basis—opposed the imperial demands for the church’s subjugation to secular authority and, more important, the imperial attempts to intervene in theological and doctrinal issues. According to Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “we must not forget that alongside the cooperation of the church and state in Byzantium, a continual dialectical tension seems to pervade the relationship between spiritual and secular authority, as exemplified by the patriarch and the emperor, or the church (mainly monasticism) and the empire.”5 If this is, in a few words, the heritage that Christian Orthodoxy received from the past, and if we connect this heritage with specific historical and cultural factors of the East (Ottoman occupation, communism, etc.), we, then, can easily understand why Orthodoxy has not developed a political theology and why prominent Orthodox theologians have undervalued political theology despite its important role to the rest of the world. Most of the orthodox churches are still very much influenced by the Byzantine ethos and the dialogue between ekklēsia and polis in the Byzantine era. The orthodox churches, in most of the cases, are attached (and dependent) on the state, which claims that it manifests the kingdom of God on earth and that it

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protects Orthodoxy of each era from heresies and from the enemies of faith. The church, in these cases, with exception of some charismatic prophetic voices, began to acquire more and more characteristics of the state and the empire, gradually overcoming the dialectical tension between empire and desert, ultimately forgetting, if not losing in many cases, its authentic eschatological orientation and its critical and prophetic spirit. Additionally, the church seems to be trapped in a purely ethnocentric dimension.6 An inevitable consequence of this is the identification of the religious with the national, and of ethnic identity with Christian identity, which is thus regarded as something unified and indivisible, even if the Christian identity is ultimately reduced to a constitutive element of the ethno-cultural identity. Another consequence is the transformation of the church into an institution, with structures of power and authority, ignoring the fact that economic globalization has negative effects, especially for the lower classes, the poor and the weak, the people of the margins. As Berdyaev has noticed: “the question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question for my neighbors, for everybody, is a spiritual and religious question. Man [sic] does not live by bread alone, but he does live by bread and there should be a bread for all.”7 John Klentos finds George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think helpful in exploring the kinds of concerns that we have here. Lakoff’s analysis demonstrates rather persuasively that these divergent political worldviews are based on moral systems that are, themselves, derived from models of family: Conservatives adhere to a “strict Father” model, while liberals embrace a “nurturing parent” model. Lakoff also devotes attention to the ways in which these models affect how people understand and interpret the Christian faith, God, and humanity.8 It is clear that, mainly, Eastern European Orthodoxy answers questions of modernity and postmodernity with resources that differ from those of the western religions.9 Despite the adaptation to the realities of modernity, which happened primarily due to the modernization of state and of society, the theme of modernity continues to remain controversial up to this day for Orthodox theology. As Radu Preda puts it: [T]he main difference resides in the fact Orthodox theology has not taken the same road of modernity, it has not systematically been faced with the challenges of Enlightenment, it has not been forced to prove the pertinence of its discourse in comparison to that of the post-scholastic philosophy and that of the natural sciences, it has not been in a situation in which it needed to impose itself in an inter-confessional and political competition and it has not had the chance to formulate a complete vision in the separation between the church and the state.10



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CHURCH MEETS EMPIRE: THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN GREECE As a New Testament scholar I know from studies that the early Christian communities faced different kinds of crises and controversial meetings with the empire since the very beginning of their existence. Christian communities, and especially Holy Fathers and Mothers, saw each and every crisis as a challenge to rethink and reevaluate their spiritual, ethical, and theological values and ideas. St. Paul, for example, tried to offer a solution to these problems. According to Pr. Petros Vassiliadis: [W]ithout any question, the solution Paul offered to ancient society was not as radical and idealistic as the solution the Palestinian community experienced in their “common” and “no property” communal life (evidenced in the Synoptic tradition and Acts). Nevertheless, the “open fellowship” and the “common Eucharistic meals” St. Paul so vigorously defended, was in fact a realistic solution that can be characterized as a “social integration” of the Church (as an eschatological charismatic community and prophetic manifestation of the Kingdom of God) into a declining world . . . in other words, Paul’s emphasis was not upon social transformation as such, but upon the formation of an ecclesial (Eucharistic) reality that inevitably would become the decisive element in creating a new social reality of freedom, justice and equality.11

Although the history of the church has followed an incredible path that gave it the opportunity to conquer the educated world, and offer hope and strength to grassroots people, the church has ended up making this biblical, ecclesiological, and missiological analysis an option rather than an imperative. As a Greek, I have seen the tragic consequences of today’s unparalleled global situation, which has deeply influenced the Greek people’s social cohesion and unity, and led many to hopelessness and despair. According to many experts, we are dealing not only with an economic crisis but also a humanitarian one, with serious consequences for people’s lives and for social cohesion. International law establishes that all people affected by humanitarian crises—natural disasters, war, and other conflict—have an equal right to aid and assistance with dignity. Grassroots experience shows, however, that this right is one of the first casualties of a crisis. Disasters and conflict don’t affect everyone the same way; they rearrange existing inequalities. In times of crisis, race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs, and immigration status all affect one’s personal situation, one’s ability to access aid and protection, and the chances for rebuilding one’s life. Official reports reveal that around 1.5 million people are unemployed in Greece: that is approximately 27 percent of the total active workforce. Since

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the beginning of the crisis, Greeks have lost 30 to 40 percent of their income; 35.7 percent of the population live close to the poverty line, 23.1 percent survive on a meager income in spite of the various social benefits that are provided, and 20.3 percent are unable to cover the expenses for the most important material goods. Moreover, a recent UNICEF report reveals that “about 750,000 children in Greece are living in poverty and many of them are malnourished,”12 highlighting another aspect of the problems brought about by the economic crisis—the victims include children of school age. If to all these, we add the rise of neo-Nazism and the reception of a huge number of refugees, coming mainly from Syria, Pakistan, and Central Africa (which constitutes a broader threat and challenge for the Orthodox churches, to the extent that the reception and acceptance of the Other, especially the poor and the foreigner, is a fundamental element of their own tradition and identity), the situation becomes harder. It is often said that the world has become a “global village.” However, the growing economic imbalances increase the disparities between strong and weak currencies, leading to drastic changes in interest rates, which brought the already existing debts of some countries to staggering heights. It goes without saying that there are more aspects than can be presented in a brief chapter, and that each country faces a different combination of these factors. It is clear to many analysts that these economic policies contribute heavily to the destruction of the very future of entire regions. It seems that the future of coming generations is being stolen from them.13 On November 12, 2014, a public lecture organized by the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics (LSE) was delivered by His Eminence Metropolitan Ignatius of Demetrias on the theme “The Orthodox Church of Greece and the Economic Crisis.” In his lecture, Metropolitan Ignatius, after describing the economic crisis and its consequences on the lives of Greek people, outlined some basic aspects of the different theo-political understanding offered by the church of Greece and then described some specific actions the church has implemented from the beginning of the crisis in response to the urgent needs and challenges of the people. He said: [T]he Church has set up soup kitchens and food distribution, given out clothing and shelter, and provided financial aid, medicine, and free medical care, its contribution through its parishes, that constitute the oldest, largest, and most active volunteer network and social welfare system, which extends even to the furthest reaches of Greek territory, the most isolated village or island, where the state itself is often absent, unable to fulfill even its basic medical obligations, the program to equip and operate soup kitchens and food banks, the free Medical Clinics and Medicine, the Citizens Advice Centers, Psychological support for victims of the crisis, etc.14



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Bishop Ignatius also made some self-critical remarks for the “wrongs” that, unfortunately, found their way into the body of the church. He pointed out: [I]t should be admitted that some clergy and officers of the Church have enjoyed luxurious living and cozy relationships with state power, and that this has resulted in their bureaucratization and professionalization. At the same time this proximity to power did not allow us to sufficiently distance ourselves from the patron-client mindset, from populism, and from the corruption of the Greek political system, so that we could warn the people about where we were heading with the deeply parasitic nature of the Greek economy and our consumeristic absurdity, which was funded by over-borrowing and the longterm mortgaging (and consequent destruction) of our country’s future, a lack of a more critical attitude toward the problem, an attitude which, faithful to the example of the Fathers, would examine the problem at its root and not just superficially, looking at the structures that produce poverty and social injustice and not just the symptoms.15

MINISTERING TO THE NEEDY OF THE WORLD It is crucial for modern Orthodox theology to challenge those dimensions of society that diminish people’s relationships with God, others, the environment, and themselves and promote those factors that enhance these relationships. Orthodox social teaching should not be a fixed, unchanging body of doctrine, but an ongoing and developing understanding of the church’s social mission in a dynamically changing world.16 To speak about justice, peace, and reconciliation requires the church to also seek the truth. And as Peter Bouteneff points out, “once we start to wrestle with the teachings of the church as if they are absolutely true, we realize that we might have to change. We might have to rethink our lives, behave differently, reason about the world differently.”17 Truth is something with which one enters into relationship. Truth is not just something we learn; it is something that we do, and it has something to show us about how we live. According to John Zizioulas: [T]ruth in the Spirit is removed from the mind to the heart, the center of love. Because it is only in the event of the communion that the Spirit leads to Truth, confession of Truth is a matter of the heart that thus acquires its own rationality. This is not making Truth a sentimental matter but focusing the entire being on the lieu where love and communion take place.18

That’s why to some people there is a sharp difference between charity and justice: charity involves working to meet the immediate needs of others through direct service and direct aid to the poor and the needy, while justice

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involves institutional change and transforming unjust social structures. This line of reasoning seeks to bring out that the personal acts of charity alone do not suffice to meet the demands of justice. The Greek term filathropia (philanthropy, charity) means love for the human being, which means that charity of course includes almsgiving but it involves much more; filathropia is a comprehensive term that is at the core of the gospel message, and it is what makes justice possible.19 St. John Chrysostom, who shaped the order of the Eucharistic Liturgy ordinarily celebrated by the Orthodox church, strongly underlined “the sacrament of the brother”—namely, the spiritual sacrifice, the philanthropy and service which Christians have to offer outside the worship, in public places, on the altar of the neighbor’s heart. For Chrysostom there is a basic coincidence between true faith, worship, life, and service; therefore, the offering of the second altar is complementary to the worship at the holy table.20 As a result, [W]e are called not only to denounce the domination of the markets and social evil, but first and foremost to examine their own mistakes and omissions, and become united for the good of our social cohesion; ultimately, they must also become creative, proposing realistic steps for exiting the crisis and for a spiritual restoration of the human person.21

In John Fotopoulos’s words, [W]e can all benefit by remembering that the Lord Jesus Christ is a king, but not as Saul the Shammaite Pharisee expected the messiah should be. Saul expected the Messiah to be a military king that would lead the Jews to victory over the Romans in order to help establish Israel’s Kingdom of God. However, Jesus is a crucified king, a seemingly defeated hero. To the world, both in the first century and today, Jesus seems a loser, not like a winner—and certainly not like a victorious king. Yet the cross of Christ shows humankind what victory and glory really are in the eyes of God. Through the cross, God has turned worldly values and expectations upside down. What seems like foolishness and defeat to the world, is really wisdom and victory to God . . . the crucifixion of the king also tells humankind that God identifies with those who suffer and with the so-called “losers” of the world. In the crucifixion, God has sided with the poor, the weak, the powerless. This strongly suggests that there is an imperative for (Orthodox) Christians to be committed to those people who are in need, who are weak, and those who suffer—the poor, the powerless, and the needy, those who in the eyes of God are the true victors.22

There is a mandate to change the orientation of life with all its aspirations, ideologies, structures, and values: in other words, to transform the recent situation into something new in Christ. Transformation is not something



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static, but a continuous process of rejection of that which dehumanizes and desecrates life and adherence to what affirms and promotes justice and peace. This comes from the knowledge of the grace of God, who calls, justifies, and empowers people, through the Holy Spirit, to be conformed to the image of God’s Son, offering the self as an instrument of righteousness (Rom. 12:2, 6:13, 8:29; Col. 1:10–14). According to Fr. John Behr: The encounter with Christ effects with respect to the comprehension of the Scriptures a similar transformation in our own lives. Before the encounter with the Christ proclaimed according to the Scriptures, we do not understand how we are sinful, nor even that we are sinful. We might know that we have some problems, but we usually think we can overcome them, should we want to (through the means offered us by various therapies and counseling, should we need them). Also clear to us is that the world is beset by problems; but if we are honest, we would probably say that, if only everyone were to agree with us, most of these problems would be resolved. That we are sinful, broken, and subject to death, to the very core of our being, is something that we can only begin to comprehend in the light of Christ, a light which simultaneously forgives, redeems and recreates.23

In his comment to the Consultation in Armenia on the topic “Confessing Christ through the Liturgical Life of the Church” (September 16–21, 1975), Anastasios Giannoulatos, archbishop of Albania, noticed: The Liturgy is not an escape from life, but a continuous transformation of life according to the prototype Jesus Christ, through the power of the Spirit. If it is true that in the Liturgy we not only hear a message but we participate in the great event of liberation of sin and of koinonia (communion) with Christ through the real presence of the Holy Spirit, then this event of our personal incorporation into the body of Christ, this transfiguration of our little being into a member of Christ, must be evident and proclaimed in actual life. The liturgy has to be continued in personal everyday situations. Each of the faithful is called upon to continue a personal “liturgy” on the secret altar of his own heart, to realize a living proclamation of the good news “for the sake of the whole world.” Without this continuation the liturgy remains incomplete. [. . .] This personal everyday attitude becomes liturgical in the sense that (a) it draws power from the participation in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist through which we receive the grace of the liberating and unifying spirit, (b) it constitutes the best preparation for a new, more conscious and existential participation in the Eucharist, and (c) it is a living expression—in terms clear to everybody—of the real transformation of men and women in Christ.24

David Bosch proposes that our response to mission Dei should be to turn to God.25 To turn to God is to turn to the world. In other words, mission is the

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church’s engagement with the world in a prophetic manner. In today’s reality of neocolonialism, of systematic injustice and violence, manifested in increasing globalization of poverty, economic and social marginalization of people, and exploitation of Mother Earth, the mission of the church as a quest of justice is not simply an option but a mandate.26 NOTES   1.  Joerg Rieger, “Theology and Empire,” n.d., accessed May 14, 2017, http:// joergrieger.com/theology-and-empire/.   2.  See Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Not Radical Orthodoxy (New York: Notre Dame Press, 2012).   3.  George Florovsky, “The Church: Her Nature and Task.” in Orthodox Perspectives on Mission, ed. P. Vassiliadis (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2013), 35–45.  4. Savas Agourides, Theology and Society in Dialogue (in Greek) (Athens: Artos Zois, 1966), 16–17; compare Savas Agourides, Theology and Current Issues [in Greek] (Athens: Artos Zois, 1966), 53–54.  5. Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Orthodoxy and Political Theology (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2012), 32.   6.  See also Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “Orthodoxy and Modern Greek Identity: Critical Remarks from the Perspective of Theology,” Indiktos 17 (2003): 56–63 (in Greek); and Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “Orthodoxy and Hellenism in Contemporary Greece,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 54 (2010): 365–420.  7. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, trans. R. M. French (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 185.  8. John Klentos, “Byzantine Liturgy as God’s Family Prayer,” in Thinking through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and Elisabeth Prodromou (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 309–40.   9.  Nikolas K. Gvosden, Emperors and Elections: Reconciling the Orthodox Tradition with Modern Politics (New York: Troitsa Books, 2000). 10.  Radu Preda, “Orthodox Social Theology as a Task for the Orthodox Engagement in Ecumenism,” in Orthodox Handbook in Ecumenism: Resources for Theological Education, ed. Pantelis Kalaitzidis et al. (Oxford: Regnum, 2014), 87. 11.  Petros Vassiliadis, “Economy, Poverty, Wealth and Ecology: Contemporary Biblical Scholarship and the Marginalized Tradition of Antioch,” n.d., accessed April 21, 2015, http://www.academia.edu/2281300/Economy_Poverty_Wealth_and _Ecology. 12. UNICEF, The State of the Children of Greece Report (New York: United Nations, 2017). 13.  Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, The Art of Forgiveness: Theological Reflections on Healing and Reconciliation (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1997).



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14.  Metropolitan Ignatius of Demetrias, “The Orthodox Church of Greece and the Economic Crisis,” 2014, accessed April 14, 2015, http://pemptousia.com/2014/11/ the-orthodox-church-of-greece-and-the-economic-crisis/. 15. Ibid. 16.  Daniel Groody, Globalization, Spirituality and Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007). 17. Peter Bouteneff, Sweeter than Honey: Orthodox Thinking on Dogma and Truth (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 20. 18.  John Zizioulas, The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church and the World Today (Los Angeles: Sebastian Press, 2010), 86–87. 19.  Preda,“Orthodox Social Theology,” 856–64. 20. Ioan Bria, “Liturgy after the Liturgy,” in Orthodox Visions of Ecumenism, ed. Gennadios Limouris (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994), 216–20; see also Geevarghese Mor Coorilos, “Mission as Liturgy before Liturgy as a Contestation,” in Orthodox Perspectives on Mission, ed. Petros Vassiliadis (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2013), 175–78. 21.  Metropolitan Ignatius of Demetrias, “The Orthodox Church of Greece.” 22.  John Fotopoulos, “‘The Kingdom of God’: Paul the Apostle’s Perilous Proclamation,” in Thinking through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and Elisabeth Prodromou (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 40. 23.  John Behr, “What Are We Doing, Talking about God? The Discipline of Theology,” in Thinking through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and Elisabeth Prodromou (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 84. 24.  Anastasios Giannoulatos, “Confessing Christ through the Liturgical Life of the Church,” comments at a consultation in Armenia, September 16–21, 1975. 25.  David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shift in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 389–93. 26. Zizioulas, The One and the Many.

Chapter Five

Appropriation of Religious Symbols as Political Capital M. P. Joseph

Daily events unfolding around the world show that religion is forfeiting its legitimacy.1 Intolerance and inciting violence are no longer banes of religious formations; those have become tools for political engineering. The tag “secular state” is rather redundant, and one’s patriotism is measured based on one’s religious identity. In the majority of the nations, civic nationalism is replaced by militant religious nationalism. Religion assumed itself as a political subject, in a situation in which political consciousness is determined by religious identity. Labeling this phenomenon as the manifestation of radical religious fundamentalism is only partly true. Common discourse on fundamentalism argues that a distinguishing feature of fundamentalist movements across the board “is that they are reactive.”2 They gather momentum from a perceived and often constructed assumption that their religion and cultural practices are under threat from the forces of modernity. These popular debates in fundamentalism identify three categories of modernity: First, in the institutional and technical revolution, reified in globalization, in which the technological and scientific worldview is understood to have the potential to answer most of the uncertainties that confront human life. Religion, which conventionally claims the agency to address the uncertainties of life, therefore must view the growth of scientific consciousness with suspicion. Second, modernity is perceived to be offering a new cultural and social aesthetic. Culture functions as a societal instrument to maintain continuity in time and comprehensiveness in scope. Every society takes elaborate measures to seek immortality through culture and thus transmit its ethos, traditional hierarchies, and other normatives. Thus, culture objectifies metaphysical doctrines and maintains them through the creation of symbol systems that create and upkeep hierarchies of domination and 55

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discrimination. And third, modernity proposes a new concept of self-hood not defined by religion but by the dynamics of market. In the marketplace, culture and identity are repackaged as a commodity for exchange. Market forces have gained sovereignty over the right to determine the value of cultural products in the same manner they exercise their rights on any other commodity presented for exchange and consumption. So individuals do not have to stick to their social location and the roles decreed by the traditional structures of society— but rather, they have the freedom and potential to change and determine the location and role that satisfy them. The recent resurgence of religious fundamentalism evinces that modernity as a process is not an issue of contention. On the contrary, the violent vigilantes that unleashed terror in the name of protecting cows are often pictured as icons of modernity, wearing blue jeans and branded t-shirts, being active on social media, and eulogizing the promise of market-based, neoliberal economic reforms.3 This strange phenomenon of the cohabitation of modernity and religious obscurantism is the character of state power around the globe. In the so-called democratic system to which countries like India claim to adhere, this cohabitation is not accidental, but rather intentional. Such marriage seems to be an imperative for claiming legitimacy for ascending to governing power. RELIGIOUS OBSCURANTISM IN SERVICE OF THE EMPIRE Strategic manipulation of religious symbols, narratives, and sentiments for political gain is not a new phenomenon. Monarchic kingdoms in Hebrew traditions were political laboratories to develop and test various means of converting sublime feelings toward a divine to a state ideology for governance. Under this dispensation, the concept of a companion God that was cherished among tribal communities was converted to a state God, and to ensure control over God, the temple was constructed on the other side of the wall of the palace. But this change from communitarian relations to monarchic (meaning hierarchical) relations were made possible through the political construction of a static religion; a static religion provided justification for state power. As Walter Brueggemann observes, “in the static religion of the empire . . . the gods have no independent existence but are only an integral part of the social order.”4 The divine was required to be a manageable object that could be manipulated by those who held power. The domestication of an otherwise dynamic and progressive religious formation into a sterile and lifeless ritual-



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istic construct was the common phenomenon in the creation of religions as political formations. Brueggemann writes: God is now on call, and access to God is now controlled by the royal court. Such an arrangement clearly serves two interlocking functions. On the one hand it assures ready sanctions to every notion of the king because there can be no transcendent resistance or protest. On the other hand it gives the king a monopoly so that no marginal person may approach this God except on the king’s terms.5

The Christian tradition offers umpteen examples of the conversion of religious symbols and faith affirmations into political constructs in the service of power. Other religions also offer evidence of the same dynamics. Current cow politics in India share this similar theme of history—the conversion of a religious identity in the service of empire. This recent religious phenomenon has three central characteristics. POLITICAL RELIGION First, it has relocated faith from its traditional role of facilitating the mediation with God to a category of social formation within the political space. Studies by Asghar Ali Engineer has reiterated the thesis that religion has very little role in creating fundamentalism.6 Samir Amin relates the emergence of political Islam as an example of this observation.7 According to Amin, political Islam is a colonial construct in India where the concern was not for the illumination of religious faith but, rather, the conversion of identity to usurp political power. Benjamin Barber’s account of the Al-Qaeda movement also conveys the same argument. According to his analysis, the political and economic changes engineered by the Saudi monarchy for their own protection constitute the primary reason for the emergence of the militant outfit known as the Al-Qaeda network.8 The dissident bourgeoisie in Saudi Arabia were disturbed by new reforms; not due to any religious reasons, but due to the realization that the reforms may provide U.S. military security to the monarch and it would become a near impossibility to unseat them from power. However, to invoke passion and obedience, both the monarchy and the dissidents used religious language. The function of religious traditions during that period was to establish control over the public space, in order to provide security to the collective self. The common feature of all political religion in this process is that the language of God was maintained as a means of social engineering to create structure in the midst of communally fragmented social formations. While

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the language of God was maintained, the content and meaning of the divine was replaced to meet the demands of the political manipulators. Religious narratives are used by the market to provide a language of the collective to the personal, and in the process, the self is transformed into a collective self for the protection and management of a specific group. Faith now operates in the political space with the claim of providing a sense of belonging and security to its adherents. However, such development either strengthened the fragmented and hostile social structures, or in many cases artificially created intimidating social relations. This religious view of identity was based on the assumption that the sociopolitical consciousness of an individual is determined by his or her identity. Society has no place for multiple identities of individuals; rather, individuals hold a monolithic identity that controls the sociopolitical consciousness. This view holds that religion alone has the ability to offer such identity that regulates the total consciousness of a person. Further, it proposes that people who bear the same identity invariably have the same political consciousness and their sociopolitical interest will be different and often in conflict with the sociopolitical interest of people with different identities. In the case of India, the growth of religious nationalism was the immediate ramification of this truncated reading of religion. Emerging religious nationalism focused its attention in erasing the diverse identities of people; identities as farmers, workers, traders, Dalits, Dravidians, and other forms of linguistic, caste, and class identities, and in its place, advanced the dominant monolithic identity. It assumed that this monolithic identity would govern one’s political and economic consciousness. People with different identities were looked upon with suspicion and challenged to prove their patriotism. Religious nationalism also demonized discourses on ideology, since ideological debates had the potential to disrupt any attempt to create monolithic identity based on a superficial religiosity that erased the socioeconomic foundations of people’s consciousness. The new discourse expressed through religious dominance subsumed all national debates. This resulted in the evading of all issues that concerned the struggles of the poor and the marginalized, especially the Dalits and Adivasis. Debates on religious nationalism also colluded with other forces to subvert the demand for participatory democracy and reinforced a new hierarchy of caste and class. Braj Ranjan Mani states: “The caste elites utilised their money, muscle, and intellectual knavery to debase the new politics as a matter of perception which blurs reality and elections as the ability to project credibility, thus reinforcing a new oppressive power structure.”9 In religious language, identities operate as a point of negation rather than a statement of affirmation of one’s own faith. For example, the confession



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of faith in Christianity implies that the individual is not a Hindu or Muslim. The negation of Hinduism as a system of faith that provides meaning to the search for ultimate truth is inherent in the claims of faith in Christianity. This is the function of fundamentalisms. Fundamentalisms operate with the power to negate the other. AGENT TO REVERSE SOCIAL CHANGE The second function of religion is to reverse the process of social change initiated through the struggles of the marginalized communities. In the United States, the political engagement of the Bible-belt fundamentalists to break, weaken, and defeat the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s illustrates the character of the aggressive political use of religion.10 Curtis Lee Laws (1868–1946), editor of the Watchman Examiner, was considered an early proponent of the present form of fundamentalism. He was concerned about the impact of religious revivalism accelerated by the emotional participation of black slaves in Christian churches. At the time, the emerging liberal approaches in biblical hermeneutics that proposed freedom and human dignity to all believers of Christian faith, irrespective of skin color, further alarmed him. Lee Laws was also responding to the threat that the Azusa Street revival led by William Joseph Seymour, an African American preacher from the Black Holiness Church, posed to the traditional social demography of Christianity. The Azusa Street revival witnessed the breaking of the color codes. For instance, the cohabitation of the Appalachian whites and Southern blacks in the floor of the church was depicted as “washing away of the color line in the Blood of Christ.”11 Threatened by these developments, Lee Laws rallied the “faithful” to defend the “fundamentals” of faith.12 Billy Sunday was one such prominent follower in this school of fundamentalists inspired by Lee Laws. The sermons of Billy Sunday in the 1920s exemplify the political appeal of a fundamentalist approach. Through his sermons, he suggested that “the man who has real, rich, red blood in his veins, instead of pink tea and ice water was both a real Christian and a real American.”13 He believed that Christianity and patriotism were one and the same, just as hell and traitors are synonymous. He also popularized the slogan “back to Christ, the Bible, and the Constitution.”14 There are similar developments in other religious traditions as well. A well-received study conducted by Tapan Basu and others illustrates Hindutva as a philosophical practice that emerged in the 1920s in Maharashtra, where the Hindu-Muslim tension was yet to reach a crisis point.15 In contrast, Hindutva emerged as a response to the historic movements of Dalits led by

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Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, and the Dalit Panther movement to gain self-consciousness. When Indian nationalism was identified with Hindutva, it presupposed an ordered, traditional society in which people’s relationships with one another were well defined along with their occupation, relative power, social responsibilities, and rules regarding the ritual purity and pollution. This new nationalism was a political weapon to silence the growing Dalit consciousness in order to maintain the hierarchically graded system where the power and privileges are assigned according to the caste into which one is born.16 The objective behind this political construct of religious faith was to reverse a social process initiated by rational and egalitarian thinking. Notions of gender and race equality were found to be incompatible with the hierarchical order that these figures represented, and therefore, they appealed to the foundations of their religious traditions to guard their relative political and social power. In similar fashion around the world, Christian fundamentalism aggressively focused on silencing marginalized communities of women, people of color, LGBTQ persons, and the poor as they rediscovered biblical revelations, equality, and fairness. MECHANISM FOR SOCIAL ENGINEERING The third function of this surge of religious nationalism is to assist the hierarchical state to maintain order and stability in the nation. Recent changes in the economic-political space in India and the subsequent change of the role of religion elucidate this phenomenon. The postindependence economic system ensured the domination of public and private capital but, by default, allowed space for petty commodity producers. Considering the gap between urban and rural economies, and the numerical strength of rural producers, the persuasive presence of the petty commodity producers remained decisive. The postindependence Indian economy was thus largely governed by a system that allowed constant negotiations and struggle between capital and petty commodity producers, including small farmers, artisans, and others. On the demographic scale, both these segments were dominated by uppercaste social formations. The rich among the upper caste took control of capital, while the economically backward class among the upper caste, along with communities known as “other backward class,” occupied the segment of petty-commodity production. Constitutive of this system is the exclusion of Dalits, Adivasis, and other marginalized communities. Dalits and Advasis did not have a niche in the negotiating space of the Indian economic system,



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and the body politic was molded “in such a way that caste was reinvented as a modern institution capable of reproducing caste inequalities.”17 This economic and political landscape has undergone profound changes with the advent of neoliberal economic policies since the early 1990s. During the initial stage of neoliberalism, the focus was on regulatory liberalization, capital account-liberalization, and rollback of social welfare by the state. Such policies, followed in almost every country that came under the IMF/ World Bank regime, aimed at strengthening the might of transnational finance capital, and to subsume the petty producers under the logic of finance capitalism. Capital account liberalism progressed without much resistance, partly owing to the fact that the Indian capitalist class gained confidence during the period of the protective economy to ally themselves with transnational capital. However, the rollback policy of the government that destroyed the economic base of the petty producers, especially the farmers, was met with resistance. Subsidies given for fertilizers, seeds, and low-interest loans were withdrawn, thereby paralyzing the rural economy. The crisis in the rural economy created new political upheavals, inviting the construction of different political strategies to reassert the legitimacy of big capital to control the political space. Unlike the previous epochs of empire, the neoliberal regime pretended to respect a democratic process and therefore sought political legitimacy in the form of majority votes to govern, while promoting neoliberal policies. Caught in the cycle of developmentalism, the traditional parties failed to gather legitimacy and lost the majority vote in almost every state in India. Neoliberalism hence needed a new political ally to break the deadlock and to recalibrate the capital-friendly economic process. The rebirth of Jansangh, an early Hindu nationalist party that formed the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was to fulfill this task of neoliberalism and to fill the political void created by the then ruling party. Jansangh began as a sociopolitical front of the Brahmin-Baniya groups, composed of the upper caste Brahmins and the rich traders. During the colonial period, this party was a trusted partner of the British colonial rule, as Brahmins almost exclusively occupied the bureaucratic positions in the colonial administration, and the rich traders offered a lumpen role to the East India Company by procuring and supplying the commodities that the company needs. Thus, this group had an insignificant presence in the rural belt and had inherent impediments to capture support from rural elites and the working poor. The Jansangh was known for developing a truncated and manipulated religious reading to enforce a religiously regulated social formation in the political space. For the Brahmin-Baniya political formation, condemned by the poor, to assume the mantle of being the local managers of neoliberal transnational

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capital was an arduous task. On one hand, to gain political legitimacy by bringing the majority of the votes into its fold meant creating inroads into the political space of the marginalized and the poor.18 At the same time, however, they implemented a capital-oriented and anti-poor measure of the neoliberal doctrine. The Brahmin-Baniya caste formation also had a defined interest in filling this gap. Similar to the interest of the managers of the international finance capital, the Brahmin-Baniya group wanted to ensure that the prevailing capitalism would remain as a regulated and blocked capitalism. Debates during the early phase of neoliberalism suggested that the contemporary account capitalism, known as casino capitalism, had the potential to be volatile, with capacity to move to any geographic location, or to any social group. This character of the freedom of capital mobility had the danger of destabilizing existing demographic social formations and enabling the creation of new ones. The function of regulated capitalism is to ensure that the right to control capital should remain in the hands of the social group that exercises this power historically. Often, an empire is created from a need to regulate and prevent the possibility of any other groups emerging as a threat to the present capitalist class. Of course, there are aberrations, and one or two from the marginal groups will be adopted into the social group that controls the global capital. Welcoming the one or two from the marginal groups into the privileged community would only strengthen the legitimacy of capital. In India, the exalting of the “chayawala” (tea seller) narrative19 was to create such legitimacy. But an empire is also tasked with ensuring that the unfettered growth of capital will continue unabated, and at the same time, the demographic nature of the social/caste group that controls capital will remain without change. For BJP/Jansangh, this form of a regulated capitalism resonated with their caste/class interest. This is what Jansangh sought since its inception—the dual function of preserving the social economic hegemony of the BrahminBaniya community through the strict adherence of the discredited caste system, while creating an economic space for faster capital growth. Capturing the political void left by the humiliated Congress party was a boon for realizing these socioeconomic dreams. Political discourse in India began to change as a consequence of the above political pressure. The dominant experiment was the conversion of religious symbols as political capital. The challenge was to get majority popular votes to demonstrate political legitimacy to rule. For an upper-caste party with limited mass base, this was a phenomenal task. The route adopted in India by the political pundits of neoliberalism was the careful creation of a militant religious nationalism. Civic nationalism propagated since the birth of the independence movement had limited scope for transformation as political



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capital for a specific party or political group, as civic nationalism included everyone. Religious nationalism, on the other hand, identified the “other” and thereby created the distinction of “us” and “them.” The first attempt in the road to create religious nationalism was rehearsed in 1992 with the slogan of reclaiming the birthplace of Lord Rama from the invading Muslims. Later, this trend was extended to convert all religious festivals into political celebrations, aimed at narrowing the borderline between religion and politics. The protection of cows falls within this ambit. Manipulating these narrow views, religious nationalism replaced civic nationalism, where Indian and Hindu became synonymous terms. Neoliberal policies also have converted civil societies into “noncivil” societies, and in the case of India, as religious societies. Civil societies are those that through progressive laws protect and guarantee the essential needs for a healthy living of people, such as the right to education, right to employment, and right to health care. Noncivil societies are those that remove such rights. Neoliberal economic practices have succeeded in effectively removing all civil rights enjoyed by ordinary citizens. When such basic civil rights are taken away, the lives of the people are left to regulation by the vagaries of various contracts determined by market forces. To meet the needs of life, people are forced to engage in contracts between various providers of the essential good. Education, health care, and employment are not the only domains placed in the market space, but almost everything from spirituality to sex has become a commodity that traders bring to the marketplace under the conditions of exchange. People enter into such contracts to ensure a living based on their relative purchasing power. Consequentially, the stark reality of Indian society is that the majority of the people live in deplorable conditions, and they are deprived of the ability to enter into any of these contracts that the market holds. According to the figures provided in the inaugural edition of the World Bank report titled Poverty and Shared Prosperity, “India is by far the country with the largest number of people living under the international USD 1.90-a-day poverty line, more than 2.5 times as many as the 86 million in Nigeria, which has the second-largest population of the poor worldwide. Nearly 800 million people live on less than USD 1.90 a day.”20 A report published by an Australia-based human rights group, Walk Free Foundation, titled Global Slavery Index, observed that more than 18 million Indians, or 1.4 percent of India’s population, live in slavery. The report observed: “All forms of modern slavery continue to exist in India, including intergenerational bonded labor, forced child labor, commercial sexual exploitation, forced begging, forced recruitment into non-state armed groups and forced marriage.”21 The International Labor Organization report added that “there are 5.8 million child labourers in India.”22

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Massive growth of poverty coexists with two more realities. The first is the unprecedented inequality gap. Data provided by the Human Development Survey indicates that India surpasses the United States, Russia, and Brazil with respect to the inequality ratio. The richest 1 percent of Indians holds 58 percent of the country’s total wealth. This ratio is much higher than the global figure of about 50 percent.23 The second reality is the death of the social concept of responsibility to the other. Since the collective life is regulated by market-driven exchange rules, human-to-human relationships and the feeling of responsibility toward the other is fast disappearing. The other is either an object for exploitation or a burden. Furthermore, the market has created a superficial homogeneity by proposing that the consumption of certain brand objects is normative to gain a subjective personhood, and that this process further results in the large majority of the poor remaining invisible. Individual contracts have led society to a type of social fascism where those who control the contracts make those without control invisible. Consequentially, the invisibility of a large section of people has the potential to become a serious threat to the stability and security of any nation. This is what the traditional political wisdom of the Machiavellian school reiterates. It is rather natural for the invisible communities to demonstrate their “will to live”; that means they need to make political statements to overcome their invisibility and to make signboards from time to time reminding the public that they too exist. Such political action could threaten the very foundation of neoliberal growth of the present India. To the ruling government, that means it is important to tame this large group of potentially dangerous people and diffuse any major threat to the establishment of power and wealth. This is achieved through depoliticizing the poor or by domesticating the poor into the politics of capital. Religious nationalism helped domesticate the invisible non-being into the grand political structure of fascist forces. Political forces have identified the strength of religious formations and their belief systems to maintain social order and inspire nationalist sentiments, through the mass manipulation of religious myths and symbols as political capital.24 A reminder from Machiavelli is rather accepted as the necessary political doctrine to establish power: “[A] prince must want to have a reputation for compassion rather than for cruelty; nonetheless, he must be careful that he does not make bad use of compassion. . . . So a prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal.”25 What has changed is the language of compassion with the language of religious fervent. Contextualizing Machiavellian doctrine that “along with good soldiers and good laws, the best state requires good religion,” the neoconservative historian Michel Ledeen suggests, as



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observed by Urban, that strong faith is critical to a strong and healthy nation. Without a strong faith, the nation becomes weak and degenerate: “a good state must rest on a religious foundation. To remain good, a state must above every other thing keep the ceremonies of their religion incorrupt and keep them always in their veneration, because one can have no greater indicator of the wreck of a land than to see the divine cult scorned.”26 However, as Urban has observed, “what Ledeen has in mind here is not a religion of peace, love, and harmony on earth; rather, following Machiavelli, Ledeen has in mind a strong, virile kind of religion that would generate the kind of nationalism and patriotism needed to die for the love of one’s country.”27 Ledeen offers concrete examples of how this religion operates. Urban gives an account of Ledeen’s observation: He contrasts two different kinds of religious leaders: the “unarmed prophet” and the “armed prophet.” While the former knows the good but cannot fight to save it, the latter knows the good and knows how to preserve it—even, if necessary, by “evil” means. The prime example of the armed prophet is Moses, who first brought God’s Law in the Ten Commandments and then ordered the slaughter of all the idolaters who worshiped the golden calf instead: “[H]e said unto them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Put every man his sword on his side, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor’ . . . and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” Ledeen follows Machiavelli’s conclusion, then, that “[w]hoever reads the Bible sensibly will see that Moses was forced, were his laws and institutions to go forward, to kill numberless men.”28

Merging this viewpoint to recent events in India, the choice of the religious symbol of a cow, although it is not a cardinal primordial symbol for divinity, as the focus of religious nationalist energy was informed by the need to assume the role of the armed prophet.29 Political pundits have settled recently on cow politics after attempting the use of several other symbols. To begin with, the political managers of religion have used the “temple” (Mandir) as the rallying mark. It indeed created a momentum but was unsustainable, as the said temple is only one among many temples in the land. This attempt was followed by another attempt to craft Lord Rama as the unifying symbol. This attempt also failed to generate enough enthusiasm, since Rama is only one among the pantheon, and insufficient for constructing an exclusivist approach. Both these symbols of “unarmed prophets,” temple and Lord Rama, were not sufficient for the political manipulators of religion. However, the construction of the holy cow created more militancy. This symbol closes the door for multiple interpretations and helps identify the enemy: those who

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consume beef (primarily, the Dalits and other minority communities). All those who consume beef are violating the spiritual tradition and, by extension, are not patriotic. The change of rallying symbol from Mandir to Lord Rama to Holy Cow epitomizes the need for identifying an enemy to gain militancy, because the claims of absolute truth only function with the ability to name the demon. This phenomenon also demonstrates that the construction and manipulation of the myth of political messianism, which is the conviction on the part of those who assume they are “true believers” of a religion that they have a divine mandate to save the world, coexists with fundamentalism. Construction of political messianism is a reality of all religious traditions at present. This savior syndrome does function along with the claims of absolutism: a claim of being the custodians of absolute truth, absolute morality, or an absolute political system. THEOLOGY, AN INCARNATIONAL NECESSITY Reconstruction of religion as a political tool for governance is the reality that we confront now. If theology is a response to the living incarnations of God in history, the domestication of faith by political power denotes a serious theological crisis. Faith in God is no more an issue for religion; rather, it has become an engine for the construction of myths as a means of political engineering. The language of such myths provides the necessary ferment to radicalize the masses and transform them into foot soldiers required to protect the political social order. Unlike science, myths function as a symbolic language of reality in terms of transcendent events; myths disguise the real, and suspend time. Myths hold the ability to transcend historicity, and create a moral normative that regulates human behavior. The history of political construction of religious myths often unravel hierarchical power and invent cultural-religious industries to produce myths. Through that process (of unraveling power and inventing myths), political order rationalized myth and mythized reason.30 Theology’s function is to subvert these myths and such false narratives, because the function of myth is to legitimize and uphold a given political order. Like the parables told by Jesus, which were aimed to subvert myths that justified political power of his time,31 theological discourse today should radically question the roots of current religious language. Freedom of religion from its political manipulators, however, is conditional on the political project of the marginalized and the poor gaining subjective peoplehood. This political process, spearheaded by the poor, to break the yoke of all forms of domination epitomizes the divine critique of all idola-



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trous power centers. Concentration of power and hierarchies for governance run contrary to the values of the divine, and the living response to the divine is the essence of true religion.

NOTES  1. According to a report that appeared in a Bangalore-based daily newspaper Deccan Herald (October 9, 2017), Promod Muthalik, chief of Sri Rama Sena, during a speech at Mangalore, advised “Hindus to stock weapons at homes” and prepare for a fight with people of other faith communities (http://www.deccanchronicle.com/ nation/current-affairs/091017/muthalik-asks-for-economic-boycott.html).  2. Peter Herriot, Religious Fundamentalism: Global, Local and Personal (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 2. Fundamentalism is often defined as a “pattern of religious militancy by which self-styled ‘true believers’ attempt to arrest the erosion of religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors” (Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 17).   3.  A popular news media in India, India Times, reports on June 28, 2017, that “28 people—24 of them Muslims–have been killed and 124 injured since 2010 in cow-related violence. As many of 97% of these attacks were reported after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government came to power in May 2014, and about half the cow-related violence—32 of 63 cases—were reported from states governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 8 were run by the Congress, and the rest by other parties.”   4.  Walter Brueggemann, “Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel,” JBL 98, no. 2 (1979): 166–67.  5. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1978), 35.   6.  Asghar Ali Engineer, Communal Riots after Independence: A Comprehensive Account (Mumbai and Delhi: Center for Study of Society and Secularism and Shipra, 2004), 8.   7.  Samir Amin, “Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism,” Monthly Review 59, no. 7 (2007): 1–19.   8.  According to Barber, the campaign of the Bible-belt Christians for a return to family values, undermining school textbooks that teach the theory of evolution and challenging the liberal politics that bar school prayers, is an American replica of jihad (Barber 1996, 212).   9.  Braj Ranjan Mani, “Caste and the Tyranny of Capitalism in India,” Counter Currents, August 25, 2012, accessed December 3, 2017, http://www.countercurrents .org/mani250812.htm. 10.  Historians often point to the initiative of Lyman Stewart, an oil baron from California, along with Baptist evangelist A. C. Dixon, to publish twelve volumes of

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The Fundamentals in 1909; this marked the birth of modern Protestant fundamentalism. See also Joseph 2015, xvii–xix. 11. C. M. Robeck, “Azusa Street Revival,” in Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley M. Burgess, Gary B. McGee and Patrick H. Alexander (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 36. 12. Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), cited by Clinton Stockwell, “Fundamentalisms and the Shalom of God: An Analysis of Contemporary Expressions of Fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam,” Evangelical Review of Theology 36, no. 3 (2012): 266–79. 13.  W. Scott Poole, Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 14.  Linda Edwards, A Brief Guide to Beliefs: Ideas, Theologies, Mysteries, and Movements (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 378. 15.  Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), 7–9. 16.  Ibid., 9. 17. Satish Deshpande, Contemporary India: A Sociological View (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004). 18.  As Satish Deshpande observes, the upper castes barely account for 15 percent of the population. This group controls different levels of power, possesses the lion’s share of the country’s wealth, and remains “the most elusive social group in modern India in statistical terms” (Deshpande 2004, 110). 19.  Chayawala narrative is a political script drafted to remind the public that the prime minister hails from marginal communities, and started his career as a tea vendor in the streets. 20. “India Has Highest Number of People Living below Poverty Line: World Bank,” Business Today, October 3, 2016. 21.  “India Has the Most People Living in Modern Slavery,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2016. 22.  “India’s Rising Income Inequality: Richest 1% Own 58% of Total Wealth,” Times of India Business, January 16, 2017. 23. Ibid. 24.  Hugh B. Urban, “Machiavelli Meets the Religious Right: Michael Ledeen, the Neo-conservatives, and the Political Uses of Fundamentalism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 42, no. 1 (2007): 79. 25. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin, 2003), 53. 26.  Cited in Urban, “Machiavelli Meets the Religious Right,” 84. 27.  Ibid., 84. 28.  Ibid., 85. 29.  Swami Vivekananda, a celebrated Hindu pundit, while speaking at the Shakespeare Club, Pasadena, California, on February 2, 1900, on the theme of “Buddhistic India,” told the gathering: “You will be astonished if I tell you that, according to old ceremonials, he is not a good Hindu who does not eat beef. On certain occasions, he must sacrifice a bull and eat it” (Vivekananda 1997, 536).



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Another great expert on ancient India, C. Kunhan Raja, while contributing to the series “Vedic Culture,” for Ramakrishna Mission, established by Swami Vivekananda, wrote: “The Vedic Aryans, including the Brahmanas, ate fish, meat and even beef. A distinguished guest was honoured with beef served at a meal. Although the Vedic Aryans ate beef, milk cows were not killed. One of the words that designated cow was aghnya (what shall not be killed). But a guest was a goghna (one for whom a cow is killed)” (Raja 1993, 217). 30.  S. Kappen, Tradition, Modernity, Counterculture: An Asian Perspective (Bangalore: Visthar, 1994), 7. 31.  William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994).

Chapter Six

Empire, Deep Solidarity, and the Future of Resistance Joerg Rieger

EMPIRE AS LENS Today, the term empire is widely used to talk about the overall global situation of oppression, which we must account for. My own use of the term is intentionally broad because I interpret it historically—in terms of the various embodiments of empire in different places and periods. Empires are “conglomerates of power that are aimed at controlling all aspects of our lives, from macropolitics to our innermost desires.”1 The topic of empire is important for scholars of theology and religion at various levels, not least because empires seek to shape us all the way to the core, including our deepest beliefs and values. This insight is countered by another one—namely, that no empire has ever managed to control us completely—and so there is always the possibility that some of our beliefs and values provide support in resistance against empire.2 This second insight is the reason why I continue to work as a Christian theologian. When we talk about the power of empire, we need to do so across all the established boundaries of religion, nation, culture, creed, race, gender, and class; empire is able to use all of these boundaries to its advantage. The forces of empire should not be understood as merely political or economic, as their reach goes far beyond politics and economics. Furthermore, empire, understood as “massive concentrations of power which permeate all aspects of life,” cannot be controlled by any one actor alone, especially in its postmodern and postcolonial forms.3 Empire affects everything: not just politics or economics but also culture, intellectual life, emotional sensitivities, personal relationships, and even our images of the sacred.

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The horizon of empire, defined as controlling power, can inform conversations about the various forms of oppression. Discourses around race may serve as an example. The rule of thumb for defining racism is “prejudice plus power,” and so we need to take a closer look at how this power shapes up and where it is located. Merely discussing the prejudice of a racial majority is hardly enough; talking about whiteness is necessary but not sufficient, either, as not all white people share in the benefits of racism equally. As power becomes part of the discussion, we need to take a closer look at where the powers that generate racism are located. This is important not only for analytical reasons; it is important for the sake of developing resistance and alternatives as well. When we talk about empire in the current context, it is important to note that the most visible manifestations of empire, like warfare and direct violence, are often merely the tip of the iceberg. The hard power of bombs, guns, beatings, rape, and even the hard power of forced structural economic adjustment programs need to be seen in conjunction with the soft power of neoliberal capitalism, as it is embodied in surplus production, trade, loans, and development programs. Cultural influences and religion are often closely linked to this soft power as well. As empire takes on postcolonial forms, supported by the powers of neoliberal capitalism, it is able to integrate postmodern pluralism, multiculturalism, and even certain notions of freedom and democratic ways of life. Because the reality of empire and the resulting forms of oppression run deep, we need to pay attention to its structures. This does not mean that personal experiences of oppression and the many different shapes that such experiences can take should be disregarded; personal experiences of oppression help us broaden and deepen our understanding of the structures. I simply mean to remind us that we need to explore what contributes to the creation of these experiences, and that we need to develop broader horizons in terms of the collective shape that these experiences take. In discussing the structural nature of empire, new tools have proven to be very useful, postcolonial theory and subaltern studies in particular. These approaches have helped us look at a broader range of oppression in our current context. The subaltern studies groups in India and Latin America, for instance, have introduced a deeper awareness of oppression generated along the lines of gender, caste, age, social status, and other factors often overlooked. Postcolonial theory has contributed an understanding of the complexity of oppression (I use this term advisedly, as oppression may be complex but it is nevertheless real), as it shapes up in hybridizing contexts, where many different factors interact. In this regard, postcolonial theory has also helped us gain a new sense for the predicament of the oppressors, who are affected by



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hybridity as well and whose identity is, therefore, pulled deeper into the pain of the colonized than they had ever imagined. Liberation theologies and postcolonial theologies, in conversation with subaltern and postcolonial theories, have helped explore the complexity of religious tensions. All these efforts of grasping the complexity of empire are crucial to the future of resistance against empire and to understanding the contributions of religion. Nevertheless, the problem in the United States in particular (and to some degree elsewhere in the so-called first world) is that we have not yet addressed in depth one of the key factors of oppression that was presupposed by the subaltern studies groups and many postcolonial approaches—namely, the notion of economic class. In fact, in the United States, and particularly in the study of religion and theology, the notion of class is frequently left out of analyses of power altogether even though the trinity of race, gender, and class is sometimes mentioned. As a result, keeping in mind the central role of neoliberal capitalism in the contemporary situation of empire, in the United States we are only gradually rediscovering the importance of the notion of class and its intersection with other forms of oppression.4 ECONOMIC EMPIRES AND CLASS ANALYSIS Around the globe, there is broad agreement that one of the major expressions of empire in our time is economic.5 In the tradition of Pope Pius XI, Pope Francis has denounced “the demonic effects of the imperialism of money,” and other church bodies such as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) have made similar statements.6 One of the implications of this insight is that people of faith need to take the topics of economic inequality and economic class differentials seriously, yet not as isolated factors. Investigating class does not have to imply a disregard for other factors like gender and race, and neither does it have to imply focusing on economics alone. In the United States, bell hooks and Angela Davis, two prominent African American women, have reminded us of the interplay of all these factors, noting the limits of identity politics and the impact of class in the lives of women and minorities. African American Womanist theologies have likewise upheld the intersectionality of gender, race, and class, although even here the notion of class tends to remain under-analyzed and under-theorized. The conversation on class in relation to these other factors is still in its infancy in the fields of theology and religious studies, even though there is some work being done along these lines.7 When class has been mentioned, especially in the United States, it has been mostly in order to recognize the reality of the poorest and least fortunate

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members of our societies. What is mostly absent, however, is an understanding of class in terms of the relationship between classes. Sociological models of stratification have added to this one-dimensional way of thinking about class in that they have led to descriptions of various classes without consideration of how classes related to each other and to how power flows. The discussion of income stratification, for instance, functions in this way, as each class is discussed in isolation. Stratification theorists describe any number of classes, sometimes as many as fifteen, but what disappears from view is a ruling class and its relation to the other classes on which its power rests. A first step toward a more adequate analysis of class, therefore, is understanding class not primarily in terms of income levels but in terms of power. This reshapes our view not only of the working class but also of the middle class. Economist Michael Zweig, for instance, has suggested that we consider the power that people have at work. According to this model, 63 percent of all residents of the United States can be considered working class, while 35 percent belong to the middle class and only 2 percent to the ruling class.8 The working class, according to Zweig, includes not just traditional workers in factories engaged in material production but also large numbers of workers in offices engaged in intellectual production. This class is defined by the fact that it has very little power over its work, as others determine what needs to be done and give the orders. We might add here the unemployed as well, as their experiences of past work tend to match that of working people, and their current power to contribute to the common good is even more limited. When seen in this light, many traditional middle-class occupations are moving closer to the working class as well, as many of the professions are losing influence and power and are treated increasingly like workers. No wonder that even medical doctors and university professors in the United States are beginning to unionize. To be sure, a focus on work is not optional here: the discrepancies, the tensions, and the potential of class can best be seen from the perspective of work, and work is the place where all the other forms of oppression along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and such are most closely related. In this context, we need to mention class warfare, knowing that those who bring up the topic are usually accused of instigating it. In academic circles, this accusation is often expressed in terms of espousing an “ontology of violence” (Radical Orthodoxy) or of falling prey to “dualistic thinking” (various postmodern theories). Class warfare, however, is not merely a theoretical concept and it is not a social program; class warfare is real, and it is waged first of all from the top, by the 1 percent against the 99 percent, to use the language of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In the United States, for instance, class warfare can be seen in decades of chipping away at the salaries



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and benefits of both working and middle class, as well as in well-organized campaigns against labor unions, while compensation at the very top is rising. All of this has created rising inequalities not only at the level of the globe but also at the level of the nation, and there is no end in sight. The so-called jobless recovery of the economy after the global economic recession of 2008 and 2009 is neither an accident nor a natural catastrophe; rather, it is the result of persistent efforts to cut jobs, to cut benefits, and to outsource work. It goes without saying that racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women, are at the forefront of those who are affected by this, but racial and gender privilege does not prevent substantial numbers of white men from being affected as well. Internationally, neoliberal globalization has developed ever more effective ways of securing the power of transnational corporations and their investors not only over workers but also over governments, for instance, through so-called free trade agreements that favor power and wealth. However, since class warfare is covered up extremely well in the United States and even in Europe, the result is millions of voters voting against their own interests. White men, for instance, are led to blame minorities, immigrants, and women rather than the ruling class, which actually benefits from this situation. Racism and sexism help cover over class warfare, as it makes white men feel as if they have more in common with all other white men—including white men who make up most of the ruling class—than with others. In some of the countries of the Global South, by contrast, the topic of class struggle is addressed and understood more adequately. During a visit to Argentina in 2007, I remember watching a public TV program on the failures of economic globalization and privatization. What was most instructive was that this program did not stop with the description of the problems and the class struggle waged against working people; it also presented alternatives rooted in initiatives of workers to self-organize and take over abandoned factories. These initiatives were so successful that eventually the bosses, who had abandoned the factories, returned in order to reclaim what they considered their property.9 In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped create some awareness of the tensions and opportunities of class by distinguishing between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, thus locating the middle class in closer proximity to the working class. The 99 percent (not an exact number, of course, but a symbolic expression) is defined as the majority of the population who have no choice but to work for a living and whose power is, thus, limited to various degrees.10 The 1 percent differs from the 99 percent not in whether they work or not but in the power they have over their work (since they are not dependent on it) and the work of others. Resistance movements of the future will need to address not only what is happening to those who

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benefit less from the system of capitalism but also to those who are gaining enormous wealth and power as others are exploited and deprived. If class is indeed a relational term rather than an abstract category, new theological discourses on class will also need to address the 1 percent and its global role, both in the North and in the South. Before we move on, we need to take a glance at the very bottom of the system, where class turns into a literal struggle of life and death. Even in a wealthy country like the United States before the Great Recession in 2007, 35 million people were not able to buy enough food, which amounts to 10.6 percent of the population. After the Great Recession in 2011, this number rose to 14.5 percent of the population. The U.S. Agricultural Department is aware of these households and calls them “food insecure.” In the city of Dallas, 39 percent of the population were considered to be financially insecure in 2012, and one in four children were reportedly food insecure, which means that they did not always have enough to eat.11 While these numbers are of course more severe on a global scale—most people are aware of global hunger—it is significant to recognize these discrepancies that exist in the very heart of the empire in their own ways. A deeper awareness of the realities of class is crucial not only for understanding how life shapes up under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism but also for understanding how intellectual and religious categories are influenced in the process. Intellectuals and theologians need to explore how our categories develop in the midst of these tensions and what alternatives might exist. Religious images, whether of the divine or of other sacred matters, religious rituals, and the shape of religious communities are affected as well by the power wielded by neoliberal capitalism. It makes a significant difference, for instance, whether people envision God’s power as reflecting a heavenly CEO according to the model of the successful businessman, or whether people envision God’s power in alternative fashion. The same is true for the shape of our religious communities: too many of them now imitate a business model of success as evidenced in their focus on constantly growing membership numbers and budgets to the detriment of character and identity. To repeat what was already stated above, developing an awareness of class need not entail isolation from other struggles. Becoming aware of the impact of economics and class on all of life can help clarify some important issues that are often overlooked when people deal with the categories of gender, sexuality, race, or ethnicity in isolation. First, understanding class reminds us that our identities are always constructs. There is nothing natural about class, as people do not belong to the various classes by nature. As a result, a kind of identity politics where identity is considered a given, to be taken at face value, is challenged by the notion



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of class. This matches contemporary insights in the study of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, which have argued that these categories are also constructed rather than natural. Of course, talking about constructs rather than nature does not mean that matters are less severe or more benign: constructs create their own realities and shape us all the way to the core, often displacing nature. The notion of class can help us deepen these insights, especially if we understand that class differences are not something to be celebrated, which leads to the second point. An understanding of class reminds us that an appreciation of otherness and difference—often embodied in more liberal religious communities—is not sufficient and can even become problematic. It would be strange to celebrate the class difference or to seek class reconciliation in terms of a “unity in difference,” although there are examples of churches trying to do just that, both in the national and the international context. Class differences need to be challenged when they take exploitative forms and when they lead to the domination of one class over the other. This has implications for how we envision the character of resistance: while it is important to counter the results of systemic racism and sexism, for instance, efforts that fight certain systems while integrating people back into another system—neoliberal capitalism— are not sufficient. Analyses of class remind us that the neoliberal capitalist system itself will need to be challenged. Finally, class reminds us of the fact that binaries and dualisms are not as irrelevant as postmodern sentiments have made them appear. There is a pronounced difference between those who own the means of production (or those who have substantial control over them, like major shareholders or CEOs) and those who do not. This difference is not simply a matter of money but of power. In this context, those in the middle, the members of the so-called middle class, are not off the hook but are torn between the ruling class and the subjugated classes. While they are leaning, for the most part, in one or the other direction, they will never enjoy the benefits or the security of the ruling class. This brings to mind Jesus’s teaching that no one can serve two masters (Matt. 6:24), which is not merely an ethical admonition but also a deep observation about the structures of power: how will the members of the middle class make up their minds? INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENTS OF SOLIDARITY In order to make a difference, movements of solidarity are needed, and the biggest challenge may well be how to build international movements of solidarity. Scholars of theology and religion can make important contributions to

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this project in various ways, including an in-depth reflection on how images of God have been shaped by the dominant system, what alternative images of God are already at work in solidarity movements, and how such images can further support movements. Of course, this is not the first time that theologians have been involved in these dynamics; in recent history, various liberation theologies have done this work, and in the past there have been theologies of the people, which include the spirituals of the African American slaves, the peasant theologies of the Middle Ages, and the political theologies of the early Christians, including the work of the apostle Paul.12 The task for theologians is, therefore, not to reinvent the wheel but to continue the traditions of theological resistance in the present. Today, class issues are especially critical in forming international movements of solidarity, as they are international by design, due to the global spread of neoliberal capitalism. The fate and the hopes of workers in the United States, whether they realize it or not, are much more intimately connected to the fate and the hopes of workers in other countries than to the ruling class in the United States. Race and ethnicity have often been used in top-down forms of class struggle to cover up precisely these connections, so that white workers are misled to identify more with their white bosses than with their African American, African, Latino, Latin American, or Asian coworkers. While it may sound paradoxical, working people are deeply connected by the fact that their employers play them off against each other as well as against the unemployed. To be sure, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality also transcend borders and demand international movements of solidarity. Yet race and ethnicity have different histories in different contexts, and even gender dynamics are not as universal as they may appear at first sight. This is why Muslim feminists, for instance, have often had to remind Western feminists that their struggles shape up differently and that what appears oppressive to one group, like a veil, may be considered a tool of liberation for others.13 Nevertheless, international solidarity in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity can find support in international solidarity established on the basis of class, due to the international nature of the class struggle in neoliberal capitalism. In addition, the constructed nature of class reminds us of the constructed nature of gendered, racial, and sexual identities—including national identities—and points toward the possibility of new alliances and reconstruction. A deeper understanding of class can also help us deepen our current understanding of solidarity. Progressives in the so-called first world have often understood solidarity as a decision of the will to support others who are less fortunate. Clearly, this mind-set has made positive contributions to many important projects, including fair trade, international aid, and advocacy for



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human rights, even though it often overestimated its own power. At the same time, this kind of solidarity of privilege has also had some detrimental effects, for instance, in its display of a certain patronizing attitude when things went well and in burnout when they did not. The next step would be to consider what I have for some time been calling deep solidarity.14 Deep solidarity is based on a sense that neoliberal capitalism puts the majority of us in the same boat, and that class somehow ties us together despite all our differences that must not be overlooked. Despite significant differences in terms of economics, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, there are some things that tie together what the Occupy Wall Street movement has called the 99 percent. As pointed out above, most of us are benefiting less and less from the structures of capitalism, and many of us are just a few paychecks away from homelessness. These realities tie us together across the lines of different religions as well, and new interreligious alliances are already growing out of this struggle. As a result, religion can no longer be used to destroy solidarity—a major factor in the past and present—and might thus contribute to the formation of deeper forms of solidarity. The notion of God’s solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized, a key insight in various liberation theologies, is sharpened in light of deep solidarity. The God who is found in deep solidarity is not the God of the dominant imagination. In the ancient Exodus traditions, for instance, shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, God does not remain above the fray but takes sides and enters into the struggles of the people. In the Christian tradition of the incarnation, God joins the majority of working people in Jesus Christ, who grew up as a construction worker and maintained relations with common people all his life—thus embodying deep solidarity.15 Reflections on deep solidarity that bring together these various aspects are much needed, as, in the United States and other privileged countries, deep solidarity is still hard to imagine, as it was covered up for a long time. The cover-up included the easy availability of credit, from credit cards to reverse mortgages, leading people to believe that the system could be made to work for them. Now that credit is no longer as easily available and much of people’s net worth has shrunk in the housing and unemployment crisis, even the middle class is becoming clearer about its place within neoliberal capitalism. Already twenty years ago some economists talked about the “Judas Economy,” pointing out that living in the first world has been beneficial for workers—this is less and less the case.16 One reason that the Trump administration in the United States is able to keep jobs in the United States is that many U.S. jobs pay lower wages and provide fewer benefits than they once did. This is especially true in the southern states, where labor unions are weaker and where many workers work for a fraction of what workers make in other states.

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The metaphorical notion of the 99 percent points to solidarity not only within the United States but also internationally, as working people in the United States share more in common with working people in the Global South than with the 1 percent in their own country; even in global comparison, no worker makes hundreds of times what other workers make, which is the differential between workers and managers even in wealthy countries like the United States. We need to repeat, of course, that the key point of this comparison is not money but power. For this reason, the 1 percent always finds itself in international solidarity, a fact that is often overlooked by the masses but never lost on the elites. In the United States in particular, the development of deep solidarity is actively countered by various mechanisms. Race has often been used to divide those who would be allies in terms of class and even in terms of gender and sexuality. Throughout its history, the ruling class in the United States has maintained its power by playing off white workers against black workers. And even some well-meaning efforts at overcoming racism and sexism have unwittingly contributed to the weakening of deep solidarity. When workingclass white men, for instance, are made to feel that they are the main perpetrators of oppression along the lines of race and gender, they often get the false impression that their natural solidarity lies with white men of the ruling class. This helps us understand, to some degree, why in the United States so many white working-class and lower-middle-class voters supported billionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump, seemingly against their own interest. Another interesting figure is that 81 percent of white Evangelical Christians voted for Trump in the 2016 elections. If, on the other hand, working-class white men were to understand that the small advantages that they enjoy in terms of their race and gender positions are used by the system in order to play them off against racial minorities and women, deep solidarity might become an option. After all, white male workers have significantly more in common with black workers, female workers, and even immigrant workers and international workers than with their white employers. Unfortunately, the labor unions in the United States have not always addressed these challenges effectively, but it seems that they have learned a great deal in recent years. One encouraging example is the growing union support for immigrant labor in the United States in a climate that is growing increasingly hostile to immigrants. The military is another example of how class differentials are covered up in the United States. For many working-class people, entering the military is made to look like the ticket to a better life and an opportunity for moving up the ladder of success. Armies, made up mostly of working-class people, are led into war against other armies made up of working-class people, who are



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unaware that they are, for the most part, not fighting for their own interests but for the interests of the ruling class, with whom they are led to identify. Here, nationalism, patriotism, and religion serve as the glue that ties common people to the elites and makes soldiers on one side overlook the fact that they have more in common with the soldiers on the other side than with the elites of the same nationality who use them for their own purposes. This is the opposite of deep solidarity. In these various contexts, many of our religious traditions can help us imagine and reimagine deep solidarity. At the heart of worship in Israel is the Exodus from the conditions of slavery in Egypt and efforts to create a better life for the people. This tradition ties together the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Interreligious dialogue is a live option not only because of shared traditions but also because deep solidarity helps us deal with our differences and put them to constructive use. In fact, differences become an asset when the resources of our different traditions are allowed to make their specific contributions to the struggle. The support for widows, orphans, and strangers in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, is often argued on the grounds that Israel itself knows what it is to be a stranger. Jesus’s message of good news to the poor presupposes an understanding of solidarity, which includes the possibility that people put themselves on the side of the poor. As the apostle Paul pointed out, commenting on the church as the body of Christ: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). CONCLUSIONS Two of the most common criticisms of resistance movements are that their expectations are unrealistic and that their efforts invariably result in simple reversals. There is a contradiction between these two criticisms: if resistance movements are unrealistic, why worry about simple reversals? The truth is that resistance movements are hardly unrealistic, as they have changed the course of history time and again. In the United States, for instance, we might list abolitionism, woman’s suffrage movements, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement. Without them there would still be slavery, child labor, male-only voting, segregated schools and restaurants, and such. What about simple reversals, though? Are subjugated classes positioned to take over the place of the ruling class? Are they even interested in this? There is little historical evidence of simple reversals, as slaves have not enslaved their masters, women have rarely developed structures that put

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them in positions to rule over men, the labor movement has not espoused proletarian totalitarianism, and the civil rights movement has not led to the oppression of whites. It is often noted that some biblical traditions hold that the ancient Abrahamic Exodus from Egypt led to violent conquest of the Promised Land. Yet, as many scholars have discovered, those traditions display more likely a later spirit of triumphalism than the actual events. How would bands of slaves have had the wherewithal to conquer a powerful system by violent means? Other biblical traditions, which talk about processes of assimilation and revolt, seem to be closer to the reality of the oppressed.17 Simple reversals are hard to imagine for various reasons. Even when resistance movements have wielded power, their power is necessarily different from the current power of the ruling class. Millions of people cannot imitate, let alone reproduce, the relatively unified ruling class that exists at present, where power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of 400 individuals, who have more wealth than 60 percent of all Americans.18 The power of the proverbial 99 percent, or the power of the more than 60 percent of all Americans who belong to the working class at present, would never make for a streamlined ruling class. In other words, diversity is always already built into the power of the subjugated classes, and the more the masses are part of power the more diverse power necessarily becomes. To use a theological category, we might say that the sins of the people are different than the sins of the rulers. The sins of the rulers can be described by Augustine’s classic notion of pride, the putting oneself in the place of domination that resembles certain images of God. This is an option for those who have access to vast resources and power, given to them by their class status. The sins of the people, on the other hand, are different because the people do not have the power to put themselves in the place of a dominant God, and neither do most people have the illusion that this would be possible. The sins of the people might be described as false humility, in other words not taking their own powers seriously enough. This latter sin does not lend itself to simple reversals of the power of the current empire. The problem of resistance movements is, therefore, not that they produce simple reversals. The weak points and distortions of resistance movements will have to be investigated as they take shape, but the fact that such weak points exist should not prevent us from continuing to envision a different world where suffering is reduced and life-and-death struggles are less common than they are now. In this regard, a resistance theology of the future agrees with the motto of the World Social Forums: another world is possible, and this set of possibilities must refer to both the world and the powers that currently dominate us.



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NOTES  1. Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), vii.   2.  Cf. Rieger, Christ and Empire; Nestor Miguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, eds. Beyond the Spirit of Empire (London: Hymns Ancient & Modern, 2009).  3. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 2.   4.  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri provide an exception to this rule with their term “multitude,” which picks up and broadens the notion of class in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). In theological discussion, this term is picked up in Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).   5.  Hardt and Negri define contemporary empire in contradistinction to an older imperialism, as it is increasingly tied to the movements of transnational capital rather than to centralized political power in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). In discussion with Hardt and Negri, Ellen Meiksins Wood makes a valid argument regarding the ongoing importance of the political power of the nation-state in shoring up and supporting the power of transnational late capitalism in her Empire of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2003).   6.  Antony Faiola, “Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Now Pope Francis, Known for Simplicity and Conservatism,” Washington Post, March 13, 2013. Already in 1931, in his Encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno” Pope Pius XI talked about “economic imperialism.” The Word Alliance of Reformed Churches rejects “the current world economic order imposed by global neoliberal capitalism and any other economic system, including absolute planned economies, which defy God’s covenant by excluding the poor, the vulnerable and the whole of creation from the fullness of life. We reject any claim of economic, political, and military empire which subverts God’s sovereignty over life and acts contrary to God’s just rule” (World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 24th General Council, “Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth: Document GC 23-E,” in That They May All Be One: Celebrating the World Communion of Reformed Churches, ed. Neal D. Presa [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010], 169).   7.  For a recent contribution on the topic of religion and class, see Joerg Rieger, ed., Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements after Long Silence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In addition, there is budding work on religion and labor, and several book projects are forthcoming on this topic.  8. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2011), 36. In the first edition of this book, published in 2000, the working class was at 62 percent, the middle class at 36 percent, and the ruling class at 2 percent (Zweig, Working Class Majority, 34–35).  9. Avi Lewis, The Take (Documentary, 2005). 10.  Rieger and Kwok, Occupy Religion. 11.  Christina Rosales, “One in Four Dallas Area Children at Risk of Going Hungry, Study Says,” Dallas Morning News, June 4, 2012.

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12.  Despite the fact that Paul has often been seen as a conservative, more recent work on the politics of Paul has shown his political edge in the struggle with empire. See, for instance, the work of Neil Elliott and Richard Horsley. 13.  Some Muslim feminists find the veil useful in the struggle for liberation; see Meyda Yegenoglu, “Sartorial Fabric-Ations: Enlightenment and Western Feminism,” in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, ed. Kwok Pui-lan and Laura E. Donaldson (New York: Routledge, 2001). 14.  See Rieger and Kwok, Occupy Religion; Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie HenkelRieger, Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2016). 15.  See Rieger and Henkel-Rieger, Unified We Are a Force. 16.  William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 17.  See, for instance, the work of biblical scholar Norman Gottwald on this topic. 18.  Tom Kertscher, “Michael Moore Says 400 Americans Have More Wealth than Half of All Americans Combined,” Politifact, March 10, 2011.

Part II

DARE TO DISTURB

Chapter Seven

chanting down the shitstem resistance with Anansi and Rastafari optics Michael Jagessar

Systems of power, of which most (if not all of us) are beneficiaries, have a way of neutralizing disturbances especially when such “troubling” gives agency to intersections and to transgressive border-crossing disciplines in multiple directions, majors in indecency, and attempts to undress what the Rastafarians call the “shitstem” or as Kei Miller notes “it’s all a Babylon conspiracy.”1 Hierarchies and categories are examples of the reach of empire’s power even in the business of theological discourse. Empire remains safe, re-inscribed, and often undisturbed, holding us in a tight grip “like girdles.”2 We must belong to or fall into some category, even though one is at home in a strange place in whatever the category and across disciplines. Imperial habits or ways, wrote Frantz Fanon, leave behind “germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”3 The “indecenting of theology,” to draw on the late Marcella Althaus-Reid, remains a challenge for ecclesial organizations. Too much is at stake. I am merely reflecting on the challenge of the task of taking on and dismantling power and reach of empire. Religion, it seems, is both the most secretive space to hide from and create our own image of the divine! How do postcolonial subjects maintain themselves while implicated in a complex domination enterprise, of which the avatars are many? What are our reflections on how elitism may have hijacked our conversations on empire, religion, and postcolonial theology? How can we move beyond seeing histories and ghosts in all the faces we see and, in the process, miss the humanity that lies beneath? In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Hanif Kureishi eloquently points to this tension: My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care—Englishman I am (though 87

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not proud of it), from South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored.4

So, in multiple directions this chapter affords me an opportunity to step out into areas in which I am almost knowledgeable and as a mischievous Caribbean trickster. chanting down—keys to lyrics My undertaking is to puncture “normal” and its abusive guru “normativity.” I am partly motivated by words supposedly from Jesus to his friends that “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven” unearths from among his treasure “what is new and what is old” (NRSV Matt. 13:52). Scribes played a significant role for “the scribal medium decisively determined how people would remember the past, how they thought of their identity—past, present and future—and how they acted in accordance with it” (Kelber 2006, 96). In colonial contexts, the colonized could use this medium to shape their identity against that of the dominant and colonizing class. I am not a biblical scribe. My penchant is more for an economy of grace, rather than any restrictive kingdom business around sacred texts. I am, though, interested in dis-place-ment of the dominant. Hence, an urge to dig into my Caribbean treasure box, or what is left of it after Pirates of the Caribbean devoured the region, to unearth some new and yet old keys to help my mischievous rereading. Elsewhere, I argued for an Anansi hermeneutics that offers alter-native talk from a polyphony of voices, employs resistance discourse and counter-imagination, points to why something is or is not (so) in a circumventing way, and creates openings by spinning and limbodancing between lines, playing with words and texts and puncturing closure tendencies.5 Through this trajectory, biblical stories and theological notions may be released from the printed texts and pages/documents, and in the process, characters, as well as beginnings, endings, and futures are invented, un-ended, and reimagined. My chanting down will be a selected rereading of the Book of Revelation, through the optics of Anansi and Rastafarianism. This chapter reworks some of the claims made in an earlier work published in 2015. Except for an unpublished dissertation by Petrine Archer-Straw in the archives of the University of the West Indies6 and Steed Davidson’s online SBL Forum article,7 no one has specifically read Revelation through these lenses.8 Neither Archer-Straw nor Davidson, however, read with the Anansi optic. And Davidson’s focus is not



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specifically about Revelation, but about the trope of “Babylon” that points to Revelation. Likewise, scholars such as Nathaniel Murrel and Althea SpencerMiller explored the Rastas’ indigenization work on the Bible and reading the Bible in the Caribbean (but specifically) Jamaican context.9 Womanist biblical scholar Shanell T. Smith’s recent rereading of Revelation through a postcolonial Womanist hermeneutics of ambiveilence,10 though resonating with some of the general “take” in this piece (especially hybridity), is not necessarily done with Anansi and Rastafari optics. Smith does, however, raise and push questions around intersections and one’s own complicity in perpetuating restrictive habits. location matters—spinning texts in context One reason for delving into Revelation is because it “un-ends” our inherited Christian canon: those selected empire deposits determined by a group of geographically located hetero-normative male beings and ecclesial functionaries who were keen to save the divine from heretics and their heresies. John Dominic Crossan noted the tendency to read the Bible (a random assembled collection) as if the end defines the beginning and middle. He thinks that what we should focus on is the biblical struggle between “God’s radical dream for Earth distributed fairly and non-violently among all peoples” and “civilisation’s normal dream for me keeping mine, getting yours and having more and more, forever.”11 Thus, the “un-ending” aspect interests me—especially given the desire to want to major in exactitudes and boxing-in the Divine. A shortcoming of moving from an oral to a script culture is that linearity takes over and locks the mind into a fixed mind-set. Anansi (the Caribbean trickster) loves to un-end, and Revelation does just that. Further, for various reasons Revelation remains last, marginal, completely omitted (from lectionary), and only occasionally given a space in our ecclesial and liturgical lives. I am also drawn to the imaginative (dis)play and imageries of the writer that stretch the imagination to the absurd, in this unending vision. For, learned as we are, and with the world of knowledge at our fingertips, modern society suffocates from illiteracy of the imagination. Imagine a new heaven and new earth! Imagine the whole of creation new! Imagine a different world—a just one! This is clearly one of the relevant challenges of Revelation. Can we begin to live a life we are unable first to imagine? How can we be a new community/church if we are unable to first imagine what the contours of this will be like? Anansi, the Caribbean patron saint, can help us release the imagination. Likewise, Rastafarians’ reshaping of the language and terms can help release our tongues and impoverished imagination. Some scholars express the view that Rastafarians reject the survival ethic and apparent lack

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of moral standard or resolve of the Anansi.12 These insights reveal a narrow and myopic view of trickster and signifying. Perhaps, this is where Shanell Smith’s work can help us “turn the postcolonial ‘contact zones’ into places of mutual learning, and places for trying out new ideas and strategies for the emancipation of all.”13 I hold the view that it is the Rastafarians, not any ecclesial pundit or theologian, who are the first contemporary Caribbean biblical theologians of deconstruction, decolonizing, and reconstruction. They do unique spins on the book of Revelation. I agree with Shanell T. Smith that “[i]t’s more than interpretive business; it’s personal.”14 My interest in Revelation is also via my encounters with Rastafarians and my Hindu grandmother. It is through the Rastafarians that I could discern connections between oppressive contexts in which John was located (or was perceived to be located) and where his church existed and the connections with Christians in oppressive contexts. In a history and context of oppression, the Rastas read the Bible and deployed performative hermeneutics with cathartic “apocalyptic activism.”15 It is through the Rastafarians that I have been made aware of the “rich world of creation imagery,”16 with the river of life, healing tree, and a God who inhabits creation and dry tears. In 1975, I wrote one of the earliest pieces on the “Rastafarians and Justice Peace and the Integrity of Creation.” With the environmental crisis facing our world today and the growing gap between rich and poor within and between nations, injustice is indeed a global horseman. Babylon needs chanting down as the “shitstem” continues to morph into terrifying shapes. Also, it is through my grandmother’s retelling of selective Hindu epics and dragging me off to watch Hindi movies (she serving as translator) in a small town in Guyana that my love for the mythic, for imageries and the multiplicity or layers of meanings in graphic stories, started to work overtime. She had a unique way of retelling stories with graphic details moving between Hindi, Bengali, and broken English. It is only in retrospect that I have come to appreciate why she chose stories that dealt with how good conquered evil, about living with ambiguity, about how to meander between choices, and those that pointed to a deeper mysterious reality. This was her way of signifying on the “shitstem”—“troubling Babylon” while hauling her progeny out of penury, wary of Babylon’s reach. So, what follows is not a detached exercise. At the same time, any sense of objectivity lies only in my attempt to remain “fair” to the source (as far as I am able), as I read the texts through various lenses shaped by my context(s). Context is yet another text, mine as well as that of the text. Contexts are often more complex than our God-talk may care to admit. There is the context of the text: yet a text does not have meaning by itself. We the readers



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assign meaning based on our complex location. Suggestions around letting the Bible “speak in its own voice”17 are wishful thinking. As Brian Blount writes: “Revelation seen (the Revelation we see) is always Revelation read (the Revelation we read) through a particular cultural lens.”18 Put another way, Revelation is always my/our Revelation. This was the case for John as it is the case for every interpreter since. Moreover, “the religious-theological location of Revelation’s readers and that of their interpretive communities” also shape the multiplicity of interpretations.19 To use the language of filmmaking, I am using a sort of a wide-angle Caribbean lens with several filters with a constant “switching between filters.” Besides the Anancy (Anansi or Ananse)20 and Rasta filters, I will also use other filters to detect notions of empire and the dynamics between colonizer and colonized, expose misrepresentation, and note signification, sub/per/version and ambivalence, essentially exposing the hegemonic agenda. empire’s world—John’s and ours Using the Rastafarian deployment of “Babylon” as that which symbolizes what is evil and down-pressing, I read John’s visionary piece as underscoring Crossan’s point: the struggle (jihad) between the economy of God and the empire/economy of humans. Various interpreters have suggested that Revelation is a cosmic battle between God and the Roman Empire. It is about power and justice, and the reconstruction of a just cosmos.21 Revelation is more than a “critical appraisal of society”22 and its oppressive structures. Or as the Caribbean poet asks in a slant way: “how can one map a place that is not quite a place?”23 Revelation is a direct challenge to the Christian community who were genuflecting at the economic, cultural, and military altars of Roman hegemony.24 As Pablo Richard noted: Revelation combines eschatology and politics, myth and praxis, within history. It may not be politics and praxis in the modern sense, but it is an organized and conscious action by the people of God against the oppressive empire or system.25

While the Rastafarian lens underscores ethical engagement—chanting down Babylon—as paramount in a context of domination,26 the Anansi optic punctures any idea that truth, justice, and love are found in fossilized doctrinal and spiritual categories, and serves to counter proclivities toward re-inscribing the very thing to be displaced. Instead these are found in the tensions, the ambiguities, paradoxes, and conflicts—the messiness of life. Truth(s) do not come to us in neat and sterile propositions. They come to us in the lived realities of our encounters.

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Scholars also agree that John, a “multiple belonger” (Jewish-Christian for starters), was probably a pastor to the churches of Asia Minor. Besides a maverick imagination, as a Jew and a Christian, John must have known firsthand what it means to be a minority in a dominant culture and to embody multiple identities most likely doubly marginalized. Scholars also agree that Revelation was written during the reign of Caesar Domitian (81–96 CE), the first emperor to enforce his divinity by law and to be addressed, “my Lord and my God.” The historical documents of this period reveal that Christians were located at the lower end of the social ladder and considered enemies of the Republic because of their nonconforming tendencies.27 What is thus penned from John is an apocalyptic “parody of imperial worship and economics”:28 a “polemic against the myths, legends, half-truths and false pretenses that emanated from the imperial cult.”29 Christians are urged to resist genuflecting to Roman imperial hegemony and economics. The question that John posed to his readers is: Who is in control? God, emperor, or Rome? What choice will they make? What will it be: uncritical participation in “babylon’s shitstem” or will they seek “an alternative construction of [their] social and planetary order”?30 I find Justo L. González’s reading of Revelation, located around three interrelated dimensions, very helpful.31 Adding a fourth, we have: geopolitical race, economic maze, intercultural space, and perverse grace: these are helpful in enabling us to “catch a glimpse” of John’s world, as we make some quantum connections with our world and specifically the Caribbean. carving up the world—geopolitical race Is it wishful thinking and deception for the cartographer to believe s/he is in the business of showing the earth as it is, “without bias” and never ever getting “involved with the muddy affairs of land”?32 Geopolitics and empire were real at the time of John, as they are today. Asia Minor’s history was tied to Greek, Persian, and Roman encounters. John was writing when Persia and Rome flexed their might and clashed, with the kingdom of Armenia serving as the sort of buffer zone. Modern-day comparisons offer mind-boggling and real-time insights. With so many competing interests, allegiance to Rome and her emperor was paramount. One way to assure loyalty was through a focus on emperor worship. Not surprisingly, critique of Rome was synonymous to treason. It was unpatriotic, to draw on a current terminology! Colonial history is replete with examples of such carving up. The late Walter Rodney’s work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, though written in 1973, applies even more today, given the insidious avatars of empire. Rodney



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demonstrates how Europe’s assumption of power to make decisions within international trading illustrates that international law, which regulated the conduct of nations on the high seas, was simply European law, and Africans (like other colonized regions) did not participate in its conception. In fact, the laws identified and chained them as transportable merchandise (enslaved). Moreover, Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannons to control and police the world’s waterways, dominating the seas and converting parts of Africa and Asia into economic satellites.33 The powerful continue to carve up the world into A, B, C, and “left-overs” world34 like “jerk-chicken” on a weekend fete. What has changed? It is in this context of carving up geopolitics that John’s vision is a subversive gaze against the Roman Empire and the geopolitics race. His alternative polis is a call for resistance. This is not to suggest that John favored the Persian Empire as a possible source of liberation (see chapters 6, 13, 17). Like Anansi, John encourages his readers to spin alternatives (spaces) within the “shitstem” to help it implode from within. Hence, John’s vision locates the struggle between two cities: the city of the oppressor (Rome) and the city come down from heaven (liberator): two conflicting orders in the way they prioritized life in the polis. follow the money—economic maze Follow the Money, a tale of greed, corruption, and death, is a Danish financial crime thriller that underscores in a simplistic way one contemporary example of the reach of empire in our lives. Empires and colonizing powers depend on military might to maintain their geopolitics. To fight and win battles, including that for the mind, involves economics or money. Rome, therefore, is an economic empire and organized its life in such a way to ensure maximum economic exploitation from the conquered provinces. No wonder Rome is “seated upon many waters” (Rev. 17:1). “The waters that you saw . . . are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages” (17:15). Rome is powerful and wealthy because Rome annexes, grabs, and sits on others and their wealth. Rome is an exploiter, “the magnates of the earth” (18:23). It is not insignificant that the horsemen in John’s vision carry bow and sword (instruments of pillage and destruction) and a balance, symbols of trade, not justice. (Rev. 6:6). Again, Walter Rodney’s work on Europe’s role in underdeveloping Africa still stands as both true and as a prototype of understanding the imperial agenda. He showed how the poverty and inequalities of Sub-Saharan Africa are reflections of historical relationships of exploitation. This exploitation, he argued, was total: Countries were dispossessed of all resources deemed useful to Europeans, including human labor, and a hierarchy

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of civilized and uncivilized became inscribed in the relationships. Those two elements of empire—dispossession for profit and creation of hierarchies in relationships—are still alive. The imagery of a rich and powerful city, located by rivers, seas, and ports for trading, is quite poignant for the Caribbean basin. For it was via the seas that our ancestors were brought in chains to the region; it was via the seas that Britain (Europe) accumulated wealth; it was into the Caribbean Sea that the Caribs leapt to their death rather than succumb to French invaders; it is via the sea that the Americans continue to extend their hegemonic control of the region; it is at the Bay of Pigs that Castro (the Cuban Anansi) drove back mighty America; it is through the sea that Haitians and Cubans performed colonizing in reverse; and it is across the sea that hurricanes hammer the region. It is not insignificant that we are described by that sea (Caribbeans). Yet for Africans and Indians, the river and water imagery stirred up an alternative beyond: that of crossing over, home, promised land, and a physical space of comfort and hope. One may be tempted to say that Caribbean living is located between the devil and the deep blue sea. Caribbeans live between the fragile assurance of dry land and the terrifying mystery of the sea. Therefore, we understand paradox: “We are a paradox.”35 It is the seascape, that open island space, more than landscape that shapes Caribbean identities. No wonder identity is for us a process, not a product. The site that represents the reproduction of empire becomes the amorphous coordinates for doing theology and rereading texts. Derek Walcott got there first in his poem “The Sea Is History,” in which he develops the idea that the Caribbean Sea offers the alternative history that locates the lived experiences of the region’s people.36 Asia Minor was a very self-reliant place in terms of agriculture and economics. When taken by Rome, Roman capital and polices moved in, much like the European in the colonies, the United States with its offer of democracy, contemporary China with its incursion into Africa, free trade agreements of the Gluttonous Eight, and more. Senators and wealthy Romans worked themselves into ownership of the fertile lands—dedicated to vineyards and olive trees as these were more profitable (compare with sugar, cotton, and opium in Europe’s colonies). Domitian tried to check this by slapping restrictions on the production of wine and oil with the hope of forcing an alternative crop, cereals. The resistance was so powerful that he backed down, resulting in inflation, and the purchasing power of the poor dented. This is the story of much of the Caribbean—Haiti, Cuba, Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica.37 This is “Babylon” and “bald-headed” economics according to Marley. This is what Walcott implied in his penned lines on Adam’s idea to lose Eden “for a profit” and to partner with the snake in the creation of the so-called new world.38



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Hence, John’s call: “Come out of her, my people,” out of this maze of economic and political exploitation (Rev. 18:4). How different is this from the Rastafarian “chanting down of Babylon and the ‘shitstem’”? The question is: Come out into what? Can we, citizens of two kingdoms, ever totally be divested from the economic maze and geopolitical race? I am not sure. What I am sure about is the need to come out and reenter with a different tactic! As Shanell Smith contends about a “hermeneutics of ambiveilance”: it is a call to expose “the veil in our lives,” “forcing us to confront it” (i.e., the contradictions), pushing us “to make a decision” and to break free from whatever shackles us.39 bloody foreigners and migrants—intercultural space Colonial encounters include a clash of and interaction with cultures. This is the story of the Caribbean. Revelation was written at a time when Rome was flooded, to use a present-day media term and descriptor, with foreigners bringing strange ideas from all over the Roman Empire. How did Tacitus put it? Rome is turning into a “cesspool for all that is base and sordid.”40 The authentic Romans felt they were invaded not only by uncultured and strange talking peoples. Those peoples were even bringing their gods with them and were corrupting Roman practices. Roman persecutions under the different Caesars were an effort to stop any cross-fertilization and miscegenation, as this was a threat to the glory of pure Rome. Miscegenation is still a nightmare for many! In the eyes of Rome (or any empire), Christianity was a threat because it was subverting the Roman way of life. It is sad that Western Christians forgot this when they dreamed up the idea of God giving them the right to carry their cultures and God(s) to faraway lands, peoples, and cultures and impose them on others. Revelation recognizes the diversity evident in the world around. Hence, “every tribe, and language and people, and nation” is mentioned about seven times. The fact is, Rome becomes rich because Rome can annex and exploit peoples and nations. But the victims of empire and colonialism have the ability to strike back in several ways. The impoverished and exploited people come back to haunt the colonizer as destinies become intertwined in a complex relationship. The more the colonizing nation tries to divest itself from the colonized, the more the colonized clings on to haunt the colonizer. The late Miss Lou Bennett of Jamaica captured it well in her line about the Windrush generation colonizing Britain in reverse.41 We may laugh at Louise Bennett’s “Colonization in Reverse.” This is more than “tu[r]n history upside dung.”42 This is about the complexity of the

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relationship created by the cross-cultural engagement, be it a one-sided one. The cross-cultural encounter is also an intercultural encounter. Perhaps, a clue here is as González noted, John eating the small scroll and finding it bittersweet (Rev. 10). The sweetness is in God’s plan or economy for God’s people. And bittersweet because of the unsettling aspect of that promise: that God shows no partiality to a privileged group as God’s embrace includes peoples, nations, and languages. In effect, God does an Anansi by puncturing, throwing out, and un-ending notions of selection, homogeneity, and purity. performing resistance—perverse grace Marcella Althaus-Reid has been one of the most daring and critical minds to engage in deconstructing theology and its deposits. In deploying the term “indecenting,” she contended that our God-talk must move beyond mere troubling of the status quo to perverting the foundations. She wrote: Per-version is nothing more than a name for a different interpretation more rooted in reality than those representations and parodies of life of the people who seem drawn to vignettes of colonial texts.43

What indecent and transgressive insights can we draw from Revelation to pervert “normal” and “homogenous” tendencies? The apocalyptic narration of John is more than a pronouncement of judgment on Babylon and Roman imperialism. John targets the heart of empire—economics—and in his specific case maritime commerce—and “counsels a strategy of commercial non-cooperation with corrupt and vainglorious Babylon.”44 Deploying imaginative language, imageries, music, and liturgy, John calls his readers to employ perverse tactics of resistance and subversion. He makes a case for an alternative city (21:1), for newness—new heaven and a new earth (21:5), for the politics of re-memory (12:1; 14:1–5). The linking of the past and present (tenses) reflects that Revelation is “a subversive piece of memorywork.”45 And, the sea will be no more: that which was used to deny life for many would be displaced with a river that offers life for all. Here is covert resistance at work. I suspect this is what Joerg Rieger has in mind when he noted the need to exceed the capacity of the distortions of empire through surpluses—Christological, theological, and as Revelation displays, a doxological surplus—refusing to be pawns and empire’s playthings, always looking to transcend the norms and reach of the “shitstem.”46 Resistance and perverse rhetorics and tactics hold a central place in Caribbean peoples’ experiences of oppression. In his analysis of the dynamics of



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power and resistance between dominant and dominated groups, James C. Scott highlights how the subjugated “adopt[s] a strategic pose in the presence of the powerful.”47 Anger, umbrage, and rage are masked by various acts of accommodation that trick the dominant group into believing that their hegemony is accepted. This is the “public transcript.” The need to talk back, however, is always simmering underneath those masks and, because of this need, the dominated create a “hidden transcript” that camouflages their critique of the dominant power. And these “arts of resistance” take various forms: jokes, speech, songs, carnival, linguistic tricks, gossips, euphemisms, grumbling, folktales, the rhetorical, and the imaginary, among others (Scott 1990, 19–28). Anancy’s world is within the “arts or tactics of resistance.” It is through these that she will spin theological discourses to subvert the “lie” of dominant discourses. Let me note the tactic of resistance in Revelation’s liturgical praise, doxology, and music in John’s resistance discourse (5:8–10; 14:3; 15:3–4; 19:6–7). What can be more subversive in the context of empire and imperial worship than this claim: “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen” (Rev. 1:5–6). John deploys worship language steeped with imperial overtones. But mind the signifying in John’s ultimate question: who has the right to be called emperor? Caesar or the Lamb? This is subversive stuff. It is what Philip Potter referred to as “biblical realism.” For those who are to remain faithful under persecution, these will be both words of comfort and protest. To Caesar, this is a declaration of war.48 What the doxologies and liturgical praises do is locate the real fears and stirrings of hope among the oppressed and then set them alight in a way that only language, poetics, and music can do. Liturgy in Revelation, like the poetics of resistance, “constructs a world of vision that challenges the symbolic discourse of Rome’s hegemonic colonizing power.”49 A contemporary example is the United Kingdom’s double MOBO-award-winning rap/grime artist Guvna B, whose new book Unpopular Culture suggests a new direction of living with a counter-script to that of the popular culture.50 This is also a discernible pattern in Rastafarian language and chants: hijacking (biblical) language and deploying it as a weapon to trouble the hegemonic culture of Babylon. The status quo of today would label such as unpatriotic language and the user, perhaps, as anarchist! It is not insignificant that John’s vision captures the elders and thousands around the throne as they break forth in joy, singing: their praises overturning the present reality with another reality, that of God (5:9–13). Joyful singing and praise amid suffocating realities terrifies the imagination of those in power: “The joy of the oppressed is a source of fear for the oppressor.”51

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Music and lyrics play a significant part in Rastafarian chants of resistance. Dominated people sing because they believe and they hope. This is true of black folks across the globe. If praise is letting God be God, then that very act is resistance. This subversive grammar and beat “is a noisy [and performative] breakout from a Roman prison of imperial signification.”52 Anansi-ism and signifying on empire A significant dimension of resistance discourse and subversive talk is the notion of “signifying” and the role of the “trickster” in that process. The more I read Revelation, the more I am led to see John as a trickster signifying upon empire. The connection here is with Anansi. As I have argued elsewhere, Anansi—hero and villain, loveable and trickster, wily and stupid, laid-back wisdom’s genius, subtle and uncouth, “an agent of ambiguity”—brings contradiction into human life opening up spaces where play, difference, transformation, and paradox can live together. In oppressive and desperate situations, the trickster interrupts to subvert the status quo, to contradict, to undermine expectations, and to puncture or overthrow human hubris, while in the process highlighting the absurdity and inconsistency of what may be perceived. In other words, “things are definitely not as they seem” in Anansi’s signifying. Signifying is that ingenuous means through which marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable people find verbal methods, with layers of multiple meanings, to lay bare and open the truth about oppressors and to subvert the arrogant assumptions of those in power over them. This is done in such a way as to protect the marginalized signifier.53 Having recently spent some time in the small Protestant village of Le Chambon, I am currently rereading the story of Pastor André Trocmé and how the banality of goodness performed by everyone of this very impoverished village saved the lives of more than 5,000 Jewish refugees (mainly children) during German occupation. Secrecy, signifying, and performing goodness on principles of the gospel—not the values of empire and hegemony—counter the might of Hitler, the Gestapo agents, and the Vichy collaborators. This faithful commune, inspired by both the preaching and lived out sermons of pacifist Trocmé, deployed signifying tactics on a simple premise: “faith works on earth: we do not know of heaven.”54 A few examples in Revelation’s signifying will suffice at this point. Take, for instance, the following verses: And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly



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wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls. (Rev. 18:11–13)

Implied here is a critique of the sale of human beings that comes at the lower end of the list. What was John’s agenda? Was he taking a swipe at the broader grip of imperial hegemony deploying indirection, slant swipe, and irony? If so, then John signifies on Rome’s enslavement of human souls. The economic pillage of the merchants of earth was not about commodities and profit. It was about humans, who were commodified, to be exploited in the name of empire. A second example is related to John’s vision of a new polis. It would seem as if John places before readers a choice between the two cities. Is John’s opposition to the dominant culture of the one city “an attempt to redeem culture or to replace it with a Christianized version of the same thing?”55 The choice is about citizenship in which polis, Rome or the New Jerusalem? In the world or not of the world? The Anansi optics insists that what is at stake is not a choice, but the need for wisdom to discern and negotiate life in complex, multiple worlds so that you can live in both, strategically deploying Rieger’s surpluses (mentioned earlier). How would the Christian community identify itself in contradistinction to the sociocultural and religious practices of the cities they lived in and of their Jewish counterparts? A spin-off from moving between two cities is the possibility of exploring a third-space option—moving between both worlds, but in an intercultural and countercultural way, and finding a space that transcends polarizations. This is about creating the space/identity of in-between-ness with enough wisdom to know “when to come out” from Babylon and from participating in its sins. Regarding John’s divine city, my reading pushes me to ask: in presenting his case for faithfulness to the ways and demands of the divine city, isn’t John using derogatory comments about the “other” (as he accuses them of a similar behavior), re-inscribing notions of insiders and outsiders? Isn’t John using the very language of empire, king, and throne to imagine the divine polis? Note how John hijacks the scriptural heritage of his Jewish neighbors (which is also his own) and at the same time derides them. He belittles Rome, dismissing his Jewish heritage and Jews—using the divine city à la empire as his counter-script. What I discern here is something Caribbeans will know fully well: mimicry. Mimicry is more than mere imitation. This complex practice in the Caribbean should be seen “as a means of shifting power relations” that employs “partially hidden public spaces” to practice politics of freedom “on a lower frequency.”56 It looks almost the same but not quite the same.57 John’s alternative empire vision is one that disassociates itself from human rule and

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provides a challenging alternative to participation in the surrounding culture and economy. I agree that the rhetoric here should not be misconstrued as a reversal of power and roles, though historically this has happened, and that danger is ever present. For the price of parody and poking fun is the danger of re-inscribing in the new heaven and new earth oppressive language and relationships of domination with the stamp of the divine on them. Examples of this abound around us. For the fact remains, we have turned the slain Lamb into Caesar, however loudly we are shouting against empire and hegemony! This is why I find the Anansi optics helpful. For Anansi would quickly eat up our notions of the Lamb before it becomes Caesar and trick “Caesar’s thrones” when they become “down-pressing” instead of “life-giving” and “for the healing of the nations” (22:2). John’s dilemma is perhaps his messed-up mind around “purity,” his fear of ambivalence, and his myopic reading of defilement and intercultural engagement. And we have inherited this problem. The quicker we can recognize our hybrid nature, a better place this world may become, makes me want to puke. No matter how determined the author of Revelation tried to sever himself from the religion-political mechanisms of provincial Asia Minor and construct an alternative world vision that challenges Roman hegemony, his own hybridity (multiple identities) undoes it. Hybrid resistance is characterized by blurring the boundaries of colonizer/colonized to renegotiate a new set of power relations. “freeing memories shackled in the mind”—un-ending notes The late Rex Nettleford suggested the need for us to be “a latter-day maroon, ambushing society under the camouflage of intellectual investigation, analysis and artistic invention.”58 Like Martin Carter, I too have drunk from my ancestral calabash “to free the memories shackled in the mind.” I have tried to reflect some of that in this rereading. The book of Revelation un-ends with the author employing “time” differently to turn his world inside out, to subvert it with new ways of seeing and acting. What I sense from reading Revelation is that the boundary between heaven and earth becomes amorphous. Heaven invades earth and the contrast becomes blurred. The skin of God is with humanity. As Marley sings, Almighty God is a living man (sic). It is the divine who is ruptured and takes up residence among oppressed people and the pillaged earth, for their renewal. The story of the resistance of Le Chambon, Occupy Movement, Lampedusa, Cédric Herrou (the farmer of the Alpine village Breil-Sur-Roya in Southern France), and many such



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others across our world demonstrate this. God loves this world so much that God continually comes to give and redeem/renew it: this is not to absolve us of our responsibility. It is to heighten the earth’s importance; to release the earth from empire that is devastating it. So the challenge is for us to “come out of Babylon” to a different way of living, mindful that our task “is not to transform or manage culture but to trouble it.”59 John, as a performer of mimicry and ambivalence, performs duplicity to threaten, transgress, trick, and subvert the lie of our neat and fossilized dogmas, our obsession with the need for quick answers to complex questions driven by our illusionary charade of certainty. In questioning our representation of the sacred and the divine, Anansi and her mimicry offers a way into the world of ambivalence, “limbo-ing” the tightrope of chaos and living with the “messy economies of our world,”60 precisely where God-talk is birthed, lives, and breathes. NOTES 1.  Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Manchester: Cacanet, 2014), 21. 2. Ibid. 3.  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 248. 4.  Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Penguin, 1990), 1. 5.  Michael Jagessar, “Rain-bow City: Anancy, Multiple Somersaults and the Art of Limbo,” paper presented at the Conference on Ethnicity and Culture in the Global City, University of Birmingham, July 25–26, 2005; Michael Jagessar, “Spinning Theology: Trickster, Texts, and Theology,” in Postcolonial Black British Theology: New Textures and Themes, ed. Michael Jagessar and Anthony Reddie (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2007), 124–45. 6. Petrine Archer-Straw, “Cultural Nationalism, Its Development in Jamaica, 1900–1944” (MPhil thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1986). 7.  Steed V. Davidson, “Babylon in Rastafarian Discourse: Garvey, Rastafari and Marley,” SBL Forum (February 2006). 8.  Even the volume From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective, ed. David Rhoads (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), does not include such a perspective. 9.  Nathaniel S. Murrel, “Wresting the Message from the Messenger: The Rastafari as a Case Study in the Caribbean Indigenization of the Bible,” in African American and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (London: Continuum, 2000), 558–75; Althea Spencer-Miller, “Reading the Bible in the Caribbean: The Case of Jamaica,” unpublished paper presented at Society of Biblical Literature 1995 Annual Meeting, Bible in Africa, Asia and Latin America Group, Philadelphia, November 18–21, 1995.

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10.  Shanell T. Smith, The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire: Reading Revelation with Postcolonial Womanist Hermeneutics of Ambiveilence (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014). Smith’s focus is specifically directed to the characterization of the woman/city Babylon as whore. 11.  John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (New York: HarperOne, 2015), 31. 12. Ennis Barrington Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 57. 13. Smith, The Woman Babylon, 181. 14. Smith, The Woman Babylon, 175. 15.  Spencer-Miller, “Reading the Bible in the Caribbean,” 13. 16.  Barbara Rossing, “For the Healing of the World: Reading Revelation Ecologically,” in From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective, ed. David Rhoads (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 165. 17.  Rodney Hunter, “The Bible in Pastoral Practice,” Contact: Practical Theology and Pastoral Care 150 (2006): 4. 18. Brian Blount, Can I Get a Witness: Reading Revelation through African American Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 4. 19.  Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (New York: T&T Clark, 1991), 5. 20. Anancy is a Caribbean trickster figure who takes different shapes: human, insects, and animals. She is a trickster who is hero and villain, wily and stupid, a mouthpiece and a rival for God, shrewd and laid-back (see further Michael Jagessar, “Spinning Texts—Anancy Hermeneutics,” Journal of the College of Preachers 117 [July 2007]: 41–48). 21.  Allan A. Boesak, Comfort and Protest: Reflections on the Apocalypse of John of Patmos (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1987), 18; Fiorenza, Revelation, 117; Rhoads, ed., From Every People and Nation, 19. 22.  Harry O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002), xi. 23. Miller, The Cartographer, 50. 24. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled, xiii. 25.  Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 32. 26.  Davidson, “Babylon in Rastafarian Discourse.” 27. Boesak, Comfort and Protest, 21–22. 28.  Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Toronto: Random House, 1999), 9. 29. Boesak, Comfort and Protest, 30. 30. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled, xi. 31.  Justo L. González, “Revelation: Clarity and Ambivalence: A Hispanic/Cuban American Perspective,” in From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective, ed. David Rhoads (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 47–61. These are: the Geopolitical Order, the Economic Order, and Cross-Cultural encounters.



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32. Miller, The Cartographer, 18. 33.  Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House; and London: Bogle L’Ouverture Publications, 1973). 34. Andrew Salkey, Anancy’s Score (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1973), 175. 35.  Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, “Re-discovering Caribbean Christian Identity: Biography and Missiology at the Shore (Between the Dry Land and the Sea),” Voices from the Third World 27, no. 1 (2004): 115. 36.  Michael Jagessar, “The Sea Is History: The Caribbean and the Deep as Paradigms for Doing Theology on a Postcolonial Landscape,” Black Theology: An International Journal 10, no. 2 (2012): 1. 37.  Cf. González, “Revelation,” 56–57. 38.  Derek Walcott, Sea-Grapes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 19. 39. Smith, The Woman Babylon, 180. 40.  González, “Revelation,” 57. 41.  Louise Bennett, “Colonization in Reverse,” in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Paula Burnett (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1986), 32–33. 42.  Bennett, “Colonization in Reverse,” 32. 43.  Marcella Althaus-Reid, La teologia indecente (Barcelona, Spain: Bellaterra, 2005), 171. 44.  Werner H. Kelber, 2006. “Roman Imperialism and Early Christian Scribality,” in The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 108. 45. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled, 19. 46.  Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 9. 47.  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1990), xii. 48. Boesak, Comfort and Protest, 50. 49. Fiorenza, Revelation, 124. 50.  Guvna B, Unpopular Culture (London: SPCK, 2016). 51. Boesak, Comfort and Protest, 61. 52. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled, 113. 53.  A warning, though, as Shanell Smith notes, and specifically related to “the woman babylon”: “Although, ‘metaphoric violence against women is not the same as real violence,’ metaphor can still be dangerous and ‘harmful to real women because it shapes perceptions of reality and of gender relations for men and for women” (Smith, The Woman Babylon, 5). 54. Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper & Row, 1994), 37. 55.  Robert Royalty, The Streets of Heaven: The Ideology of Wealth and the Apocalypse of John (Atlanta, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 246. 56.  Gerard Aching, Masking Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 32.

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57.  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 121. 58. Rex Nettleford, “Draw Wisdom and Listen: How to Eat And Remain Human,” in The Caribbean Community: Beyond Survival, ed. Kenneth Hall (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001), 182. 59. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled, 27. 60.  Marion Grau, “Divine Commerce,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Myra Riveria (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2004), 184.

Chapter Eight

The Chicano Student Movement as Religious and The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán as Scriptural and Utopian Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

If you spent much time among the picket lines of the Los Angeles Chicano1 movement—ethnic Mexican activists in the United States—in California of 1968 or 1969, you might have described Lydia López as “a church lady” who was “very connected to Epiphany,” an Episcopalian church in Lincoln Heights.2 López takes some pride in that identification because being a Chicana church lady suits her strong identifications as a Chicana and a Christian. During the 1960s, López grew into those identities and their deep interconnection. Not unlike many Chicanx activists with whom I have spoken, the tensions of feeling both at home and yet somehow displaced permeated the life story López conveyed to me. She described how her parents moved from northern Mexico in the early 1900s, how her mother had left Garfield High School in order to take up migrant farm labor with her family, and the fact that López’s childhood neighborhood of Jimtown in Whittier was once a “labor camp” in the nineteenth century and an “immigrant barrio” by the time she lived there. Comparing the construction of Southern California’s freeways to New York’s “slum clearances,” López explained that “our little barrio is now the 605 Freeway and so it’s no longer there.” López’s life also reflected a shift in educational status between herself and her parents, a shift that entailed a different sort of cultural displacement because of López receiving a bachelor’s degree. During her early adult years, she also drifted away from church life and lived briefly in San Francisco, a time that she described as “pretending I’m somebody else.” The religious and political “preaching and the teaching” of the late 1960s helped her “g[e]t out of th[at] place,” to stop feeling lost and out of place from herself. In 1968, she went to a picket line in order “to demonstrate 105

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against the indictment of thirteen Chicanos for the [high school] walkouts.” This first picket line drew her into the Chicano student movement, a specifically education-oriented activism for people of Mexican descent in the United States in the late 1960s. This picket line exposed her to church leaders from a variety of denominations fighting for justice, and the Chicano student movement, like the movement at large, was a diverse conglomeration of multiple insurgencies and distinct individuals.3 Although as a child she associated church leadership with social conservatism, through her movement involvement, she “learned that faith is a connection that we make with people.” López especially found a home at the Episcopalian Church of the Epiphany, amid its celebrations of mariachi masses with Aztec dancers and its décor of papel picado. What mattered is that Epiphany felt like a “home” for her as a Chicana and a Christian. López’s experience disrupts the tendency to narrate the Chicano movement as a strictly secular enterprise; not only does López contend that “faith and social justice are so connected in my book,” she also further claims that many of the activists drew upon their religious heritage and backgrounds in motivating and understanding their own struggles for justice. The Church of Epiphany itself demonstrates how traditionally “religious” spaces provided fuel and resources for supposedly “secular” enterprises. Epiphany had been a meeting space for planning the 1968 East Los Angeles high school blowouts. Epiphany’s leaders helped facilitate the founding of the Brown Beret coffee shop La Piranya and aided with the printing of the local La Raza newspaper. César Chávez regularly visited Epiphany when in Los Angeles, and Epiphany was one base for the organizing of the Chicano Moratorium committee that protested the U.S. war in Vietnam. As part of her involvement with Epiphany, López was active in the Chicano student and youth movements, participated with Católicos por la Raza (Catholics for the People), and performed with Teatro Chicano, which also took her to the 1969 Denver Youth Conference where El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Manifesto—or Plan—of Aztlán) was first written and read. Each of these groups and spaces should not be understood as strictly secular, but nor can they be conceived as apolitically spiritual or institutionally religious. After her time with the movement, López went on to organizing work at a local level, and in 1981, she became president of the United Neighborhoods Organization (UNO) in Los Angeles. She links all of her ongoing activism to her involvement with both the Chicano movement and the Church of Epiphany. “I go back to the fact that the base—it’s kind of . . . my theology school, you know . . . I mean, that was the place where I learned so much of this.” Epiphany was a home for her not just because it spoke to some static and essential way of being but also because it transformed her way of being in the world.



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As López explains it, at Epiphany she came to recognize that “faith and social justice are so connected in my book so that you can’t do one without the other.” Her sense of belonging to both her church and the Chicano student movement were bound up with a sense that what was most sacred, what held meaning as her own scripture, was an embrace of belonging to and amid the struggle for justice; López echoes the spiritual sensibility that historian Lara Medina described as central to Las Hermanas, an organization of specifically religious Latina women that started in the 1970s, and their theology of “transformative struggle.”4 López’s story challenges scholars to reimagine what might have been the space and the power of the religious and the spiritual in the Chicano movement. What defines and constitutes the “religious” in movement activism cannot be neatly circumscribed around institutional religious belief and affiliation. Parts of the Chicano movement might be redescribed as religious activism if we rethink the terrain of the religious as significantly emplaced sacred struggle, if we cast the religious as a framework within which articulations of social justice, commitment, and meaning were being contested and reimagined. REDEFINING RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE Any attempt to define religion confronts limits, and no study of religion can shake the colonial past inherent to the English term; religion’s categorical invention in colonial exchanges across the globe has delimited its reach in ways that do not speak to many lived Latinx experiences even as Latinxs have been their own agents in drawing upon and reinvigorating the vocabulary of the “religious.”5 Religion’s contested past as a term partially explains why Chicano/a/x studies generally avoids discussions of the religious. With some notable exceptions, scholars tend to narrate the Chicano student movement as especially not religious, and the assumption is that movement activists were, by and large, particularly disconnected from and disenchanted with institutionally religious forms of Christianity. Yet the student movement frequently drew on religious rhetorics and tropes, albeit not always Christian ones, and the existence of Christian groups such as Las Hermanas demonstrates the way that student and religious struggles were often intertwined. At the same time, many churches, and especially the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles, often perpetuated and supported the racism and sexism that activists challenged in other parts of U.S. society.6 Because of a lack of hierarchal support, and sometimes even because of outright ecclesial antagonism, many Chicanx student activists left institutional religion with a great deal of disappointment and distrust.

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Many activists were openly irreligious, many didn’t come from Christian contexts at all, and many from Christian contexts sought to maintain or revive indigenous, African, and Asian religious practices and spiritualities that they hoped to divest of European Christianity. Yet many of the individual activists whom I have interviewed these past several years, even if they described a disenchantment with institutional Christian faith, also narrated how important their families’ religious backgrounds had been in spurring them to activism during the movement era.7 López narrates her involvement with the Chicano student movement as a reversion narrative, as an activism that brought her to a sense of place and brought her back to her faith, an activism that reminded her that faith and social justice remain interconnected facets of life. If they engage religion at all, scholars in Chicanx studies have more often turned to “spirituality” rather than “religion” as the more usable explanatory category for daily lived experiences. These scholars challenge dominant academic norms in studying religion even while they underscore the persistence of the “spiritual” in Chicanx contexts, a persistence that defies dominant religious categorizations. Precisely because they grapple with products and activities that exceed and live beyond the written word, theorists and scholars of Chicanx art and performance have often provided the most fruitful guides for rethinking the “religious” and the “spiritual” in Chicanx contexts. In Laura E. Pérez’s work on the spiritual in Chicana art, she associates “religion” with “religious orders,” duties, and institutions, whereas “spirituality” becomes her broader term “to refer to a range of beliefs culled from different established faiths, as well as new, self-fashioned forms of belief, worship, and social practice.” Yet “religious beliefs are not transparent, timeless universal categories [. . .] they reflect our social positionings and interests.”8 Pérez’s triangulation here reflects the deep problems with the category of “religion” oft discussed elsewhere; that the main definition of “religion” is static, supposedly universal and timeless, and rooted in a context somewhat alien to Chicana experience. Such a sense of religion is too confining for the lived practices of the Chicana artists that Pérez examines. In the historical roots of the academic study of religion, certain forms of Protestant Christianity became the “prototype” for the category of religion, a category that is significantly legally inscribed in the U.S. Constitution, and hence inescapably binding at a certain level for those of us who live in the United States.9 The problem with the formulation of this category is that it too often presumes that religious identities are exclusive in ways that do not speak to Chicanx religious experiences of practicing and living multiple “religious” allegiances, and, at the popular and legal level, religion is too often understood as belief focused, or in terms that might be understood as “theocentric.”10 In other words, definitions of religion tend to emphasize particular



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theological and dogmatic beliefs about God, but beliefs about God are not the only focus of Chicana artistic expressions of the spiritual that Pérez studies.11 Additionally, religion, in its various guises, ever remains a discourse of power, and in certain ways, particularly in the Americas, religion came to be formulated over and against practices that are deemed superstitious. On one level, this distinction serves an elite, class division as a way of distinguishing whose and which practices are legitimate and wise rather than foolish or merely practiced popularly. But in another significant historical vein, the distinction between religion and superstition served European Christians in their conquest, conversion, enslavement, and domination of Native and African peoples in the Americas. In response to this history, Pérez casts “religion” as “institutional,” and associates religion with dominant “power.” Thus she prefers spiritual as a term that disconnects minoritized practices from dominant conceptualizations.12 Similarly, one of the individuals whom I interviewed, and whom, for confidentiality’s sake, I call Ramón, describes how he grew up Roman Catholic in Mexico until he was twelve, but then when he came to the United States and encountered mass in English, he left the Catholic Church and experienced it as “an oppressive, racist, and discriminatory institution.” This distinction between spirituality as conveying the practices of minoritized communities and religion as conveying “institutional” frames of dominant repression suggests that part of the problem with definitions of religion is associating religion with dominating power.13 Rather than proffer a final definition of religion that makes us ask whether something is religious, it might be better to ask: What does understanding something as religious help us to see?14 Such an approach can redirect our attention to what people do with the “religious” rather than what we think they should do with it. By shifting to the terrain of “spirituality,” Chicana scholars pay greater attention to what people, rather than institutions, do with religion. In so doing, Chicana scholars often rely on the “hierocentric” mode of religious discourse with a focus on the “sacred.”15 Theresa Delgadillo’s definition of spirituality inscribes the “sacred” as a key to divining the “other world” and “other ways of knowing,” one that specifically privileges the sort of interconnection that figures such as Gloria Anzaldúa pursue.16 Although Delgadillo approaches the sacred through the lenses of spiritual and racial mixture, invocations of the sacred have historically envisioned a hierarchy of space and imagination, a conception that replaces the theocentric God with a different but related abstraction; moreover, many versions of the sacred imagine space in a binary way, as neatly divided into two categories, sacred and profane, in ways that distinctly do not apply to peoples who especially imagine life in a “borderlands” and as “mixture.” Nevertheless, the term sacred recurs in varying Chicanx texts, and because of its association with

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“space” and “place,” I follow Delgadillo in perceiving the Chicanx context as a fruitful one for reconsidering the utility and limits of the sacred. Chicano movement activism, writing, art, performance, and politics wrestled with and through the sacred, although scholarship of and about the movement rarely articulates it on quite those terms.17 Nevertheless, discourses of and about the “sacred,” “sacrality,” “spirit,” and “spirituality” appear with striking regularity in multiple writings (not just text but also various ephemera, such as posters) from the Chicano movement as well as those who respond to and take inspiration from the 1960s and 1970s.18 The sacred becomes something conceptually defined and utilized as part of struggles to reimagine self, community, and world in the Chicano movement.19 The sacred can demarcate “another terrain upon which to challenge the cultural blind spots in mainstream values.”20 Discourses and practices of the spiritual and the sacred become tools for dealing with experiences that exceed the linguistic terms available to us. Moreover, Medina and Pérez recuperate terms such as spirit while acknowledging the falsity of any mind/body distinction previously associated with it.21 Many texts I study that deploy “spirit” language never represent the spirit as neatly distinct from the material. All of these texts are filled with bodies and blood.22 Moreover, many Chicanx texts concern themselves with creating a language and imagination that has previously been “unwritten.”23 Language of the “sacred” designates particular human relationships to particular spaces and places.24 Even though earlier theorists, such as Émile Durkheim, imagined the sacred and profane as distinctly separated from each other, more recent scholars have reimagined the relationship between sacred and profane spaces differently; for instance, Kevin Lewis O’Neill employs affect studies in order to illuminate how people experience sacred and profane spaces not as divided but as “hierarchically interconnected.”25 Rather than presume the world neatly divides between sacred and profane and center and periphery, he suggests scholars of religion should focus on how spaces are affective, how people come to feel and perceive particular kinds of space on particular terms.26 A significant tension around using the sacred in the study of religion is the encoding of a seemingly neat binary division of space that does not apply to how people often “feel” sacred space. When Jonathan Z. Smith describes “sacrality” as “a category of emplacement,”27 it allows us to treat religion, at least within these contexts, as the strategies that somehow displaced peoples have taken up to make place for themselves and to feel good about or connected to the place that is sacred. Religion, for some communities, can be about making, contesting, and reshaping place rather than just navigating a world already neatly divided between sacred and profane; as religion scholar Edwin D. Aponte argues, sacred spaces are made



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through the stories people tell about them and the experiences they perceive in them.28 Scholarly attention focuses then on the production, reception, and negotiation of the sacred rather than presuming its preexistence; sacrality for the Chicano movement might best be approached as a means of making and contesting place. If one regards the religious as a facet of the Chicano student movement, even if on other terms, then the study of religion might shed light on religious rhetorics and practices in the movement even as those movement practices defy and push the boundaries of religious studies vocabulary. CONTESTING RELIGION, CONTESTING SCRIPTURES, INSCRIBING AZTLÁN For López, religion mattered in helping her make place in the world. Though rooted in more traditionally institutional religious forms, López emphasized the interconnection of religion and social justice in the Chicano movement as coming together in her own metaphorical book; she, in some ways, has created her own scripture, pulled together from a variety of preexisting texts, but she articulates her own sense of sacred text that brings these traditions together. This need for a scripture and this need to revise how scriptures get made and understood appeared in other movement contexts as well. In my book Revelation in Aztlán, I considered how the Chicano student movement, in challenging a dominant Euro-U.S. Protestant cultural norm, could not help but contest and rethink scriptures. In what remains of this brief chapter, I want to sketch certain religious rhetorical framings that we might broadly term utopian and scriptural in the context of the movement and point to how the study of utopia and scriptures can illuminate Chicano movement texts, in particular El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (1969), a product of the youth movement, a text with an explicitly spiritual framing in one of its popularly circulated forms. Not unlike approaches to religion and sacred space, shifts in minoritized biblical criticism have queried the Bible as a modern text, wherein how we as readers have come to encounter the text and what we read biblical texts for must also be part of what we study. Such a shift means that one studies not only the Bible but also people interacting with the Bible; for instance, Tatsiong Benny Liew describes reading the “bible” with and as “theory.” Liew explains that by theory he means “attempts to understand conditions and consequences of making meaning, making sense, or making reality.”29 For Liew, biblical hermeneutics then becomes an examination “of the construction and operation of power/knowledge in the wor(l)d.”30 Thus Liew’s approach to the Bible attends to texts, but he is no longer interested in texts alone; rather, he is interested in how texts are connected with embodied persons and material

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lives in the consequences of making and negotiating power and making and negotiating the world in and through texts. “Scriptures” in general, then, might be those centering “texts” that serve as communal theory, those texts people turn to in order to define, defy, and remake communities and especially in order to make and to make sense of power relations. Scriptures are not special texts on their own; scriptures are something that human beings do and make with texts so as to make those texts special, and so we should consider people’s interactions with “texts” as what makes them scriptural.31 If “scriptures” signal a kind of relationship rather than a quality inherent to a text, in addition to looking to make sense of scripture as phenomena broader than the Christian Bible, we may also want to shift our emphasis from the simple noun of scriptures to formulations of the verb scripturalize, formulations such as scripturalizing and scripturalization.32 Biblical scholar and scriptural theorist Vincent L. Wimbush foregrounds the questions of “power”—social, political, economic, and such—that surround how and why peoples engage with scriptures: “the nature and consequences of interpretative practices, their strategies, and play, especially in terms of power relations—namely signifying on scriptures.”33 For him, scriptures are practices of, about, and around power, and Wimbush became more interested in “how” given texts and larger scriptural phenomena mean.34 The Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, from its first writing and performance at a Chicano Youth Conference in Denver in 1969, explicitly called for its own scripturalization. Under the heading of “action,” the text calls for “Awareness and distribution of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan.35 Presented at every meeting, demonstration, confrontation, court house, institution, administration, church, school, building, car and every place of human existence.” Thus El Plan calls for its ongoing ritual engagement as an alternative scriptural text, especially in places and moments where the struggle for justice is paramount. Not unlike López’s individual scriptures, activists at this conference decided that making their own scripture was one way of contesting their minoritized place in the United States. During Palm Sunday weekend in March 1969, activists from all over the country assembled in Denver, under the auspices of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s antiwar and Chicanx-focused organization, the Crusade for Justice, a name with clear religious overtones; Gonzales himself was a Protestant. Chicano nationalism was the explicit focus of the conference, and its written product, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a “spiritual” manifesto from “Aztlán,” the mythical Aztec homeland, signaled a complicated recasting of place as multivalent. Responding to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that annexed the northern half of Mexico and, through conquest, made what is now the U.S. Southwest part of the United States, El Plan renamed Colorado as



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liberated territory. Denver ceased to be a U.S. state capital and instead became the Aztec homeland, but it is a homeland freighted with an added spiritual power. Excerpts from the text, especially the prologue, largely crafted by poet Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia (nom de plume Alurista), were rapidly circulated, read, reprinted, quoted, and interpreted in varying local Chicanx media such as newspapers, activist circles, and performance groups, throughout the United States.36 One way to understand the writing of El Plan is to appreciate its attempt to take up the power of scriptures, to be that textual locus through and by which people make power and make meaning about the workings of power in the world. It becomes a text that encodes a counter-theory of the world and at the same time it remakes the world. Besides a concern with scripturalization, the spirituality of El Plan is particularly utopian in imagining a better world that can come into being through engagement with the text. Utopian orientations tend to be socially critical by nature but also socially invested; utopia is an inherently ambivalent and ambiguous term that can mean “no place” and “good place” at the same time.37 Something of this slippage between good and no place may account for how and why utopias and scriptures are often entangled. THE UTOPIAN ORIENTATION OF CHICANO MOVEMENT SCRIPTURAL PRACTICES Through my conversations with Chicanx activists, I came to see utopia as a practice of constructing place when one has been varyingly given no place, a practice of working toward and locating oneself in a better world that is quite tied to this world but also, at the same time, distinct from it. Thus the creation of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was the making of an alternative scripture bound up with the articulation and practice of utopian place making in and through text. Aztlán, the name of the mythical Aztec homeland, in particular, has already been identified by several scholars as a utopian vision, and its utopian frustration of place has been frequently remarked upon for its both inspirational and oppressive power.38 Near its conclusion, El Plan Espiritual frames the power of Chicano nationalism and self-determination, as portending a distinctly embodied utopian other world of sociality: “A nation autonomous and free—culturally, socially, economically, and politically—will make its own decisions on the usage of our lands, the taxation of our goods, the utilization of our bodies for war, the determination of justice (reward and punishment), and the profit of our sweat.”39 One activist I interviewed, whom I call Rubén, not only experienced “self-determination” as the core message of his involvement in the student

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movement, but he noted its connection to Aztlán by describing the “mythical Mexican paradise . . . [as] a goal we all had to make things better for us, for us and our people.” Here, Rubén echoes a sense that Aztlán, and the Plan that entexted it, encodes a sacred struggle for justice. Aztlán was both the good place that was and could be but also a no place that is always alive in an ongoing struggle for place and justice. Other colleagues have preferred to take up Michel Foucault’s heterotopia so as to emphasize the already existing utopian worlds that live in the same space as other decidedly non-utopian ones. Yet, my examination of the Chicano movement points toward the power of the specifically utopian term because of the way that it plays with existence and nonexistence at the same time. I was drawn to the ambiguous and ambivalent definition of utopia as both “good place” and “no place” in my work, in part, because Cuban American biblical scholar Fernando F. Segovia once described the religious orientation of Latinxs in the United States as growing out of an experience of in-betweenness, of having “two places and no place on which to stand.”40 Although Mexicans were technically granted citizenship (or had it imposed upon them)41 as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, U.S. courts often worked to dispossess ethnic Mexicans of their land, to circumscribe their rights, and to deny citizenship to people who migrated from Mexico afterward. Under U.S. law and practice, ethnic Mexicans were generally treated, from the outset, as “second-class” subjects for “discrimination, harassment, brutality, and land theft.”42 As I encountered narratives of marginalization, displacement, and homelessness among the Chicanx activists I interviewed, I also came to wonder: What if, instead of describing those experiences as entailing a lack of place, senses of marginality are redescribed as their own kind of place, a particular sort of no place that can also be quite distinctly powerful? What if that “no place” is a strange elsewhere territory of transformative struggle? What if that “no place” actually helps us to understand the spirituality of movement-era texts? Theorist of religions Charles H. Long argued that the oppressed must look to “an-other” world in order to experience a full sense of humanity; thus central to religions of the oppressed is a utopian no place of possibilities incompletely experienced in daily life.43 In the Chicano movement, new scriptures that encode mythical imaginations like an Aztlán to which Chicanxs belong can then act as a place that is also not a place. Just as Aztlán and El Plan Espiritual were scriptural resources for sacred struggle, they also became scriptural loci around which such struggle transpired. Even at the conference that first articulated it, the ideas of the Plan Espiritual became highly contested. Most of these critiques focused on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Because the appropriation of Aztlán can leave unquestioned the historical ways that Mexican mestizaje has rescripted



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domination of indigenous and African bodies while erasing Asian Mexicans, some critics queried the potential dangers of El Plan’s use of indigenous spiritual tropes if Chicanxs were not self-critical enough about their own complex racialization.44 Moreover, as Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram argue, “recuperating the mythic pre-Colombian past” ignored the importance of historical change in the making of Chicanx identities.45 Most contested were the unequal relations of gender and sexuality seemingly encoded in the text. El Plan’s use of carnalismo (brotherhood) appeared to emphasize male membership and an “ideal(ized)” Chicano/a family with male-dominated hierarchical heteronormative structures.46 For all its talk of familia/family, El Plan erases gender and sexuality as social categories when it claims that nationalism “transcends all religious, political, class, and economic factions or boundaries”47 with no mention of gender or sexuality. As artist and critic Alicia Gaspar de Alba argues, such a construction distances Aztlán from the actual bodies who would inhabit it.48 Thus, understanding Aztlán as “utopian” as outlined by performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz is helpful in illuminating that utopias are not static. Because the utopian does not fully exist, it is also always challenged and transformed, ever on the horizon but existing in present interruptive moments.49 El Plan’s Aztlán, as with many prominent utopian visions, has a certain enduring power that people sought to reconfigure rather than abandon; such reconfiguration is a sign of El Plan’s scripturalization. Even within the movement period, women such as Enriqueta Vasquez sought to transform the gendering of Aztlán. Writing in 1992, Cherríe Moraga renegotiates Aztlán as rooted in queer familia instead of carnalismo, where “there would be no freaks, no ‘others’ to point one’s finger at.”50 Daniel Cooper Alarcón recuperates the role of Aztlán as a construct that, like a palimpsest, contains within it a complex history and the tensions, pain, possibilities, and textures of those histories can be pored over in a palimpsestic Aztlán.51 As with other movements around the world, many anti-imperialist, feminist, and queer critics of Aztlán embraced the utopian vision “as life-giving” struggle even when that struggle is also over and in relationship to the utopian vision itself.52 In reading the utopian after the Chicano movement, especially in light of Chicana feminist and queer criticism, contestation and dynamism prove more fundamental to any survival of Chicanx utopianism than perfection, purity, stasis, or isolation, the more traditional attributes of modern utopianism.53 This inflection of utopias as much more dynamic, plurivocal, and mutable also situates scriptures as meaningful especially in their pliability, in their ambiguity and ambivalence. We can see how a form of religion was important to at least some Chicanx activism. Moreover, movement practices around scriptures compel scholarly interpreters of both scriptures and the utopian in

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the study of religion to broaden their understanding of how such phenomena work in lived social contexts. Looking at how El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán came to incorporate rhetorics of the sacred and the spiritual that emphasized a struggle for justice, and looking at how this text came to be and continues to be a site of struggle itself, reveals something about how scriptures and religion function in Chicanx contexts; religion has never been just institutional or distinct from daily life. In writing El Plan and challenging it Chicanx critics, such as López, hold onto a sense of scriptures as loci where faith and the struggle for social justice intertwine. NOTES 1.  As with many historically minoritized communities, much debate encircles the appropriate naming practices. People of ethnic Mexican descent living in the United States of America are most generally called “Mexican American,” though that term has the problem of reifying the United States’ hegemonic deployment of the hemispheric term American. In the 1960s, particular youth activists mobilized Chicano as an identity label that demarcated them as a people connected to and distinct from both Mexico and the United States. Throughout this chapter I interrupt the gendered sense of Chicano as a masculine singular that incorporates all subjects. I will more commonly deploy Chicanx, which is inclusive of women, men, and non-binary genders; however, at moments where I am referring to an individual or where I am trying to reflect the historical self-understanding of the movement I may use the more genderexclusionary term Chicano. 2.  Lydia López gave permission for the use of her name and responses; see also Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), chapter 5. 3.  Activists were not merely fighting for education, and many had an internationalist perspective. Different groups within the movement tended to focus their attention on specific fronts, such as education, opposition to the Vietnam War, anticolonialism, economic justice, health care, ethnic pride and nationalism, land rights, political participation, and police brutality (Blackwell 2011, 27). 4. Lara Medina, Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 123–46. 5.  One could cite a litany of texts in the academic study of religion that take up this issue. For a short introduction to some of the historical variants in the terminological challenge of studying religion, see J. Z. Smith 2004, 179–96. Note especially his observation that without “theological criteria, then it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish religion from any other ideological category” (193). Ultimately, however, he notes “it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define” (194). Laura E. Pérez struggles with the term religion (2007, discussed in this chapter) in order to arrive at her use of spirituality; Talal Asad’s critique of the category of “religion,” springing from a reading of Clifford



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Geertz, explores many of the concerns of division, focus on belief and “transhistorical essence” in the study of “religion” that particularly lead Pérez to abandon the category (see Asad 1993, passim, but especially 29). 6. See also Rudy V. Busto, King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies López Tijerina (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Mario T. García, Católicos: Resistance and Affirmation in Chicano Catholic History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), chapters 5 and 6; Richard Edward Martínez, PADRES: The National Chicano Priest Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Lara Medina, “Los Espíritus Siguen Hablando: Chicana Spiritualities,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998). 7.  In my interviews with Alberto Juarez and Richard Martínez, for instance, they both asserted the import of religious backgrounds in shaping the “values” that motivated their movement activities, but they were reluctant to connect their movement activism specifically to “religion.” Juarez also observed that a higher proportion of vocal Chicanx activists tended to come from Protestant backgrounds, including himself, Lydia López, Rosalio Muñoz, and Bert Corona. As Luis León observes, many Chicanx activists narrate their political commitments using the rhetorical tropes of religious conversion narratives (Luis D. León, The Political Spirituality of César Chávez: Crossing Religious Borders [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014], 97). 8. Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), loc 2624; 3652. This preference for “spirituality” continues in the more recent edited collection, Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives (Facio and Lara 2014). Christopher Tirres offered an interlacing reading, a way of looking for paths of bridging the senses of the spiritual and the religious in a conference paper at the July 2014 International Latina/o Studies Conference, “Imagining Latina/o Studies: Past, Present, and Future,” in Chicago, Illinois. 9.  See discussion in J. Z. Smith’s essay, “God Save This Honourable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse” (2004). In terms of categorization by “prototype,” the idea is that when we think of a category, we tend to associate it with a member of that category. So for the category “fruit,” a person might think of “apple,” and then other members of the category “fruit” are more or less like an “apple.” In the course of the study of religion, even when an abstract set of characteristics are used to define religion, they often get drawn from “Protestant Christian” assumptions about what constitutes “religion” as opposed to other forms of social construction. Yet, even in the history of Christianity, “religion” has been a shifting moniker so when we say religion relies on a Protestant prototype, we mean a particular assumption about what is centrally religious in Protestant Christianity. Yet that prototype assumption is part of why religion is a weak category. For instance, Jason Ānanda Josephson examined how Japanese intellectuals and politicians working to redefine religion usably even though it was an imposed category. Although in alignment with certain aspects of Tomoko Masuzawa’s historical narrative of how “world religions” were invented, Josephson argues, “what Masuzawa sees as the hegemony of Euro-American universalism can also be seen as the result of a protracted negotiation that has in fact dethroned

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Christianity. By becoming merely one of other world religions, Christianity has been reduced in stature, even as it maintains its status as the prototype of the category. . . . In essence, the category of religion has been increasingly de-Christianized. But because Christian theological principles were the only thing holding the category together, this has contributed to its disintegration” (Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012], 248–49). Since we must imagine religion more capaciously, we also struggle to make sense of it; Chicanx activists deploy elements of the religious, but it is almost impossible to neatly delimit what facets of Chicanx practice are religious. See also Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10. Josephson classifies scholarly approaches to defining “religion” within two foci. One definitional approach, generally older, can be termed “theocentric” because it centralizes a Protestant-style, individually relational devotion to a “God” as the defining characteristic of religion (Josephson, The Invention of Religion, 10). 11.  I do not deny that theological beliefs and theology itself can be quite important to Chicanxs and Chicanx religiosity. However, I contend that a definition of religion that stresses the primacy of theological belief misses important facets of Chicanx religiosity. 12.  One can observe this tension in other contexts also. See, for instance, Oropeza Lorena, “Viviendo y luchando: The Life and Times of Enriqueta Vasquez,” in Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writing from El Grito del Norte, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2006), loc 253 of 3068. 13. As Lara Medina suggests when also deploying spirituality for disaffected Christian Chicanas, the issue is about finding a term that speaks to Chicanx agency as minoritized subjects, a “tradition of religious agency” that “emerge[s] from a purposeful integration of their creative inner resources and the diverse cultural influences that feed their souls and their psyches” (Medina 1998, 189). While “religion” is a challenged category, so too is “spirituality.” As Medina also observes, “spirituality” can be a tricky term to reappropriate because of its legacy within “Western thought [which] separates spirit from body, mind, and woman” (Medina 1998, 192). 14.  Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 155. 15. Following Josephson’s division of scholarly definitions of religion into two camps, the hierocentric is the more popular twentieth-century formulation; it emphasizes a problematic “sacred/profane binary,” something that many Chicanxs likewise problematize even when holding onto the “sacred” as category. Moreover, the “hierocentric” definition can be understood as asserting that “the sacred (or the transcendent) [is] the core of religion and [. . .] an irreducible dimension of religious experience.” Josephson points out, however, that “[t]he hierocentric definition is merely a displaced theocentrism” (Josephson, The Invention of Religion, 9). Attention to the sacred is but a revised form of the earlier theocentric approach, and thus redefining the “sacred” as a part of Chicanx religion necessarily entails caution.



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16.  Theresa Delgadillo, Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, Latin America Otherwise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 15/253. 17.  For instance, the work of Lee Bebout takes up the import of myth, examining how notions of myth and history are deeply interconnected, but he does this work by contextualizing myth within American studies and the study of culture rather than also grappling with related scholarship in the field of religion. Lee Bebout, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies, Critical American Studies Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 18. In essayist, playwright, and poet Cherríe Moraga’s discussion of a “Queer Aztlán,” she not only describes the inspiration she derives from movement imaginaries—and the challenges that she lays to the limits of those movement imaginaries—she also discusses sacred land, notions, and religious ideas. Though not derived directly from the movement, she describes how “[c]oming to terms with that fact [earlier stated as ‘the recognition of my lesbianism’] meant the radical re-structuring of everything I thought I held sacred” (“Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” in The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry [Boston: South End Press, 1993], 146). In other words, definitions of the “sacred” that were available to her had to be let go of and remade after she recognized herself as a lesbian and a Chicana. 19.  Varying Chicanxs recognize that they have to fight to redefine the religious, the sacred, and the spiritual for themselves. In this way, as Laura E. Pérez describes, “spiritual beliefs and practices [become] culturally complex and contested social terrains where dominant cultural understandings of gender, ‘race,’ and sexuality are reproduced or rescripted” (Pérez, Chicana Art, loc 144 of 3652). 20. Pérez, Chicana Art, loc 84–87. Pérez describes how often scholars have “effaced” the “spiritual” in Chicana art and have ignored the multifaceted ways by which varying Chicana artists have employed and made claims to alternative epistemologies rooted in a “spiritual” dimension, perspective, and/or connection (Pérez, Chicana Art, loc 65–71). 21.  Both Medina and Pérez emphasize how the Chicanas they study, especially lesbian Chicanas, redefine spirituality to be communally entangled and bodily, sexually, and materially enmeshed (Pérez, Chicana Art, loc 279 of 3652). 22.  El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán while being a “spiritual” manifesto, references how “Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops” as one example of the ways that this “spiritual” place is also deeply physical and material in meaning. I wish to thank Kristi Upson-Saia for reminding of how bodily El Plan is when I gave a talk at Occidental College on April 4, 2014. 23.  In describing the ways that the educational system has eliminated Chicanxs from the historical narrative, Enriqueta Vasquez articulated the need for a written record: “Y entendemos que nuestra historia realmente no la hemos estudiado, tal vez por que no está escrita. Precisamente porque la historia del indio nunca ha sido escrita. Al sistema educativo presente se le hizo más facil eliminarnos en total” [And we understand that our history actually has not been studied, perhaps because it is not written. Precisely because the history of the indigenous has never been written. It was made easier, for the current educational system, to eliminate us altogether] (Enriqueta

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Vasquez, “La Historia del Mestizo,” in Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writing from El Grito del Norte, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2006), loc 1105 of 3068. 24.  Edwin David Aponte, ¡Santo!: Varieties of Latino/a Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), 116. 25. Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “Beyond Broken: Affective Spaces and the Study of American Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81, no. 4 (2013): 1102. 26.  O’Neill, “Beyond Broken,” 1103–4. 27.  Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 104. 28.  Aponte, ¡Santo!, 117–18. 29.  Tat-siong Benny Liew, What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 10. 30. Ibid. 31.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993), ix. Smith further observes that there is no one way that scriptures have interacted with the peoples who treat them as such (Smith 1993, 9). 32.  Miriam Levering, “Introduction: Rethinking Scripture,” in Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 8. 33. Vincent L. Wimbush, “Introduction: TEXTureS, Gestures, Power: Orientation to Radical Excavation,” in Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 5. 34.  Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 35.  El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, 2. 36.  See Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán, chapters 2 and 4. 37.  Ibid., chapters 1 and 2. 38. See, for example, Jeanette Rodríguez-Holguín, “La Tierra: Home, Identity, and Destiny,” in From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology, ed. Orlando O. Espín and Miguel H. Díaz (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 196; Ignacío M. García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 18. 39.  El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, 3. 40.  Fernando F. Segovia, “Two Places and No Place on which to Stand: Mixture and Otherness in Hispanic American Theology,” Listening 27 (1992): 26–40. 41. See Hector Amaya, Citizenship Excess: Latino/as, Media, and the Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2013), esp. chapter 6. 42.  Patricia L. Price, Dry Place: Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 47. 43.  Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 1995), 151. This utopian bent also returns in Pérez’s analysis of spirituality, Segovia’s interest in “a world of otherness,” and in Jonathan Z. Smith’s understanding of religion as “the quest, within the bounds



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of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate ones ‘situation’ so as to have ‘space’ in which to meaningfully dwell” (J. Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 291). 44.  Daniel Cooper Alarcón, “The Aztec Palimpsest: Towards a New Understanding of Aztlán, Cultural Identity, and History,” Aztlán 19, no. 2 (1992): 52; Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring Aztlán,” Aztlán 22, no. 2 (1997): 31; Price, Dry Place, 75. Even as early as November 1969, Enriqueta Vasquez became concerned about the relationships between Chicano Aztlán and Native American land rights (see Vasquez, “La Historia del Mestizo,” loc 369 of 3068. 45.  Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram, “Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses,” Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (1990): 206. 46. Price, Dry Place, 76. 47.  Rául H. Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 226. 48.  Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “There’s No Place Like Aztlán: Embodied Aesthetics in Chicana Art,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4, no. 2 (2004): 103–140. 48.  See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 50.  See Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 76. 51.  Daniel Cooper Alarcón, “The Aztec Palimpsest,” 35. 52. Medina, Las Hermanas, 125. 53.  For more insight into the dynamism underscored in feminist and queer Chicanx critical engagements, see Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán.

Chapter Nine

Religion as the Ethico-Political Practice of Justice Ambedkar as Guide Y. T. Vinayaraj

It is indeed a radical move on the part of the Council of World Mission (CWM) to expose the ambiguous relationship between religion (specifically, Christianity) and empire in its theological pilgrimage for envisaging substantial contemporary mission strategies. As its 2010 mission statement upholds, “wresting with the manifestations of colonialism in the 21st century” marks CWM’s paradigm shifts in relation to its mission theology—from the colonial patronages to the agonized peoples of the South.1 Naming our contemporary context as empire and defining the method of mission as engaging with the powers and principalities of the world, CWM relocates itself in the radical biblical tradition of Jesus—the one who sacrificed his life for the abundant life of many by challenging the Roman imperial social imaginations of that time. Empire, as it is defined by the CWM’s mission statement, is a spirit of domination and exclusion proclaimed through powerful propaganda and religiously justified. Religion as a modern Western concept has always been embodied with its “imperio-colonial sense”—the ethos of transcendence.2 As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the postcolonial feminist thinker, argues, religion as it is “deeply implicated in the narrative of the ebb and flow of power” is impotent to resist the logic of empire unless it is decolonized in content and practice.3 By naming empire as the context of contemporary Christian mission and exposing the imperio-colonial sense of world religions, CWM invokes us to formulate a twofold radical vision of mission: first, to envisage an anti-imperial global community that particularly stands in solidarity with the marginalized and the excluded; second, to redefine religion as an ethico-political practice of justice by repudiating its imperio-colonial stance embodied in religious dogmatics and doctrines. 123

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Mark C. Taylor, the political theologian from North America, has clearly exposed the return of Christianity in the postmodern period in connection with the emergence of global capitalism.4 According to Taylor, global capitalism and its neoliberal social imaginations are legitimized by the Christian theology in the postmodern period. As such, God has become oppressive, narcissistic, and anti-human. The global capitalist agenda has become a decisive economic/cultural/political propaganda in the contemporary world community and it has assumed the form of empire that enjoys the patronage of Christian theology. The election victory of Donald Trump as the president of the United States of America testifies to this fact, and it has become a crucial vantage point for the pro-capitalist and neoliberal Christian theologians to chant their liberal liturgies and theologies. However, the illegitimate relationship between empire and church is not just a modern or postmodern phenomenon; rather, it can be traced back even in the history of the church in the Constantine and Patristics era. Whether it is the hierarchical pattern of society or the question of the social exclusion of the weaker sections, the Western logic of empire always finds its legitimacy in Christian dogmatics based on the notion of sovereign God and His charity-oriented love for the other. Giorgio Agamben exposes the imperial meaning of the patristic theology of oikoumene (economy of salvation) as it legitimizes the absolute difference between God and the world while assuming a fake unity of divine love. Mission in this theology has been interpreted as a benevolent act of the wholly other God who wants to redeem “the other” without compromising His absolute otherness. Mission without challenging the notion of the benevolent act of sovereign God becomes a charity-oriented program of the “civilized to the uncivilized,” which is foundational to the modern Christian mission. Mission in the context of empire, however, has to relocate its theological foundation in a decolonized Christianity and a de-transcendentalized divinity. Mission in the postcolonial context demands the repudiation of the “imperiocolonial sense” of Christianity and its metaphysical dogmatics that legitimizes the notion of God from “beyond” (transcendence). It is this notion of “beyond” God that justifies the colonial act of mission. In his well-read book Deconstructing Christianity, Jean-Luc Nancy demands the crucifixion of the Christian logic of the sovereign power implicated in the monotheist theology of God and the decolonization of the Euro-centric content of Christian dogmatics and doctrines.5 Gianni Vattimo, on the other hand, argues for a “weak ontology” or “the ontology of the weakening of (the Western) Being,” which supplies philosophical reasons for preferring a non-totalitarian divinity and social democracy. According to Vattimo, Western Christian theology and democracy have to be reconstituted on the basis of this “weak ontology” in order to envisage a liberal, tolerant, and democratic society that attends to the



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cry of the victims of this world.6 In the same vein of thought, Spivak offers a postcolonial notion of “de-transcendentalized transcendence”—a notion of divinity that is relocated in the immediate, the material, and the local.7 While defining empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that it is no longer a military system of oppression or just an economic propaganda; rather, it is a new form of ontology of sovereignty.8 For them, empire is a new form of sovereign power that forms the subjectivities in favor of its neo-capitalist agendas and hierarchical ordering of global communities. They expose its multidimensional operations of anarchy and hierarchy in favor of the multinational corporations and the global elites. For Hardt and Negri, empire is no longer a military system that exercises its repressive power over its subjects; rather, it is a biopower that colonizes the minds and bodies of its subjects and enables them to be the agents of the sovereign systems. Empire today appears in the forms of economic, cultural, and political agendas that constitute the structure of the global community. It is a new form of sovereignty that reconstitutes global community in terms of asymmetric social relationships. Hardt and Negri call it a sovereign power because there is no outside of this enclosed ontology. Resistance can be the legitimization of the logic of empire, and acts of terrorism are not to resist but to control empire. Even in this crucial juncture of human entrapment, however, Hardt and Negri find fecundity in religion, especially in the theological imagination of ekklesia to become the counter-imperial social imagination to reclaim the “life in common” over against the homogenous logic of the empire. However, they are convinced of the need of the decolonization of Christianity and its dogmas and doctrines as they substantiate the hierarchical ordering of social sections. In this process of our effort to deimperialize Christian vision and mission, this chapter contributes to the discussion of an indigenous effort that redefines religion as the ethico-political practice of the marginalized by critically engaging with the imperio-colonial sense of world religions. Apart from Christianity and the other world religions, this particular indigenous philosophy of religion finds fecundity in the materialist philosophies and ideologies in order to substantiate an anti-imperial social order and social existence in favor of the marginalized. This philosophy arises from the story of the Indian Dalit legend Babasaheb Ambedkar, who offered a political philosophy of religion through which he disavowed the Brahmanic imperial ethical practices of caste, which has been legitimized by orthodox Hinduism. Ambedkar is the first Indian philosopher who critically engages with the world religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity and exposed their “imperio-colonial sense” in favor of the marginalized communities in India—the Dalits. Ambedkar renounced the concept of religion and at the same time formulated a radical philosophy of Dhamma—the political

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becoming of the social.9 This chapter particularly focuses on Ambedkar’s redefinition of religion as Dhamma as it repudiates the imperial notion of divine sovereign power and colonial dogmatism of the world religions, including Christianity. This study envisages a radical redefinition of religion as an ethico-political practice of justice that negotiates the dichotomy between religion and politics, philosophy and ethics, secular and sacred, East and West, and the West and the Rest of the World. This chapter envisions that this discussion will invoke us to redraft our Christian mission in a postcolonial world where the marginalized sections of our global community expose the illegitimate nexus between Christianity and empire, theology and politics. RELIGION AS THE MORAL CONSCIENCE Ambedkar, as the political thinker of the subalterns in India in the period of colonial modernity, exposes the hegemonic epistemological foundation of the Indian sociopolitical order, which excludes the majority of the people in the account of the social practice—caste that is legitimized by the orthodox Hindu epistemology and theology. Ambedkar was convinced about the permanent inconsistency in the political knowledge of Indian casteist social order where the majority of people are permanently excluded, and their struggle to enter into the political domain constitutes democracy in India as inherently problematic. In this contested political situation, Ambedkar comes up with a radical slogan: the social precedes political.10 According to Ambedkar, it is the social content of democracy that enhances the excluded one’s struggles to reorganize the social-political order.11 It is not just the lack of the political conscience but also the lack of moral conscience that becomes important in the Indian context of caste exclusion. For Ambedkar, the moral conscience is the religious content of social organization that reorders the society in favor of justice and equality. Thus Ambedkar critically engages with the orthodox Hinduism that substantiates caste practice and seeks for alternative religious foundations in favor of justice and equality. According to Ambedkar, an Indian social order that is fundamentally built on the caste epistemology of the Vedic religiosity is to be destabilized and denied on the basis of the modern ideals of democracy, justice, and liberty.12 The moral standard of the Vedic religiosity is not at all acceptable due to its exclusivist and enslaving theology. The authoritarian Hindu social order delimits the freedom and enslaves the majority of the Indian polity. The victims of the caste system are thrown out of the sociopolitical and economic capitals of the society. They are regarded as the outcastes and the untouchables of the country. Thus the social order is to be reconstituted on the basis of equality,



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justice, and moral religiosity. Hinduism is not capable enough to provide an ethical social life due to its caste epistemology. It is here Ambedkar brings the question of religious conversion as the political strategy for freedom and social democracy. For Ambedkar, renouncing Hinduism is a political strategy of Dalits to merge with a political community and to have a political identity in the context of colonial modernity. RELIGION AS THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY OF THE MARGINALIZED Religion for Ambedkar is nothing but a political community that gives a collective identity to the marginalized people in India. The modern Indian context of nation-state necessitates a collective political identity that is rooted in a religious identity. In the nation-state politics, it is the religious collective identity that signifies the representation of plural sections of people. Analyzing this consciously, Ambedkar argues for the caste victims to be represented both in the religious establishments and in the nation-state. Thus the notion of community becomes central to Ambedkar’s political philosophy, which is closely linked with the desire for a radical religious identity. For him, Hinduism is not qualified to be a just community or a fair religion. It is a collection of rules and regulations that substantiate hierarchy of human beings and the super beings. Hinduism for Ambedkar is a worthless philosophy of life that never accepts the worth of human beings. For him, Hinduism is a fake religion that still remains in the age-old myths that substantiate the hierarchical ordering of the social order. In the same way, he was critical of Islam and Christianity due to their impotency to challenge the caste epistemology and its practices, even though they stand for egalitarianism. For Ambedkar, Buddhism has the inherent potentiality to be a moral community based on political reasoning and ethics. Buddhism, unlike Islam and Christianity, has had the history of challenging the caste epistemology theologically and politically. Ambedkar finds fecundity in the Buddhist philosophy of ethics as he engages with it critically and redefined it as Navayana (lit., “radically new”) Buddhism. Contrary to the Marxist notion of class, Ambedkar’s ideal community is to be created through the moral transformation of an individual from the caste status toward political subjectivity. Ambedkar believes that reformed Buddhism has the potential to initiate this moral transformation because of its anti-casteist epistemological heritage and the moral philosophy of political becoming through sangh (community). In the law’s place, he advocated the criterion of a new socio-cultural-political community as the power capable of producing social consciousness and

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a shared moral order. Conversion to Buddhism was a political agenda of Ambedkar, enabling him to envisage a political community, political practice, a counter symbolic space, and a political theology that challenged the casteist social order and promoted political subjectivity to the disenfranchised in the Indian context. RELIGION AS THE ETHICO-POLITICAL PRACTICE OF JUSTICE Following the Navayana Buddhist philosophy, Ambedkar defines religion as a political philosophy of Dhamma—the ethico-political practice of justice. He distinguishes between religion and Dhamma. For him, religion is personal whereas Dhamma is social. According to Ambedkar, Hinduism as a reformed Brahmanic philosophy is ritualistic and thus forms enslaving subjectivities. On the other hand, Dhamma stands for righteousness, which means right relationship with all. Dhamma necessitates sociopolitical relationship and vice versa. Society cannot do without Dhamma. Dhamma leads to liberty and justice. Dhamma consists of prajna (reason) and karuna (compassion). It is the understanding that compassion and ethics keep our social life righteous and democratic.13 Following Buddha, Ambedkar held the view that religion is concerned with revealing the beginning of things or the origin of the world, whereas Dhamma is to reconstruct the world. Dhamma is founded on morality and thus it is built on immanence, while religion is founded on transcendence. For religion, morality is an attachment, since it is linked with the notion of a “beyond” God; whereas in Dhamma, morality takes the place of God—there is no God in Dhamma. Morality in Dhamma does not need any divine sanction or legitimization from beyond. It arises out of the human relationship for liberty, freedom, and justice that is envisaged in the political philosophy of Dhamma. Morality in Dhamma is considered as sacred because it stands for the protection of the weak. Survival of the weakest is the social imperative behind morality. It is the morality or the politics of the survival of the weakest that determines the sacrality of the sociopolitical life. Sacredness is neither beyond the sociopolitical life nor does it substantiate any hierarchical social order within. Unlike religion, Dhamma is not controlled by ceremonies, rituals, and liturgies, but by the social morality that sustains the society as sacred. For Ambedkar, Dhamma is not just rhetorical, it is practical and thus internally political. It is our effort to make our society more ethical and moral that determines the divine content of the social life. God is not regarded as a legitimizing point: rather, it is the ultimate ethos of responsibility that invokes



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us always to strive for a just and moral community. The transformation of the society is not linked with any transcendental logic: rather, it is embodied in the political formation of the just relationships. It is here that Ambedkar’s political theology of (no)God finds semblance with the argument of Giorgio Agamben, the post-continental philosopher, when he says, “God is not revealed ‘in’ the world, but the world itself, as it is thus, and insofar as it is absolutely and irreparably profane, is God.”14 God as the divine potentiality is in the “being thus” of things, which is materialist in content. Catherine Keller’s dictum becomes more significant here: “If God is immaterial, God doesn’t matter.”15 Ambedkar’s political philosophy of (no) God provokes Christian theology to seek for an embodied, “enfleshed,” and “enmattered” God who is the “being thus” of all political practices of justice, freedom, and equality. CHRISTIANITY AS THE RELIGION OF TRANSCENDENCE Despite its egalitarianism, Ambedkar is skeptical about the potentiality and the usefulness of Christian theology in challenging caste structures and practices. According to Ambedkar, Christianity is purely spiritual and transcendental. Christian spirituality is unrelated to the material life and thus it is politically unproductive for the marginalized. This is evident in the life of the Dalits who converted to Christianity. The Christian-converted Dalits, in Ambedkar’s perspective, become apolitical and inactive due to the transcendent content of the Christian doctrines. Analyzing the missionized theology in India, Ambedkar tries to expose the theological inconsistency within the doctrinal discourses of the Christian missionary program: Instead of being taught that their fall was due to a wrong social and religious environment and that for their environment they must attack the environment, they were taught [that] their fall was due to their sin. Consequently, the Dalit Christians, instead of being empowered to conquer their environmental context, conferred themselves with the belief that there is no use of struggling, for the simple reason that their fall is due to the sin committed not by them but by some remote ancestors of theirs called Adam and Eve.16

According to James Massey, Ambedkar stresses here that when a Dalit Christian “was a Hindu his fall was due to his karma. When he becomes a Christian he learns that his fall is due to the sins of his ancestor. In either case, there is no escape for him.”17 In Ambedkar’s political philosophy, the transcendental framework of Christianity is being interrogated and Christian

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theology is being invoked to deconstruct its doctrinal fecundity in a postcolonial political content. THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN CONTEXT In the contemporary Indian political context, the Hindutva ideology—the political philosophy of orthodox Hinduism, which is supported by the current political governance of the country—enforces the age-old casteist and hierarchical social patterns for the sake of reinstating pseudo-nationalist heritages. The women, the poor, the Dalits, the Adivasis, the tribals, and the unorganized sections of the country face various kinds of violence and violations. The Dalits are being tortured in the name of their menial jobs, food culture, and social position as it is imposed upon them on the basis of caste phenomenology. Hindutva ideology, with its political power, assumes a new form of empire in India today. Ambedkar’s political philosophy of justice (Dhamma) become more significant today as it invokes the formation of the radical political community that stands for the weaker sections. Hindutva as a transcendent ideology legitimizes a sacred “beyond” in order to substantiate the hierarchical ordering of the society. Dhamma offers a sharp critique of this transcendental legitimacy of the sacred and seeks radical political practices of justice to restructure the social imagination in favor of the weak and vulnerable. It is ironic that the present Hindutva government offers venerations of Ambedkar effigies while consciously suppressing any kind of manifestations or eruptions of his sociological, ideological, and philosophical stance on equality and social justice. The church in India, which has a heritage of challenging the sovereign power of the state, becomes silent and mute due to its fear of the closure of its institutions and services, such as educational institutions and hospitals, that are their major income-generating programs. Furthermore, as we have discussed earlier, church in India is yet to develop a radical political theology of justice as it encounters the nuances of empire. For that matter, Ambedkar’s political philosophy of justice becomes a meaningful interlocutor to envisage a relevant postcolonial, anti-imperial, materialist, political theology in India today. Christian theology is invoked here to envisage a materialist turn, repudiating the sovereignty of the wholly other God and to take an immanent turn to become the “being thus” of the political practice of justice. Indian Christian theology, including Dalit theology, has yet to critically engage with this materialist notion of (no)God. Second, Ambedkar’s political philosophy of religion invites Christian theology to have a postcolonial turn to decolonize its Euro-centric dogmatics and doctrines. As Catherine Keller contends while delineating the potential-



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ity of the postcolonial theologies in the contemporary context of empire, “with its (Christian Theology’s) imperial success the church, one might argue, absorbed an idolatry of identity: a metaphysical Babel of unity, an identity that homogenizes the multiplicities it absorbs, that either excludes or subordinates every creaturely other, alter, subaltern.”18 The challenge that Ambedkar’s philosophy of religion poses before Christian theology is that it is to be rooted in the subaltern ethical and religious epistemologies embodied in their political practices of transformation, rather than in the Euro-centric “imperio-colonial” epistemologies and doctrines that are impotent in resisting the Vedic-transcendental epistemologies and theologies. The challenge before Christian theology in India is to reconfigure its epistemological and philosophical foundations that delimit its potential to become a subaltern political practice, which locates its epistemological habitation in Indian materialistic philosophies and heterodox religious traditions. Finally, Ambedkar’s philosophy of religion invites Christian theology to take a “polydoxical” turn. Polydoxy, as defined by Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, signifies the multiple origins of its resources such as doxa, opinion, heritage, and tradition. Unlike the orthodox tradition, “polydoxy” celebrates inter-, trans-, and even non-disciplinarity. It is to encounter, articulate, embody, and contest the multiplicity of Indian religious traditions in favor of the weak and the agonized. As Richard Kearney opines, “polydoxy” is the anatheist point where the so-called theists and atheists sit together, dream together, and do theology and politics together. Religion in this “polydoxical” turn becomes “religion without religion” and it is the moment when Christianity is provoked to be a kenotic Christianity. It is the “polydoxic” moment for the Christian church to deny the fixity of its dogmatics and the idolatry of its traditions. For the church it is an invitation to validate the multiplicity of its being, becoming and belonging in this world of many-ness. NOTES 1.  Phillip Woods, “Preface” to Mission in the Context of Empire: CWM Theology Statement (Singapore: CWM, 2010), 2. 2.  Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and The Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011), 17. 3.  Gayatri C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 382. 4. Mark C. Taylor, Confident Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30.

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 5. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabreil Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 87.  6. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism & Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 91–92.   7.  Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera, eds., Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality and Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 71.   8.  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 13.   9.  Anupama Rao, “Revisiting Interwar Thought: Stigma, Labor, and the Immanence of Caste-Class,” in The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B. R. Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalits and Subalterns, ed. Cosimo Zene (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 58. 10.  Kesava Kumar, “Political Philosophy of B. R. Ambedkar: A Critical Understanding,” International Research Journal of Social Sciences 1, no. 2 (2008): 193. 11.  B. R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, ed. Vasant Moon and Hari Narke, 20 vols. (Mumbai: Mumbai Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 2014), 472. 12.  Ibid., 57. 13.  Ibid., 221. 14. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 93. 15.  Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, eds., Polydoxy, Theology of Multiplicity and Relation (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 112. 16. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, 471–72. 17.  James Massey, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: A Study in Just Society (New Delhi: Center for Dalit/Subaltern Studies, 2003), 60. 18.  Keller and Schneider, Polydoxy, 223.

Chapter Ten

Babblers to the Rabble, Prophets to the Powerful Mission in the Context of Empire Allan Aubrey Boesak

The year 2017 marks the 500th year of the Reformation and Martin Luther’s bold act of October 31, when he published his “Disputation” which included the 95 Theses, an act that changed the history of the church and the world.1 Helmut Gollwitzer, respected German theologian and pastor of the Confessing Church in Germany, prominent in the resistance to Hitler and Nazism, wrote words we would do well to ponder these days: Whether Rome won or Wittenberg or Geneva; whether it was to be justification through good works or by faith; whether the Decrees of Dordt or the Statements of the Remonstrants were to become the official church doctrine; whether Cromwell or Charles I would be the victor—for the red, yellow, and black people of the world this was all irrelevant. This had no bearing whatsoever on their situation . . . Nothing of all this would stop the capitalistic revolution as the revolution of the white, Christian, Protestant peoples that would spread all over the world to open the era of slavery which even today (albeit not in the same form), is not yet ended.2

Gollwitzer was talking about the overwhelming reality of empire which, even though it has in the last five centuries changed hands from the Europeans and Ottomans to the British, and presently to the Americans, is still not yet ended. So it would indeed not matter whether in the various colonization processes the colonized were overrun by Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, or Anglicans. They would all be representatives of the nations of the rich North, empires that had as their goal the theft of land and people, oppression, slavery, and genocide, all with the express intent of exploitation, deprivation, and selfenrichment. Invasion and colonization went hand in hand with domination and subjugation, and the Christianization of the people was unthinkable 133

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without the demonization of their culture and beliefs, that wide open door to the eradication of their history and their physical annihilation. Inasmuch as it had to do with doctrine, it was purely incidental. Particularly crucial was the Christianizing of the process, for the purposes of self-justification and self-righteous indemnification at the heart of which was the pulsating darkness of exceptionalism. Central to it all was the Bible, the source of an all-encompassing justification of acts unspeakable in their cruelty, and the sanctifier of bigotry, hatred, and greed so deep it could only exist and endure through the most obstinate denial. It became the preserver of the vilest forms of pseudo-innocence, with the deadliest consequences. It is important to keep in mind that “not yet ended” means not only that enslavement is continuing in modernized forms today,3 in the enslavement of neoliberal, capitalist financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, holding poorer countries to ransom, for example; but also that the propagators of a new slave religion, a new Christian fundamentalism with its devastating consequences for the peoples of the Global South, is no longer the sole province of the “white, Christian peoples.” Gollwitzer’s “white, Christian Protestant peoples” have found for themselves black and Latinx neoliberal capitalist partners, the new prosperity gospellers who cross the borders of our lands in their private jets and the boundaries of our existence in their supreme imperial confidence to bring our people a poisoned gospel of Christian, capitalist, neocolonialist, consumerist enslavement.4 They are the face of the fundamentalist “third Reformation,” the lavishly paid black high priests and priestesses of the empire. In our communities, they are the religious frontrunners and shock troops of empire’s relentless reach. Within this context, the questions “Which God?,” “Which Bible?,” “Which Jesus?” should be uppermost in our minds. SCANDALOUS INTERPRETATIONS Vincent Harding articulated the experience of captured Africans subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage during the slave trade and raised urgent questions: We first met this Christ on slave ships. We heard his name sung in praise while we died in our thousands, chained in stinking holds beneath the decks, locked in with terror and disease and sad memories of our families and homes. When we leaped from the decks to be seized by sharks we saw his name carved in the ship’s solid sides. When our women were raped in the cabins, they must have noted the great and holy books on the shelves. Our introduction to this Christ was not propitious and the horrors continued on America’s soil.5



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In South Africa, our introduction to this imperial, white Christ was facilitated by the representatives of first the Dutch Empire and then the British. Throughout the centuries of colonization and slavery, and the five decades of apartheid, the toxic legacy of the colonization of scripture, as perfect instrument of domination and subjugation used by Christianized empire, continued to endure. And so we hear Rev. Dr. Koot Vorster, leading figure in the white Dutch Reformed Church, as vigorous a proponent of the theology of apartheid as he was a staunch defender of apartheid as policy of both church and state in South Africa, speaking in 1970: Our only guide is the Bible. Our policy and outlook on life are based on the Bible. We firmly believe the way we interpret it is right. We will not budge one inch from our interpretation [in order] to satisfy anyone in South Africa or abroad. . . . We are right and will continue to follow the way the Bible teaches.6

It is this scandalous abuse of the scriptures (no longer new by the time the apostles of apartheid employed it) that led to the serious questioning of the Bible by non-Western, colonized Christians as the instrument of imperialist, colonialist oppression, so aptly called a project of “God, gold, and glory” by African scholars.7 My issue with these friends and colleagues has never been about the use of the Bible by racist, colonialist structures and the subjugation of the Bible to these racist, colonialist ideologies. That could never be disputed, and I remain grateful for the way in which they have kept these critical issues front and center. Neither do I want to take issue here with those who have lost any hope that the Bible could ever be rescued from the hands of its powerful abusers. I do need to say, however, that, precisely because the Bible remains so crucial a source of life for oppressed communities and for reflection in black liberation theology, I am not at all prepared to give up the Bible as a source of life and a powerful resource for empowerment, inspiration, and witness in that struggle against ruthless, powerful, and conscienceless forces. Those forces clearly understand the place of scripture in the life of oppressed Christian communities very well, perhaps better than some who seek to contest their power in these same communities. My argument is fourfold: First, that the central, and most enduring, message of the Bible stands in opposition to and in rejection of both a manipulation of the message of the Bible and of the God of the Bible. Second, that rather than treat the Bible as a wholly compromised sacred text, irredeemably contaminated by Western imperialist readings, we should approach the Bible as sacred scriptures appropriated by imperialist powers for the sake of domination, the subjugation of peoples, justification of the theft and exploitation of their resources, and for the purposes of ideological control.

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Third, for those who hold that the central and enduring message of the Bible is liberation, freedom, justice, dignity, peace, and inclusivity, the Bible is nonetheless “a site of struggle” (not just about the Bible but within the Bible itself) between two voices, two traditions, two understandings of specific contexts within the biblical stories, and two alternative futures for the people of God. This means that we should also add the question “How do you read?” as critical in our approach to the scriptures and to the readings that seek to make the Bible submissive to empire. The fourth element of my argument builds on the distinction between “Great tradition”—which seeks legitimacy for the dominant forces in ancient Israelite society, and exercised by the wealthy, powerful and privileged—and “Little tradition,” which calls upon the liberation energy of the exodus and confesses the God of liberation, freedom, and justice, who sides with the powerless, the wronged, the poor, the meek, and the exploited.8 This is the tradition rooted in the acts of prophetic defiance by the midwives in Exodus 1 and by Miriam on the riverbank, the seashore, and in the wilderness, and embraced by the eighth-century prophets of social justice. The “Little tradition” attends to ‘am ha’aretz, the little, voiceless and powerless people in Israel.9 This is the tradition of resistance against empire that we find in the gospels with Jesus of Nazareth, in Paul, and in the early Christian church before the Constantinian captivity of the Christian church and faith. Fourth, therefore, I hold that oppressed people, from the early Christian communities to the Africans in slavery to oppressed communities in recent colonial and neocolonialist times, have always, at some deep level, understood the tension between “Great tradition” and “Little tradition.” Evidence suggests strongly that oppressed communities, in reading the Bible, have approached the Bible with a conscious sensitivity to this internal biblical struggle, from the famous story of Howard Thurman’s grandmother and her reluctance to let him read to her from the apostle Paul because of the misuse of his writings to justify slavery, to my own mother’s theological insights in our nightly prayers at the family table. Despite the decades-long teachings of white missionaries, this woman, who did not get beyond primary school education, somehow held fast to her firm belief that the most enduring and trustworthy understanding of God was of a God who is the “father of the fatherless, the protector of the widow and orphan, and the defender of the defenseless.” She learned this from the Bible, clung to it throughout her life and the onslaughts of apartheid during her lifetime, and taught it to her children. This was, I suppose one could say, my earliest and most foundational introduction to a theology of liberation. U.S. historian Eugene Genovese’s observation, drawn from his study of the religion of the African slaves in America, makes this just as clear:



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For while much went into the making of the heroic black struggle for survival under extreme adversity, nothing loomed so large as the religious faith of the slaves. The very religion that their masters sought to impose in the interests of social control carried an extraordinarily powerful message of liberation for this world as well as the next.10

Genovese expresses his surprise at this finding, but it was inescapable. “The empirical investigations disturbed a historian with the biases of an atheist and a historical materialist who had always assumed, however mindlessly, that religion should be understood as no more than a corrosive ideology at the service of the ruling classes.”11 That conclusion is correct, not because of the slave masters’ generosity of spirit, but precisely because of the irresistible, inalienable message of liberation and justice permeating the biblical story, and what I call below the intuitive theological ingenuity of the slaves who had heard in that message, rather than in the ideologized preaching of the slave masters, the “Word of God.” BIBLE AS SITE OF STRUGGLE The scriptures, as the Reformed tradition has always understood, interpret themselves. I take that to mean that the scriptures resist interpretations, meanings, and applications that distort the heart of the biblical message. This self-interpretation finds its most enduring forms in the resistance to empire, in the liberation from slavery, in the resistance against kings and ruling elites, and in the preaching, teaching, and actions of the prophets—from Elijah to Isaiah and Jeremiah, to Amos, John the Baptist, and Jesus of Nazareth; in the midwives Siphrah and Puah, Miriam, Hannah, Huldah, Noadiah, in Mary in the Magnificat and Martha in her confession. Oppressed people have understood and taken seriously the core of the biblical message in their encounter with the Bible, in their encounter with oppressive interpretations, in their encounter with God in their situations of oppression, and in their hope for freedom. Liberation theology has named this “a hermeneutic of suspicion.” It is not just suspicion of the Bible in its complexity but an even stronger suspicion of the way the Bible has been and is being interpreted and presented by those who think they own the scriptures and who appropriate God for the side of oppression, power, and dominion. It is a suspicion that is informed by something far more sophisticated. Oppressed people had, and exercised, an intuitive, critical, theological ingenuity. They intuited that what they heard from slave masters, white missionaries, and the spokespersons of the empire was wrong, not just because it did not respond to their reality and their needs in situations of unspeakable suffering, but because

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they could not square it with what they, from the beginning, understood to be the heart of the biblical message. They therefore could not hear the Exodus story as a story of and for the white, oppressive, slave-holding classes, parading as the “chosen” of God with a divine manifest destiny to rule in a “Promised Land” that stank of blood and oppression. They knew only too well who in that situation was the Pharaoh and who were the slaves.12 Similarly, they looked at the crucified Jesus and understood, intuitively, the relationship between the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of oppressed people—as James Cone has brilliantly pointed out, between the cross and the lynching tree—despite the claims laid upon him by the slave master’s religion.13 And what they could not articulate in theological argument, they put into song.14 In the words of that thoughtful African American scholar Dwight Hopkins, for the arduous journey toward freedom, “on the rough side of the mountain,” they made “shoes that fit their feet.”15 Simply put, they understood intuitively that one could not say “God” and abide with oppression, and one could not say “Jesus” and abide with injustice. The scriptures had interpreted themselves to them and they knew that what responded most truthfully to faith was fundamentally different from what was presented to them as a religion that pampered the wickedness of the powerful. That interaction between the oppressed and the Bible, between hearing and believing, between the self-interpretation of Scripture, in its resistance against manipulation and appropriation, and the understanding of the oppressed in faithful response to both God and their own situation of oppression, I call not merely hermeneutical suspicion, but an intuitive, critical, subversive theological ingenuity. It is this critical ingenuity that opened up an understanding of scripture and of the distinction between ideologized religiosity and faith by the African slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and few articulated it so well: I love the religion of our blessed Savior . . . which comes from above, in the wisdom of God which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle . . . without partiality and without hypocrisy . . . which makes it the duty of its disciples to visit the fatherless and the widow in their affliction. I love that religion. . . . It is because I love this religion that I hate the slave-holding, the woman-whipping, the minddarkening, the soul-destroying religion that exists in America . . . loving the one I must hate the other; holding to one I must reject the other.16

The literary eloquence and soaring rhetorical brilliance aside, one would be hard-pressed to find a statement more steeped in theological wisdom and scriptural discernment than these words by a non-theologian. And whether it is the now legendary wisdom of Howard Thurman’s grandmother in her intuitive hermeneutical discernment; the daily prayers of my own mother



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Sarah to the God she, against the grain of white, missionary indoctrination, worshipped as a God of justice; or the deep insights of Frederick Douglass; they are all drawing from the deep well of the biblical prophetic tradition, which they understood without much formal book learning, and against all odds and the wishes and laws of the ruling classes, much as the crowds of poor, oppressed, colonized peasants in first-century, occupied Palestine heard, understood, and believed Jesus. They knew, intuitively, but with that great certainty brought on by faith and not by sight, that the certitude of the oppressor, built on power, privilege, status, and might, but not on wisdom or faith, was the antithesis of what they heard the Bible say to them. South Africa’s Steve Biko has made an observation that is both profoundly true and profoundly pertinent, and it calls for closer attention to the workings of empire. It turns the spotlight on empire and its collaborators within the oppressed communities, and raises the question of our complacent embeddedness in empire, our desires for the rewards of empire, our surrendering to the temptations of empire, and our complicity in empire. Thus, if Christianity in its introduction was corrupted by the inclusion of aspects which made it the ideal religion for the colonization of people, nowadays in its interpretation it is the ideal religion for the maintenance of the subjugation of the same people.17

I understand Biko to say at least three things: First, it is true that Christianity, as “corrupted” and appropriated by the empire and brought to us as a colonizing religion weaponized for our oppression, was and is indeed the ideal religion for the subjugation and domination of people. Biko lays the blame squarely at the door of Western, imperialist Christianity and its white missionaries. Second, the problem in the struggle against empire is not the Bible. “No people can fight a struggle without faith,” Biko says elsewhere.18 “Nowadays,” he states, it is the interpretation of the Bible that continues to make Christianity an instrument of the subjugation of our people. That means, third, that the problem is no longer just the erstwhile and contemporary white missionary or the twenty-first-century imperial spokespersons in their use of global media, for instance—the problem is the church in the communities of the oppressed, who should by now know better. Our modernday Western Christian fundamentalism, with its vicious exclusivism, predatory capitalist consumerism, sacralized bigotry, homophobia, and patriarchalism, is trumpeted to people of the Global South on forty-three television channels in South Africa alone, not just by whites but also by Africans and African Americans as the favored faces of imperial religion in the Global South. And in too many cases, for power and financial success, we are not forced, coerced, or blackmailed into this; but rather, we are “conniving,” as Biko rightly says.19

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We can no longer simply regard, and sometimes reject the Bible as a “Western book,” now that we know this, and now that we can know and read, and in reading reclaim the Bible, as a collection of articles edited by New Testament scholar Richard A. Horsley is titled, as “a history of faithful resistance to Empire.”20 As a collection of books the Bible was written and compiled under continuous imperial rule. Those books reflect the struggle against empire and empire’s appropriation of scripture for its own ends.21 I have come to believe that it is not so much the Bible that is holding us captive and subservient. It is us holding the Bible captive to the evil impulses of the empire, to our own paucity of prophetic courage, and to our own abundance of self-pampering self-interest. It is now much better understood that “issues of imperial rule and response to it run deep and wide through most books of the Bible.”22 Biblical texts are not unanimously or unambiguously anti-imperial or pro-imperial. The Bible has been used to justify both imperialism and to motivate struggles against imperial domination. Reading the Bible as a history of faithful struggle against empire will include our understanding of that struggle within the texts themselves, exposing the struggle between power and powerlessness, privilege and exclusion, centering and marginalization, domination, oppression, and resistance. The question, I suggest, in agreement with Biko, is not only the Bible; it is also very much us. The challenge is to approach the Bible as sacred scripture with its internal and external, its historical and contemporary struggles against appropriation and misuse by the powerful. Why can’t we, with the Bible, expose the mendacity of empire by standing upon the truth of the prophetic message of the Bible? An empire-critical reading of the scriptures intentionally tries to recapture the enduring message of the Bible, understanding the Bible as a site of struggle for imperialist claims and anti-imperialist resistance, and honoring the intuitive theological ingenuity of oppressed communities in their reading of the Bible. It is a reading in resistance to biblical interpretations subject to the mind-set of the oppressor, the powerful and the privileged. It is a stream of resistance that originates within the biblical story itself. It is a reading critical of, and in resistance to, empire. RESISTANCE TO POWER The imperial world in which the church serves its mission today is in great and terrible upheaval. It is not the world created by God. It is a world of the tohu wa bohu, the chaos before the Spirit of God made her presence felt; a world so flooded by violence that even the birds cannot find a place to rest



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their feet (Gen. 8). It is a world created by tyrants and warmongers, plunderers and profiteers, homophobes and misogynists, traffickers of women and children, enslavers, and the stealers of human souls. It is a world where might is right, where mendacity is hailed as cleverness, incivility as boldness, loudmouthed arrogance as forceful leadership, and the politics of deceit and fear as the path to power. In a world such as this, in times such as this, as biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us” and then to work towards dismantling that dominant culture.23 In other words, to join God in God’s work of reconciling that world unto Godself in Jesus Christ, and by embracing God’s call to us, to become ambassadors of reconciliation—reconciliation that is real, radical, and revolutionary, and dedicated to the fundamental transformation of that world into a world of radical justice, radical inclusivity, radical equality—in other words, a world of peace, love, and joy.24 I have previously worked with the concept of empire,25 and I have come to the conclusion that our world of imperial domination is a calculated coalescing of global forces pooling their economic, political, military, and cultural resources together in unprecedented and frightening ways.26 They are, as the Bible describes them, powers and principalities, representing crushing realities of domination, oppression, and control. They are murderous, but not by accident—euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” “friendly fire,” or “enhanced interrogation” are the arrogantly transparent veils with which they seek to mask their calculated homicidal, ecocidal, and cosmocidal intent. For this reason, we call these powers “lordless,” for that is precisely what they create and maintain, and they demand absolute submission. These lordless powers are not the Lord Jesus Christ. They set themselves up in the place of God, and therein lies the idolatry the prophetic church has identified. We should remember that the empire we face is created by humankind—it is not divinely sanctioned, God given, or historically determined; it is not irreversible, unchangeable, or unchallengeable, as it is claimed. Its claims of benevolence mask the persistent violence inherent in that imperial reach and the destruction it wreaks upon whole communities for the sake of profits for the few. There is nothing God-like about it. We are called instead to discern the idolatrous, blasphemous nature of empire. It is an “all-encompassing reality”: it lays claim upon every facet of life. It serves, protects, and relentlessly defends the interests of the powerful: corporations, nations, national elites, privileged groups—the beneficiaries of empire, to the detriment of those who are its perpetual prey. The imperial arrogance we are speaking of is not simply a misguided attitude, stumbled

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upon by some inexplicable turn of history. It is a deliberate, continuous act of violent destruction. Empire manifests itself everywhere, presents itself as the right, necessary, and natural way to think and exist. To think, exist, and act differently would be unnatural, an aberration. So in the logic of empire, which captures and colonizes our logic and our imagination, it is justice, freedom, and dignity that become the ultimate myths, the unattainable reach, the unsustainable and foolish hope, so easily crushed by the ruthlessness of imperial Realpolitik. Empires cannot survive without myths: the myth of exceptionalism; the myth of benevolent domination, of mutual beneficiation as long as the hierarchical structures—racial, social, gender, economic—remain intact, and the myth of redemptive violence, absolutely necessary for social and political control. Closely related to that is the myth of invincibility and irreversibility—Margaret Thatcher’s famous “There Is No Alternative!” comes to mind, which by itself produces the myth of the futility of resistance. Fundamental to all these are the myths of religious sanction without which none of the above is possible to sustain because they provide moral justification and ideological control. So central was this role in the Roman Empire that John Dominic Crossan deliberately speaks not of “emperor worship” but of “Roman imperial theology,” because it was the “ideological glue that held Roman civilization together.”27 WORLD SHAKEN BY CONVULSIONS Unlike the God of liberation, the empire cannot hear the cry of the oppressed; the empire refuses to see the destruction that its own rapaciousness and violence are causing, and it cannot respond with compassion and the doing of justice. The same Helmut Gollwitzer mentioned earlier, speaking of his times in Nazi Germany, called the world one “shaken by deadly convulsions.”28 The world of imperial domination in which we live and are called to witness as the church of Jesus Christ today is equally a world shaken by deadly convulsions. The combined wealth of the world’s richest 1 percent has overtaken that of the other 99 percent in 2016. More than half of the wealth in the world is in the hands of just sixty-two individuals, more than is owned by the entire 3.5 billion of the world’s population. That is what Oxfam said in 2016. That is now old news. In January 2017, Oxfam reported that eight white men own as much wealth as half the world’s population.29 One in nine people do not have enough to eat and more than 1 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. The so-called economic recovery of the last few years was in essence only a recovery for the rich: The richest 1 percent have seen their share of the global wealth increase



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from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014, and that share has climbed to more than 50 percent in 2016. This is a world shaken by deadly convulsions. In the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, the United States and the world witnessed a spectacle many were convinced they would never see. Now, all over the world, misogynists and homophobes of every stripe, creed, and color, as well as white supremacists and unashamed racists, from New Nazis in Europe to revived white apartheid defenders in South Africa and emboldened creators of apartheid in the State of Israel, consider themselves vindicated. Predatory capitalists, oil hungry desecrators of sacred lands and sacred places, worshippers of money and destroyers of the Earth, have rejuvenated joy. Warmongers and the makers of drones, cluster bombs, barrel bombs, land mines, and all kinds of deadly chemical weapons rejoice in the temples of profiteering as they see their fortunes and stocks rise even higher.30 In a perverse reversion of Isaiah’s vision, they have waited upon their lord, their strength is renewed, and they are ready to mount up with wings like eagles, to run and not grow weary, to walk and not faint. This is a world shaken by deadly convulsions. I am not even speaking of the death toll of hundreds of thousands in the senseless, endless wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan; of the millions of refugees from North Africa, Syria, and other war-torn and economically devastated places. Neither am I speaking of the more than 10,000 refugee children who have gone missing on the borders of European countries or even inside those countries where hostile systems have exacerbated their refugee situation, buried their plight under mountains of red tape, and drowned their calls for compassion in the battle cries of a renewed, racist, Christian nationalism. Ours is a world shaken by deadly convulsions, and the people of the rich North, who might not feel those convulsions as yet, but who are the most direct beneficiaries of these upheavals, must not remain unaware of the biblical truth: you shall reap what you sow. HOLY RAGE Mission in a time of empire means a clear prophetic witness against the forces of empire and the havoc it is wreaking upon the Earth and God’s people across the globe. During the 1986–1989 state of emergency in South Africa, I quoted Danish pastor and anti-Nazi resister Kaj Munk, who, in the darkest hour of his day, understood exactly what the prophetic church needed: What is therefore our task today? Shall I answer: “Faith, hope, and love?” That sounds beautiful. But I would say courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we

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Christians lack is not psychology or literature . . . we lack a holy rage—the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity.31

What I wrote then for South Africa is, I think, as applicable to our imperial reality and the church’s mission today. What we need is this holy rage: the ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth, a holy anger about the things that are wrong in this world. To rage at the blasphemous outrage when a U.S. president places his hand on the Bible to claim authority for whatever he deems necessary for the preservation of American exceptionalism, supremacism, and domination. To rage at the sight of Barack Obama’s hand on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible while commander in chief of the country that, in King’s own words, “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” To rage when Donald Trump, his Bible still warm from the imprint of his hand, orders (on the same day) an attack against defenseless Yemen, leaving at least twenty-five civilians dead, nine of them children, the oldest twelve years, the youngest three months old.32 Mission today must mean a holy rage against this, and all, injustice. It means knowing the names of the innocents we obliterate from 10,000 miles away, in acts of terror in a war against terror we continue to create. We need a holy rage every time a South African politician, from Thabo Mbeki to Cyril Ramaphosa to Jacob Zuma, uses the Bible to justify their corrupt regime, their abuse of power, and their abuse of and disdain for the people’s faith, as my friend and compatriot Gerald West shows in his brilliant, recent study, The Stolen Bible.33 Our mission is to have the courage to make that crucial distinction we have learned from Frederick Douglass, between the religion of the empire and the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. And like him, we must be willing to make the choice: we cannot serve God and Mammon, we cannot worship at the altar of justice and peace and at the altar of empire; we cannot preach Jesus and practice baptized bigotry. Loving the one we must hate the other; embracing the one we must reject the other. Bringing that clarity to our preaching and teaching, our reflection and our action, is our mission. That means that every time the Bible is appropriated by the empire and its minions for the justification of its abuse of power, we must raise the questions, and we must raise them emphatically, persistently, and fearlessly: Whose Bible? Whose God? Whose Jesus? This means we must allow the prophetic biblical stories, as suppressed and dispossessed as they might be, those “powerless voices of the Bible,” as Dwight Hopkins calls them, to shout from the roof tops. Certainly that will have consequences. What will the consequences be for our liberation theologies, for instance, and for our preaching and theological reflection, if we let the exodus story begin and



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end where it should—namely, with the women, the midwives, and Miriam, instead of retelling the patriarchal, revisionist story with Moses as its center? What if we acknowledge that the exodus story is the story, not of Moses and the burning bush, but of Siphrah and Puah and the birthing stool; of Miriam on the riverbank and the seashore? What if we recognized that the prophetic tradition in which we claim to stand has its roots in the faith of the women, rather than the men of ancient Israel? What if we read Miriam’s standing up to Moses in the wilderness not as sibling rivalry, an underling’s jealousy, or feminine impudence, but as prophetic truth spoken to power in light of Moses’s worsening dictatorial rule and Moses’s perverse concept of God, which we, in our uncritical embrace of patriarchal manipulation of the exodus story, have made our own? What if we understood, and took seriously the fact that in that famous “missionary text” from Acts 17, Paul (speaking before the Areopagus) is not so much in debate with the elite philosophers of Athens but is directly engaging the people scattered around the marketplace: the poor and the destitute, the rootless and the homeless, the jobless and the slaves, those who had no voice and were of no account? The insults flung at him by the philosophers were not just aimed at him—“What is this spermalogos, this babbler, talking about?” They also meant that his words, seen as “rubbish,” are picked by a bird from between the cobblestones of the agora. Moreover, these words, South African New Testament scholar Andries van Aarde argues, were also derogative terms aimed at those persons looked down upon as “rubbish” by the powerful and privileged: “the rabble,” the credulous, ignorant, and easily manipulated.34 That would mean that Paul’s message on that day—that we are all (equally) children of God, made “of one flesh”—may have been rubbish to the representatives of the empire, but for the despised rabble listening to him, it was in fact a message of radical equality and radical freedom. Keeping in mind that in New Testament language, the resurrection of Jesus was God’s apanastasia, God’s revolt, God’s insurrection against injustice, oppression, violence, and domination, and against all the ways of empire. What if we understood that these people of no account now listening to him were not worthless, as the empire claimed, but counted worthy by God to join God in God’s revolution against the powers and principalities, which meant against the empire, all its claims, and might, and power? That Paul, rejected by the empire as “rubbish,” an irritating “babbler,” preaching the rubbish of the cross and the good news of Jesus, was in fact a prophet to the powerful? Mission today is prophetic resistance to empire, to challenge empire within the framework of the determination to up-end and destroy the ways of empire, and commit to transform our societies and the world. In the context of empire, our mission is to be babblers to the rabble, and prophets to the powerful.

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NOTES 1.  Whether Martin Luther in fact “nailed” the 95 theses “to the door” of Wittenberg church seems to be open to dispute. What is not in doubt is the enormous impact the theses have had on the history of the church and the world since. 2. Helmut Gollwitzer, Die Kapitalistische Revolution (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1974), 45. 3. Human trafficking and child labor are particularly vicious forms of the consequences of globalism, endless war, and the free reign of neoliberal capitalism. A new example of modern-day slavery is the African migrants “traded in Libya’s slave markets.” The head of the International Organisation for Migration reported that “migrants are being sold in the market as a commodity. Selling human beings [at between $200 and $500 per person] is becoming a trend among smugglers as the smuggling networks in Libya are becoming stronger and stronger.” See Al Jazeera’s report, “African Migrants Traded in Libya’s ‘Slave Markets,’” accessed April 17, 2017, http:// readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/42986-african-migrants-traded. This also means the continued enslavement caused by obsessive consumerism, the devastation of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” the ravages of “structural adjustment,” and the general predatory polices of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the working of the financial institutions controlled by the rich North. 4.  See also Paula L. McGee, Brand® New Theology: The Walmartization of T. D. Jakes and the New Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017); Jonathan Walton, Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Elna Boesak, “Channeling Justice? A Feminist Exploration of North American Televangelism on the South African Constitutional Democracy,” (PhD thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2016). 5.  Vincent Harding, “Black Power and the American Christ,” in The Black Power Revolt, ed. Floyd Barbour (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 86. 6.  Cited in Charles Villa-Vicencio, “An All-Pervading Heresy,” in Apartheid Is a Heresy, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and John W. De Gruchy (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), 59. 7. See Ali Mazrui, Cultural Forces in World Politics (London: James Curry, 1990), 1, 14; Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Biblical Interpretation (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2008), 11; Itumeleng Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989). 8.  See Robert Redfield, The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Andries van Aarde, “Jesus and the Son of Man—a Shift from the ‘Little Tradition’ to the ‘Great Tradition,’” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses (2004): 423–38. I do not, however, agree with van Aarde that the early Christian Church, in claiming honorific titles for Jesus (e.g., Lord, Son of God, Prince of Peace) was simply “giving him the position of founder of the cult” and in doing so “the ‘little tradition’ was reconceptualized in terms of the ‘great tradition’” (2004, 429). I agree with scholars such as Crossan and Horsley that these titles were instead signs of resistance against imperial power and the imperial religion and especially aimed against the emperor who was at the very center of imperial worship



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(see John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire [San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2007], 59–71.  9. Cf. Allan A. Boesak, “The Riverbank, the Seashore and the Wilderness: Miriam, Liberation, and Prophetic Witness against Empire,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies 73, no. 4 (2017): a4547. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v73i4.4547. 10. Eugene D. Genovese, “Marxism, Christianity and Bias in the Study of Southern Slave Society,” in Religious Advocacy and American History, ed. Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 88–89; see also Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974). 11.  Genovese, “Marxism, Christianity and Bias,” 88. 12.  See Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998). 13.  See James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015). 14.  See James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992). 15. For Hopkins there was never any doubt that the religion of the Africans in America was a religion of freedom; they “lived a faith of freedom” (Dwight N. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993], 1). “Enslaved African Americans creatively forged their own understanding of God, Jesus Christ, and the purpose of humanity. Through scriptural insights, theological imagination, and direct contact with God, black bondsmen and bondswomen combined faith instincts from their African traditional religions with the justice message of the Christian gospel and planted the seeds for a black theology expressed through politics and culture” (Hopkins, Shoes That Fit, 13). Hopkins speaks of the “interpretive cunning of the poor,” people who “developed [their] theological critique from the Bible’s powerless voices” (Hopkins, Shoes That Fit, 14). 16. Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” Reception Speech, Finsbury Chapel, Moorefields, England, May 12, 1846. 17.  Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996), 56; emphasis in original. 18.  Ibid., 60. In this context, Biko was speaking of the Christian faith, but it is obviously true of people of other faiths, as they perceive their faith to be an inspiration for struggles for justice and freedom. See, for example, the statement of Ayatollah Khomeini: “Islam is the religion of militant people who are committed to faith and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism” (Khomeini 1981, 28, cited in Richard A. Horsley, Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit. [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003], 60. 19. Biko, I Write What I Like, 58. 20.  See Richard A. Horsley, ed., In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as History of Faithful Resistance to Empire (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008). 21.  See Horsley, In the Shadow of Empire; John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2007).

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22. Horsley, Religion and Empire, 7. 23.  Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001), 3. 24.  See Allan A. Boesak and Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012). 25.  See Allan A. Boesak, “Theological Reflections on Empire,” in Globalisation: The Politics of Empire, Justice, and the Life of the Earth, ed. Allan Boesak and Len Hansen (Stellenbosch: Sun Media), 59–72. 26.  See Allan A. Boesak, Dare We Speak of Hope? Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), 55–69. 27. John Dominic Crossan, “Roman Imperial Theology,” in In the Shadow of Empire, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 59. 28.  Helmut Gollwitzer, The Way to Life: Sermons in a Time of World Crisis, trans. David Cairns (Edinburgh: T&T Clarke, 1980), xi. 29. See Oxfam report for January 2016 figures: https://www.oxfam.org/62 -people-own-same-half-the-world (accessed January 22, 2016); for the latest statistics see http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16 (accessed January 17, 2017). 30.  The U.S. Department of Defense asked for $2 billion over five years to buy 4,000 Tomahawk for the U.S. Navy in its fiscal budget in February 2017. After Trump’s decision to bomb Syria, the stocks of arms manufacturing firms such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman rose sharply. With members of Congress insisting that it was critical to invest in more missile technology this year, “it is no surprise that defense stocks are among the top performers on Wall Street . . . for all of this year.” See Paul R. La Monica, CNN, https://readersupportednews .org/news-section2/318-66/42918-tomahawk-maker-raytheon’s-stock-rises-after-us -launches-missiles-against-syria (accessed April 11, 2017). 31.  Allan A. Boesak, Comfort and Protest: Reflections on the Apocalypse of John of Patmos (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1987), 54. 32.  Villagers reported the victims as three-month-old Asma Fahad Ali al Ameri, Aisha Mohammed Abdallah al Ameri, four; Halima Hussein al Aifa al Emeri, Hussein Mohammend Abdallah Mabkoudt al Ameri, both five; Mursil Abedraboh Masad al Ameri, six; Khajija Abdallah Mabkout al Ameri, seven; Nawar Anwar al Awlaqi, eight; Ahmed Abdelilah Ahmed al Dahab, eleven; Nasser Abdallah Ahmed al Dahab, twelve. 33. Gerald O. West, The Stolen Bible: From Imperialist Tool to African Icon (Leiden: Brill, and Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2017), 512–35. 34.  See Andries van Aarde, “Reading the Areopagus Speech in Acts 17 from the Perspective of Sacral Manumission of Slaves in Ancient Greece,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 47, no, 1 (2016): 177–85.

Chapter Eleven

(Global) Climate Crisis and (Detroit) Water Struggle “Re-Schooling” Christianity through Indigenous Challenge James W. Perkinson Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matt. 10:16).

The projector juxtaposes two images of Jesus from the early days of church struggle to gain social traction in the Roman Empire. The first—perhaps the earliest image we have of the central protagonist of the Christian movement—shows a shepherd boy with a sheep draped around his shoulders, in monochrome carving from the exurban catacombs of Rome. The second is the Pantokrator of Byzantine fame, Jesus as regal emperor, staring “divine surveillance” down from the apse, shimmering in gold flake and mosaic opulence.1 We who view the images are participants in a new program of the Council for World Mission, launching the first of a series of global gatherings to “discern and radically engage” (DARE) the relationship of world Christianity to contemporary questions of violence and injustice. As one track of a four-track consultation, our group is huddled in air-conditioned comfort, in a Bangkok hotel conference room, under the rubric “Religion, Power, and Empire.” Outside the hotel, heat drenches the street in sweat; Thai businessas-usual continues its ever-polite transactions; an entire globe continues its lockstep march toward climate apocalypse and social Armageddon. It remains an open question whether such a gathering is better understood as part of these latter problems rather than contributing to solutions. And such shall remain an open question in DARE gatherings to come. I was struck with the juxtaposition of images. The first I used to think naïve and “Sunday school-ish”—a shepherd/sheep statue suitable to children, but scarcely potent for adult reflection. But now it hits me from a new angle, central to the kind of reimagining of Christianity I am lately concerned to 149

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try to articulate and live. The setting is urban and outlaw, a carving from a literal “underground,” the cemetery site of ritual celebration of a religion rendered illegal because of Roman imperial concerns to repress critique or living otherwise. But the image is feral and wild. The picture is composite: a human-animal hybrid, a “construct” of what today we would call endosymbiosis—two relatively autonomous life forms in reciprocal exchange, beneficial to the survival of each.2 This is a figure of pastoral nomad origins signifying a deep history of rebellion against empire, under its seemingly tame appearance. Or so I wish to read it. The biblical tradition is in fact a literature arising from such rebellion. It memorializes—in traces and fragments—the earliest political resistance movement our species ever created, once our experimentation with agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago, went heavy-handed and oppressive.3 The animal husbandry workers of the agricultural enterprise could (and did) take their herd animals away from the city centers and not come back, when the urban elites became rapacious (as was almost inevitable, given the unfettered drive of urban “civilization” to accumulate surplus).4 Pastoral nomadism began as lived resistance to enslavement, in most places on the planet, a return to a more “indigenous” relationship with land and ecology.5 In the biblical narrative as we have it, Abraham “goes feral” from Haran as the first act of the tradition, exiting urban domination and living independently by virtue of his herds of grazers (Gen. 12:1, 4).6 Later on, Moses will exit Egypt, on the run from the authorities; hook up with an African clan of pastoralists in the Sinai sands; relearn his humanity under their tutelage; and learn the ecology under tutelage of his animals. Only after forty years of such “de-programming” and “re-schooling” will he finally be ready, at age eighty, to return and lead the Hebrew slaves on a walkout from empire that will only be possible because they can survive autonomously in symbiotic reciprocity with an undomesticated ecology.7 It is a symbiosis, in the case of Sinai, mediated by goats, camels, and sheep. The original identity of the people of YHWH is outlaw and illegible8 to the state (indeed, nomad Jesus with his herds would have been undocumented and invisible to the gaze and census-taking of Emperor Jesus). They live free, under open sky, by virtue of the animals who integrate them into the wild economy of the desert. And already I get ahead of myself. There will be more to say later about this “nomad genesis” of holy writ. Suffice it to say here, the earliest “Christian” depiction of the “anointed one” (“Christ”)—for an outlaw urban community in Rome made up largely of slaves and menials—is this symbiotic image of a herder and a sheep. It is not of a lone man, as is the imperial Pantokrator mosaic. Humans alone could not “afford” to step free of imperial polity, if they have no skill or means for actually reintegrating (via some form of faunal



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or floral symbiosis) into wildlands, and living independently of the imperial economy. The catacomb stone depiction muses on the memory of our most ancient liberation movement: in this case, it is the nomad/sheep composite that holds the key to actual freedom. GLOBAL EXTINCTION But such is mere introit into the tack I wish to take here. The biblical tradition as memory bank of a pastoral nomad option to leave empire and recover skill and freedom to live out on the land, away from imperial domination, addresses a deep question of our beleaguered hour. For 5,000 years, elites across Eurasia (and later, to a lesser degree, among the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans of the Americas) have refined their varied projects of domestication of plants, animals, workers, and watersheds. Over the last 500 years, that project has gone global under European colonizer hegemony, birthing the so-called Industrial Revolution, extending the domestication impulse to minerals and fossilized life forms underground.9 More recently, the corporate form of elite aggrandizement, monoculturally committed to commodifying the entirety of planetary substance it can “reach” in the name of maximizing shareholder return, has conscripted the state as its neoliberal acolyte, hellbent on privatizing life itself. Now it is the biosphere itself that is weighing in with redress. Climate change is, in one sense, insurgent blowback from all the life forms being rendered extinct, all the waterways being re-engineered, polluted, or bottled, all the air being populated with particulate chemicals (some 87,000, by current estimate, and increasing at the rate of 2,400 per year, only 91 of which have ever been tested), all the land being desertified, all the trees clear cut, all the mountains decapitated, all the wetlands paved over, all the methane and CO2 being unleashed from their natural sequestration.10 Think of a Ghostly Water Monster of such immense complexity it is incapable of representation, but utterly irresistible in its growing tsunami of effects. Climate change is, at one level, “Water Talk”—shouting at us in floods and rising seas, going silent and ominous in drought, speaking to us in an increasingly fevered pitch. The issue is whether we can hear. And the question this Titan is asking is whether we, as a species, can be allowed to continue to exist, when we insist on destroying all else. What the question demands is a full stop. What does it mean to be human? All presuppositions are called into question. Either we draw back from this insane scheme of infinite unfettered growth of the market, serving an infinitely stimulated appetite and an ever-expanding corporate and corpulent girth

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(epidemic levels of wealth concentration and social inequality as of obesity, diabetes, depression, and addiction of all kinds—at the expense of the living infrastructure of the planet),11 or we disappear into a few scant fossilized remains. The unbiblical (Christian) doctrine of original sin would seem to argue that we are doomed to self-destruct. Indigenous myth and practice would argue otherwise. And here is the connection with where this writing began. The question begs inquiry: Have humans ever lived in a way that was not self-destructive? The answer is yes—for most of our time on the planet. If the criteria are “living in place” without need to conquer others, steal their stuff, take their land, and otherwise import things not native to the local ecology, the witness is manifold. Australian aboriginal peoples lived in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet for 40,000 years without doing any of the above; no European colonist has been able to live in the “down under” for more than a few months without pulling in support from without. The San of southern Africa continue in the Kalahari environs, despite colonial pressures, after at least 70,000 years. The Chumash Indians of southern California lived on that coast for some 13,000 years without destroying their eco-base. And so forth. Will the “real” human beings please stand up? It is beyond a short piece like this to engage a sustained argument about our Pleistocene heritage as hunting and gathering folk whose coercive turn to settled mono-crop agriculture may have been an evolutionary “mistake” of sorts.12 What is patent here is that the career of urbanized monocultures, incarnating the will-to-expand-and-domesticate typical of empires, have effectively nowhere proven sustainable.13 Their logic has indeed been selfdestructive. Like Daniel’s pictogram of Nebuchadnezzar with splintering crack spiking up his iron leg, they are wrecked by their own “feet” of clay (the crumbling away of soils, plants, animals, and waters that make life in a given locale possible in the first place) (Dan. 2:31–45). The iron of empire finally depends on the earth of sustenance. One cannot eat metal. And all feet stand somewhere. If that “somewhere” is decimated, even the most gargantuan political order will fall. It is the question of place-based living that climate upheaval “heralds” (perhaps like the “witnessing of heaven and earth” that Moses promised would adjudicate human choice to “dwell,” with blessing or curse, “in the land”; Deut. 30:19–20). Empire has ever been destructive of the places where it commences its tower (of babel)-building enterprise. Eloquent as exemplar is the testament of Gilgamesh of Sumerian/Babylonian fame. The epic notes the cedar forests that once covered the Euphrates/Tigris floodplain, subsequently clear-cut into oblivion for imperial building schemes even as the watershed was irrigated into a salt pan whose only human import today derives from the oils discovered under the desiccated soils.14 Cautionary tale!



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At the other end of globalizing history, Euro-colonization was driven by the overworking of depleted soils at home, whose long-running cycles of overpopulation culled by famine and disease are detailed in Richard Manning’s Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization.15 But here we are interested in the flip side. It is indigenous cultures that have nurtured lifestyles capable of dwelling in place over long stretches of time without input “from without” (that is to say, without needing to colonize other places and peoples). As climate change rages against the hubris of human pretense to know better than wild nature how to arrange things, it is those cultures that have track records of living symbiotically in a given watershed that may well hold a key to whatever chance of survival our species has. And it is “watershed” that is the crucial unit of vision when we are asking about the geography of life.16 Life is organized into living ensembles of biodiverse reciprocity by the way water flows. And finally we begin to approach the specific topic at hand for this chapter. By “indigenous” I mean any social organization of human living in place that has remained relatively intact in its communal structures and relatively viable in its relations with the plants, animals, waters, soils, winds, and weather characteristic of that given ecological niche over time.17 It can encompass not only hunter-gatherer modes of living in band societies of 150 (or less), circulating rhythmically within and foraging lightly upon the biodiversity of a well-known ecozone. But it also points to small-scale horticultural (not large-scale mono-crop) cultivation that is local, low-tech, biodiverse, and relatively sustainable. And, as already remarked, the localized modalities of herding life that are typically (though not always) an insurgent reaction to oppressive agriculture. Almost without exception, such eco-viability (in each of the three forms or various amalgams among the three) has been given temporal durability in history by way of ritual and myth.18 Thus, as climate change now roars with irrepressible warning, I am concerned to take deep stock of those communities of our species who have lived in place sustainably for significant periods, listen profoundly to how their stories codify human relationship to the more-than-human world in terms of kinship, learn how their rituals reinforce the myths and engender practices worthy of the human and nonhuman embodiments of creaturely beauty in that place, even as they necessarily engage in eating each other. Living in place is also a function of eating in place. Eating is violent; living is necessarily a matter of consuming the energy and beauty of other creatures.19 But it is not destructive of the cycle of life as long as it remains within the “trophic scaling” (the food chain) hierarchy of bodies in a given ecozone.20 What eats is finally itself also eaten. As long as the small number of large eaters remains to scale with the much greater numbers of smaller

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eaters, the whole ecosystem will remain stable, even though individual members of each of the species will come and go. But this scale ratio is precisely what our species has violated over the last 10,000 years.21 Expansionist agriculture has allowed the human species to exceed its eco-niche for that relatively short period of evolutionary time—but not forever. The crisis we now witness is in part a crisis of living “out of niche” by means of the technology of agricultural aggression on wild habitat—with catastrophic consequences for most other life forms (being rendered extinct now at the rate of 200 per day).22 And thus, for myself (and growing numbers of other denizens of this modern disaster), it is indigenous memory of living “to scale” in place that holds the key to imagining a future other than massive die-off and extinction.23 Though it may be too late . . . DETROIT WATER All of this is preamble. My place is Détroit, the strait between Lakes Huron and Erie, whence flows some 20 percent of the planet’s fresh surface water in a century touted to become—and already, in the war in Syria, showing itself to be—the century of water wars. A United Nations report of 2015 warned that by 2025, two-thirds of humanity will not have access to clean drinking water. Since 1995, more than 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide—in part because of dried up and siphoned-off aquifers, failed monsoons, and flooding. In the United States alone, by 2020, one-third of the population will not be able to pay their water bills. The city of my dwelling is smack dab in the crosshairs of corporate interests calculating cost/benefit opportunities within the shadows of this growing crisis. Indeed, Detroit has long been the object of corporate gerrymandering and dominant culture manipulation. Celebrated epicenter of industrialization, proud incubation chamber for Henry Ford’s car culture innovations, venerated production center for Word War II armaments resisting Nazi designs on the world, Detroit is today posterchild of deindustrial blight and abandonment. Its demise from home-ownership-capital of the country in 1950 to burnedout-hulk at the new millennium was not happenstance or without villains. As African American populations rushed North during the war to contribute to the effort and escape lynching and Jim Crow terrorism in the South, they filled the four “catchment basins” historically “allowed” to black settlement.24 By war’s end, white GIs returning from the war theaters no longer wanted to inhabit old neighborhoods and availed themselves of GI Bill monies and Federal Housing Administration–backed bank loans to build suburban housing, while using federal redlining policy and restrictive covenants to exclude black residents.25



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Tax dollars thus gathered from all communities were thereby funneled almost exclusively to white beneficiaries of the loans and policies—a huge, multilevel bureaucratic mechanism effectively transferring resources from communities of color to those of pallor. At the same time, any black residents bold enough to want better schooling and housing than was available in the “black areas” into which they were sandwiched were met with highly organized white vigilante violence when they tried to buy in white neighborhoods.26 After two decades of white flight, corporate relocation of jobs outside the city, police and citizen brutality enforcing segregated dwelling and schooling, the black community erupted in (now infamous) rebellion, burning out predatory stores and businesses. By 1973, Motown had its first black mayor, white citizen and corporate abandonment of the city proper went hyper, drug operations and gun marketers were allowed to run amok, the two major newspapers were privatized by Murdoch and Co. in the 1990s after vicious suppression of a two-year strike, and by millennium’s end, the city was rendered ripe for neoliberal takeover. Today it sits as a 139-square-mile tract of black impoverishment and struggle, 30 percent vacant, ringed by eighty-six independent municipalities, fortyseven townships, and eighty-nine school systems of white self-congratulation and fear.27 The economic profile of the 82 percent black city finds 40 percent of its citizens living under the poverty line, with another 27 percent unable to make ends meet as ALICE people (Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed). As of 2015, there were only enough jobs for 37 percent of residents and only one-quarter of those were held by Detroiters.28 Some twenty-two separate proposals for a regional transit system since 1970 had been vetoed by auto company interest and white citizen insistence on remaining homogenous.29 With 30–40 percent of Detroiters not owning cars, the effect has been quarantine: the black poor sequestered by policy and infrastructure from following jobs and opportunity to the suburbs.30 But cheap property, the riparian location, valuable infrastructure, and a revamped central corridor (running from downtown, three miles north through the major university, medical center, sports stadiums newly constructed at the taxpayer’s expense, and refurbished entertainment facilities) are leveraging rapacious gentrification, creating a playground of white affluence and entrepreneurialism in the continuing sea of black poverty and disenfranchisement.31 The city is clearly slated for takeover. From 2003 to 2015, one-third of all homes had been foreclosed (through default on either taxes or mortgage).32 Meanwhile, a tactic first developed in the 1990s to begin privatizing public school districts was honed into an “emergency management” mentality implemented state-wide (despite majority citizen resistance, state wide) and expanded to include all municipal services of any

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city deemed by state government to be on the cusp of financial collapse.33 Put in place almost exclusively in relationship to cities in which the majority of the population are members of the racial minorities, Emergency Managers (EMs) were endowed by legislation with dictatorial powers and unleashed in service of a “structural adjustment” vision perfected in Global South initiatives of austerity.34 Detroit became the foremost lab for experimentation. By 2014, the Car City Capital was under dictatorial control and its assets redirected to satisfy finance-capital debt that had been foisted on the city in fraudulent big-bank maneuvers, engineered in credit-default swaps beginning in 2005.35 Part and parcel of the privatization scramble so leveraged has been a targeting of water infrastructure. Elaborated over this entire seventy-year history of white relocation, Detroit Water and Sewage Department piping and pumping “enabled” suburban development on the cheap, with city residents charged retail, while 124 of the new “ex-urb enclosures” enjoyed wholesale rates and tacked on budget supports of their own to the tune of 100 to 1,000 percent—all while Detroit absorbed 83 percent of the cost of sewage disposal.36 With a view to repackaging (and likely privatizing) such services under suburban control, by 2014, the EM announced a policy of draconian shutoffs to clear out “bad debt”—going after any house $150 or two months in arrears (but letting large commercial and industrial concerns skate free and continue to enjoy the flow). In three years, more than 50,000 homes (perhaps as high as 90,000) out of a total of 380,000 have been cut off, plunging families into crisis, threatening removal of children by state agencies (it is illegal to raise a child in Michigan in a house without water), increasing the likelihood of disease epidemics city wide, and further fracturing neighborhoods with abandonment and blight.37 Response on the ground over the entire course of this history of pillage and “ethnic cleansing by policy” has been vigorous and continuous—whether in the form of street protest, journalistic and artistic “send up,” direct action “throw down,” or DIY entrepreneurialism, seeking to create community alternatives.38 Water policy resistance, in particular, has been upstart and elaborate, with older African American women and younger hip-hop heads leading the way in creating a hotline for communication, community distribution stations for shut-off blocks, and research initiatives coordinating with academic activists in mapping the onslaught in connection with development plans (i.e., a “Detroit Future City Plan” slating triaged neighborhoods for blue and green redevelopment attractive to “urban pioneers” and gentrifying families—largely white and resourced). For me, it is water resistance that has commanded most attention, where (with eight others) the loss of democratic process or other venues for registering concern led to a 2014 decision to get arrested for blocking shutoff trucks with a liturgical protest, in hopes both of



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raising awareness and curtailing actual (water) valve closures. And it is this focus that has also mandated a new concern for guidance, political and spiritual, from the biblical tradition. One upshot of all this attention paid to water is a new approach to scripture. Climate comeuppance at large, and Motown carnage in particular, have provoked a turn toward codes and cultures that more immediately inculcate respect for nature than does the typical Christian reading (of either reality or tradition). This “indigenous turn” has already been hinted above. As an orientation toward life writ large, I now seek insight from those who have habituated such respect in community ritual and oral story alike, while simultaneously committing to become accountable to their political struggle to survive.39 The method here tracked is one of “crossing over and coming back”40—learning to see the potency of agencies wild and winged, finned and four legged, flowing with force or blowing with finesse, jagged as lightning or slow as seed in soil, by way of indigenous myths and practices. And then returning to the Bible with eyes unscaled and hip to new traces and shimmerings! On such a return, I now find the book a long and sonorous shout of Wild Beneficence and Wily Weather that is largely a matter of Water speech. And this particular Creature—in the text of scripture—is the subject of conflict throughout, as indeed of a “weight of being” more akin to “Living Spirit” than “inanimate resource.” WATER POLITICS IN THE BIBLICAL CORPUS Witness the Baptist in his element (John 1:28, 35; Mark 1:4–11; Matt. 3:4–17; Luke 3:3–22). However Dipper John may have been schooled as child, as an adult he runs feral and wild (Mark 1:3–4). He dips east of the Jordan it would seem, on search for mission and ancestry, seeking to retrace his Aramean father’s footsteps as maroon, apparently finding Bedouin-tutor and landlearning among the wadis and pools where Elijah once lurked (John 1:28, 3:22–26, 10:39–41; cf Mark 10:1; Corbett 1991, 4; Tabor 2012a, 2012b). The Tishbite mystic had himself fled the settled order of his time, to chew the rind of meat scavenged by raven, listen to mountains whisper, shapeshift like wind, and wield storm as weapon when the king threatened (I Kings 17:1–7; 18:1, 7–15, 20–46; 19:8–13). John dons Elijah’s persona as cloak, his spirit as familiar, and recrosses the river to provoke a movement. Wearing camel, eating honey and grasshopper, the Wild-Clad Crooner of new vision calls the people “to exit and return” to the sacred geography at least in ritual, if not in actual fact (Mark 1:4–6). But it is Water that is his Teacher paramount.41 John hunkers down in the Elijah hideout known as Cherith—at least part of the

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time, according to scholars such as Tabor and Myer—an “outlaw” post in the sharp-cut canyons, where water had stayed pooled even as drought ravaged in Ahab’s time.42 Here was refuge for people on the run, harried by collectors or savaged by soldiers squeezing an entire country for product and labor. But the Baptizer did not limit himself to that particular lair of stone. Gospeler John makes clear he also set up shop on the West Bank of the Jordan, near Aenon and Salim, just below the Scythopolis resort where business clientele trafficking south from Damascus and points east would hole up for rest and titillation, after consorting with Herod and his court in Tiberias’ lakeside playgrounds (John 4:23).43 This regular stream of commerce and political collaboration was an object of interdiction, says exegete Sawicki, a trade connection that John interrupted with his Water Show. The stakes were high. Rome—like the Jerusalem upper crust that had colonized the north a century before in lust for Galilee grain and tithe—had its eye on flow. It funded the necessary architecture through repressive tax on an already-strapped peasantry, securing urban bathhouse luxury by way of aqueduct redirection of spring water or Jordan tributary to its gated domains of pleasure.44 Collaborator Herod, says Sawicki, “secularized” water—a first-century RomanPalestinian version of today’s privatization schemes.45 Sawicki’s language hints at many insights. For centuries among the Jewish cohort settled in the Canaanite hills, natural flows of water had been designated as “living” (Jer. 2:13; Zech. 14:8; Prov. 18:4; John 4:10; 7:38; Rev. 21:6; 22:1, 17). Water was weal—a divine gift from the heights of Hermon and the rest of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges visible to the North from the Galilean seashore (Jer. 10:13).46 Indeed, the entire region owed its lush bounty to that “trickle-down” blessing. But the berakah was understood to remain such—beneficence from on High—only (!) if it remained untouched by human hand or technology in its serpentine trek down the slopes, across the border, through the valley (part of the geological Rift extending all the way to Kenya), ultimately to puddle in the planet’s lowest (“Dead” Sea) basin, before evaporating back up, to condense as an everactive Storm Deity, recognized from ancient times as the Great Guarantor of Life, crashing Lebanon heights, and raining “blessing” into that otherwise arid Afro-Asian isthmus.47 The area’s biodiversity, nutrient bounty, and soil fertility all traced their origins to that Thunder Being hovering over those upland cedar groves. When Israel first arrived—fresh from hothouse initiation in Sinai as a nomad innovation out of the slave-kitchen of Egypt—the YHWH-people carried memory of a similar Storm-Being, met in the desert’s heat when Moses disappeared up into cloud and lightning on the mountain top for a forty-day colloquy to clarify the covenant-comity necessary to fortify that nomad memory once the people begin growing crops.48



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The memory of “whence Life”—from Sinai early on as from Hermon after settlement—was secured in the epithet “living.” Israel had its vitality as gift from a Wild Water-Spirit haunting Mountain Height, not from human genius and artifice associated with irrigation technologies controlled by elites and their priests, as out on the Mesopotamian plain or down in Egypt-land. It is telling that when the Hasmonean Jewish “gentrifiers” from Jerusalem first began colonizing the northern (Galilean) region of Palestine in the first century BCE, they supported their urban lifestyle with household cisterns known as miqva’ot.49 These catchment basins storing water piped by aqueducts from mountainsides, were also equipped with small side-basins known as otzarot that trapped passively gathered rainwater (untouched by human architecture), which was then funneled into the miqva’ot to render that otherwise “polluted resource” as once again “living” and pure and thus capable of purifying persons and objects in ritual submersion. As elite collaborators with Roman occupation, these Jerusalem settlers went to great lengths to try to maintain this ancient conviction that only “unforced” waters, not coerced flows, were “living.”50 The Baptizer’s counter-insistence on submersion in the wild flow of the Jordan currents—as the core of his movement of revitalization and the only genuine “miqva’ot of regeneration”—is a direct prophetic challenge both to Roman privatization schemes and to this Jewish elite finessing of Israel’s understanding of water as divine blessing. Lifting up the natural power of the river at the very place where business traffic was fording the Jordan near Scythopolis was simultaneously a spiritual “throw down” about the true nature of divinity.51 And it is no small coincidence that John’s successor from Nazareth will engage this same refutation. Jesus begins his career in submission to John’s mission, going under the Jordan gift beneath the Baptizer’s wet hand and rising from the flow with third eye cracked open (as Myers likes to say), tranced out with apparition, hearing divine approbation from a “heaven” carved wide by dove-wing on Spirit-collision with the reality of occupied Palestine (Mark 1:9–14 and parallels). Any indigenous culture would recognize the narration as an account of vision quest.52 That Luke directly asserts the passenger pigeon in question is divine incarnation—the Spirit in bodily form—only confirms the intuition (Luke 3:22). Jesus is here undergoing initiation into the wild side of things. The Jordan is portal into the Other-World,53 an east-leading crossover54 to the nomad zone of feral-going animals (including those called “human”), a backtracking conduit into the way Abram trod before becoming “Jew” and Moses followed at the head of a “recovering” slave-horde—schooled by the sands into survival skills learned out “on the land,” renovating memory and energy with the dignity and clarity of a lifeway not beholden to urban plunder or imperial oppression. The Nazareth prophet physically “soaks” in a “living flow” that is also “spiritual opening” to the way.

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He is driven by Spirit-Bird into Wild Site of Testing, there to revisit three primal moments in his people’s journey from slave-shackle to liberation-life in the small nexus of land between Babylonian and Egyptian powers. Arguably his trial is one of stone. Will he remember—confronted with desert outcrop or mountain height or even parapet of rock hewn into Herodian shrine55—that Jacob once slept on such a pillow of flint, dreamed the worldaxis with angels-in-motion, swore that if such a “petroglyph-revelation” would grant him “bread on the way,” he would anoint the hard cobble as “house of deity,” Beit-’El (“Bethel”) in the form of lithic Spirit-Home (Gen. 28:10–22). Water-Air-Earth; Jordan-Dove-Rock: these test and teach. Jesus may react to the fetishizing of agricultural product (bread) as had Moses before him (Deut. 8:3); but that rock should act and give gift does not daunt at all. He will later assert that stones themselves will speak if no other prophet dares (Luke 19:40).56 Jesus takes the Baptist one step further. He returns from the wild side marinated and ready. His venue of guidance going forward will be “outback,” though his place of confrontation is the city (Mark 1:35; 3:13; 9:2). From chapter 1 in Mark, he consorts with things un-tame when the authorities get rough (Mark 1:9–14, 35, 45; 4:35–41; 6:30–44; 10:1). Accused of channeling Beelzebul in his Spirit-Wars with the Demon-Powers, he will decline to answer direct, but convene a clinic for the peasants by the sea (Mark 3:22–4:34). Choosing an inner core requires time in the clouds on high, Moses-like (Mark 3:13; 9:2). He will walk the waters (Mark 6:48–51); whisper the storms into quiet (Mark 4:39); take his crew apart on Sabbath-trek to Hermon-height, where ancestral visits (Moses and Elijah) in thunder voices and lightning strikes ratify the mission (Mark 9:2–9). But it is the Beloved Disciple’s particular gospel account that specifies the intensified water-challenge. In chapter 7 of that most unique of gospels (John), Jesus crashes the Succoth Fest, no longer celebrated out in fields, but sequestered in the Temple confines. He shows up incognito, with price on head, and only dares go public and potent when the people are out in force. They are his “cover.” On the last day, as the story goes, he pops up immediately after the ritual cleansing of the altar’s bloody residues of sacrifice with Sihon spring water and prophetically riffs on the act (John 7:37–39).57 Quoting the Jubilee-text of freely circulating gifts of Isaiah 55, Jesus invites all who are thirsty to “Come drink without price,” asserting that in consequence, they will themselves become sources of “living water.” The text actually bends gender in affirming that such a drinker will, in effect, “break water” out of “his womb” (koilia as the literal Greek has it). The background is necessary to catch the bite. Post-Torah regulation, the Jerusalem Temple had at some point mandated a half-shekel tax of adult males, payable to Temple coffers and their priestly presiders to secure rain fall and crop growth



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(Matt. 17:24–27).58 Here was hierarchy arrogating to itself control of “heavenly beneficence” and “land fertility”—for a price! “Not paying” the (bureaucratic) bill threatened (divine) “water shutoff,” adjudicated by the authorities. Jesus isn’t having it. His insistence directly challenges the arrogance, reaffirming water as Gift, offered from On High (Mount Hermon, in fact), generously granted to just and unjust alike (just like sunshine) (Matt. 5:45). Indeed, later on, in chapter 12, when he marches on Jerusalem for the last time, he will style his movement the equivalent of wild wheat, falling59 into soil without human harvesting or sowing, germinating its own seed-gift in the underground dark before popping up as divine bounty (John 12:24). And his teaching will be affirmed by thunder (that some will interpret as “angel talk”; John 12:28–29)—as if the ancient Storm God of the Hermon Heights is accompanying the prophet right up into his temporary takeover of the Temple site. WATER SPIRITUALITY IN HOLY WRIT But this hardly touches the subtle hint of either gender crossover or of a Living Presence of the Spirit-World in rainfall and water flow that the Johannine text offers. Hint, however, is all that space here allows. My reading is primed by reference to indigenous practice as close to my home as the Great Lakes Basin, circumambulated by Ojibwa women “Water Walkers” in recent years in the name of “protection” and as far as a New Castle, Australia, port, where Pacific Islander Climate Warriors clogged ocean access with traditional outrigger canoes to try to halt a coal ship whose cargo would contribute to glacial melting and sea rise threatening their island homes.60 Each in varied ways names the water as Living Being, Deity-in-Modality-of-Flow, and the Ojibwa in particular, speak with “Her” in ritual congress whose first purpose is conveying “recognition” and purveying “honor,” before speaking for Her in protest.61 The hint in John is a subtle figure of similar concern. The entire fourth gospel is animated by the opening hymn (John 1:1–18) as ode to a venerable Greek perception of a reality believed to structure the entire universe. Compared to the Synoptic writers, John ups the ante on incarnation, seeing the eternal Logos of Platonic fame as the real subject of Jesus’s flesh. But while writing Greek, John thinks Hebrew. The actual idea thereby given Greek flavor is the ancient Hebrew intuition of Hokmah, the Wise Woman of Proverbs 8. This is a female demiurge in male drag in John’s text, hovering at the threshold between time and eternity in Jewish imagination, source of all form, conduit of delight, “She” through whom all things come (Prov. 8:22–31). The “Word” Jesus channels in this text is thus Quasi-Divine-Feminine—in Proverbs-talk,

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also imaged as bubbling brook, or in older ken of Genesis, the Ancient Queen of Waters, Tiamat of Babylonian fame, recast as Tohuwabohu, the Primal Deep over which the Primal Spirit-Wind, Ruach, blows (Prov. 18:4; Gen. 1:2). The Spirit-Dove hovering over God-in-the-Flesh submerged in Jordan River recapitulates this older scene. In biblical trace and rabbinic lore, this Wily Water Woman gains incarnate shape as Great Hippo-Behemoth of the Heavens, down whose mountain legs stream the “living waters” of blessing that fill up and flow through the rivers, lakes, and seas as the Underworld Crocodile-LeviathanSerpent, gushing up in springs and writhing across the land.62 Though subsequently erased in Hebrew and Christian writ, the opening here for analog with indigenous thought around the planet on water as Goddess-Being and Serpent Queen is wide and provocative. “Be innocent as Dove and wise as Serpent,” chants the prophet to a movement he likens to a herd! Indeed. These animal invocations fairly beg to be gathered up in imagination as summons to return to the feral-going ways of an Abraham finding reintegration into “Holy Land” via his herd-tutors or nomad-taught Moses accosted by Fiery-Tongued Divinity in a Bush. They sum up not only deep Genesis memory but also actual baptismal experience of the Sent One, schooled by “crocodilian”63 River and hovering Pigeon.64 LAST WORD? We conclude with a conundrum. The prospect of climate apocalypse enjoins recognition that indigenous folk planet wide have already lived through such “end time” scenarios, otherwise known as “civilization” and “colonialization.” Thus far, “in spite of,” 360 million of them have managed to survive without entirely losing their way. But what of the rest of us who have already lost ours? Can we learn all over again to listen to “heaven and earth” speak; find kinship in a herd or identity in a seed, revelation in a bush, rebirth in water, “God” in a dove—as well as listen to the “people of the land”? Or is it too late? Any deep reading of indigenous wisdom would say it is not enough merely to protect these “Others” of creation for the sake of our own survival. They are Living Entities, Spiritual Beings in their own right, whose integrity must be respected and related to on their own terms, not just ours. Yes, for me, “faith” may dictate resisting water shutoffs at the Strait. But it also demands learning from Ojibwa, Odawa, and Potawatomi cultures before and around me, who know how to talk to the Currents and give gifts to the Fish as Ancestors and Elders who had figured out how to survive “in place,” long before our entire species showed up. Any future we have left may well depend on such. Jesus may indeed have been once depicted as young shep-



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herd shouldering a lamb. The more compelling picture for us today would be an entire watershed of plants and animals “carrying” us. NOTES  1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–210, 216.  2. Jim Corbett, Goatwalking (New York: Viking Press, 1991), 4, 8, 85, 88.   3.  James W. Perkinson, Messianism against Christology: Resistance Movements, Folk Arts, and Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5–13; James W. Perkinson, Political Spirituality in an Age of Eco-apocalypse: Essays in Communication and Struggle across Species, Cultures, and Religions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3.  4. James W. Perkinson, “Religion and the Class Status Quo,” in Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook on Religion: Religion: Just Religion, ed. J. Vereecke (Farmington, MI: Gale/Cenage Learning, 2016), 201–6.  5. Jim Corbett, A Sanctuary for All Life: the Cowbalah of Jim Corbett (Englewood, CO: Howling Dog Press, 2005), 118; Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016), 15–25; Martín Prechtel, “Saving the Indigenous Soul: An Interview with Martín Prechtel,” 2001, 3–8.  6. Corbett, Goatwalking, 4, 221–22.  7. Perkinson, Messianism, 34–35, 43; Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden: An Inquiry into the Dream of Paradise and a New Vision of Our Role in Nature (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 15–16; Corbett, A Sanctuary for All Life, 220.   8.  See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (London: Yale University Press, 2009), 14–16, 184; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 2–3, 183–84; Nick McDonell, The Civilization of Perpetual Movement: Nomads in the Modern World (London: Hurst & Co., 2016), 2, 8–14, 39, 50, 74.   9.  Prechtel, “Saving the Indigenous Soul,” 4–8. 10. Robert Jensen, “Get Apocalyptic: Why Radical Is the New Normal,” Yes Magazine (Summer 2013). 11. Richard Heinberg, “How to Shrink the Economy without Crashing It: A 10-Point Plan,” Post-Carbon Institute, November 4, 2014. 12. Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” accessed October 7, 2017, http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst -mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race; John Gowdy, ed., Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), ix–xi, xii–xxix; Robert Jensen, “The Old Future’s Gone: Progressive Strategy amid Cascading Crises,” Dissident Voice: A Radical Newsletter in the Struggle for Peace and Social Justice, August 15, 2008, http:// dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/the-old-future%E2%80%99s-gone-progressive-strategy -amid-cascading-crises/. The Bible hints the “turn to agriculture” as curse and fall,

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which eco-philosopher Daniel Quinn reads as a pathology not of every individual, but of a particular cultural option—namely, the choice to coerce wild nature in the domesticating enslavements of monocrop cultivation (Gen. 3:14–19; Ched Myers, “From Garden to Tower: Genesis 1–11 as Critique of Civilization and an Invitation to Indigenous Re-visioning,” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together (Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2013), 112–16; Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (New York: Bantam/Turner Books, 1992), 164, 172–77, 182–83. 13.  Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995), 40–43. 14. Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden, 111, 116–25. 15.  Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (New York: North Point, 2004), 67–69. 16.  Ched Myers, “From ‘Creation Care’ to ‘Watershed Discipleship’: Re-Placing Ecological Theology and Practice,” Conrad Grebel Review 32, no. 3 (Fall 2014); Ched Myers, ed., Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 1–25. 17. Perkinson, Messianism, 5–13. 18.  Prechtel, “Saving the Indigenous Soul,” 5–6; G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, “Cosmology as Ecological Analysis: A View from the Rain Forest,” Man 11, no. 3 (September 1976): 308–15. 19.  Prechtel, “Saving the Indigenous Soul,” 3–6. 20.  Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2005), 94. 21.  Ibid., 94–95. 22.  Jensen, “The Old Future’s Gone.” 23.  Arundati Roy, Walking with the Comrades (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 212–14. 24. Thomas Sugrue, “United Communities Are Impregnable: Violence and the Color Line,” in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, 34–41, 235, 257. 25.  Ibid., 245, 266. 26.  Ibid., 233. 27.  Ibid., 266. 28. Kaitlyn Buss, “Don’t Assume Detroit Story Just Gets Better,” The Detroit News, February 18, 2016. 29.  Frank Joyce, “The Real Story behind the Decline of Detroit . . . and Yes, Great Things Are Happening There Too,” Alternet, September 2, 2013. 30.  Diane Feeley, “A Hurricane without Water: Detroit’s Foreclosure Disaster,” International Viewpoint, June 15, 2105, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip .php?article4078. 31.  Gloria House, Mapping the Water Crisis: The Dismantling of African-American Neighborhoods in Detroit, vol. 1 (Detroit: We the People of Detroit Research Collective, 2016), iv–v. 32.  Feeley, “A Hurricane without Water.”



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33.  Joseph Natoli, “The Great Unwinding of Public Education: Detroit and DeVos,” Truthout (December 23, 2016): 1–2. 34. House, Mapping the Water Crisis, 10–11. 35. Wallace Turbeville, “The Detroit Bankruptcy,” Demos: An Equal Say and an Equal Chance for All, November 20, 2013, http://www.demos.org/publication/ detroit-bankruptcy. 36. House, Mapping the Water Crisis, 4–9. 37.  Ibid., 15, 21, 23. 38.  Ibid., 16–17. 39.  Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonzation: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 38–40. 40.  John L. Esposito, Darrell J. Fasching, and Todd Lewis, World Religions Today, 3rd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 585–92. 41.  Marianne Sawicki, Crossing Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 16, 100. 42. Ched Myers, “Elijah as the Archetypal Wilderness Prophet,” talk at Wild Goose Festival, 2014; see also, recorded webinar, “Elijah and the Wilderness Prophetic Tradition,” http://www.chedmyers.org/catalog/ecology-faith; James Tabor, “Did John the Baptist Eat Bugs, Beans, or Pancakes?,” 2012, http://jamestabor .com/2012/09/02/did-john-the-baptist-eat-bugs/; James Tabor, “A ‘Jesus Hideout’ in Jordan,” 20012, http://jamestabor.com/2012/06/24/a-jesus-hideout-in-jordan/. 43. Sawicki, Crossing Galilee, 4, 145–46, 158, 173, 185; Stinehart 2008, 1. 44.  Ibid., 112, 116–17. 45.  Ibid., 24, 100, 171. 46.  Ibid., 16, 100; Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden, 69, 76–79, 90–91. 47.  Ibid., 16, 23–24, 100, 121–22, 145, 171. 48. Perkinson, Messianism, 74. 49. Sawicki, Crossing Galilee, 23–24, 100–101, 122, 171. 50.  Ibid., 121–23, 140. 51.  Cf. Clemens Kopp, The Holy Places of the Gospels, trans. Ronald Walls (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 114; J. Carl Laney, “The Identification of Bethany beyond the Jordan,” in Selective Geographical Problems in the Life of Christ (Doctoral diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1977), 16. 52.  Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 112. 53.  Wild water, for ancient cultures, was typically both “door” and “way,” that along which ancestors typically had come in moving into a new area, and thus also that which led to the after-world over which they presided (Williams 2010, 67–68, 72, 109, 157, 193, 211). 54.  See Havrelock for notions of the east bank of the Jordan—in some periods of Israel’s imagination of the meaning of geography—being outside of the Holy Land proper, part of the numinous hinterland through which Israel had passed on journey from Sinai, and indeed, before that, the Aramean domain “from whence” Abram, before becoming “Abraham,” had trekked from Ur (upstream on the Euphrates) and

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then Haran (and perhaps finally downstream on the Jordan) to Canaan (Havrelock 2011, 42, 84, 86, 96, 108, 136, 141). 55.  Invited, as he is to turn stone into economic provision, right where he is in a wilderness wadi; or taken aloft to the mountain source of headwaters to confront a question of political aspiration; or tantalized to orchestrate his own advent in the Temple as cultural spectacle (Matt. 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). 56.  His mentor-teacher, John, had offered, at the height of baptismal confrontation of the Jewish elites, that the standing stones of ancient time could themselves “birth” children—a conceit shared with many indigenous myths of origin (Matt. 3:9; Luke 3:8; cf. Sosruquo of the Nart Sagas). 57.  Wes Howard-Brook, Come Out My People: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 185. 58. William R. Herzog II, Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God: A Ministry of Liberation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 219–220; William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 180–81, 187–88. 59.  And it is striking here that his language invokes “falling” rather than “being sowed”—a subtle counter to the stem-clinging einkorn wheat varieties that our species effectively “selected for” when agriculture first began in that part of the world. The movement is cast in the image of a wild—not domesticated—plant-ancestor. 60.  Denice M. Nadeau, foreword to Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice, ed. C. Myers (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), xii–xiv; Julie Zauzmer, “Do It for the Water: Native Americans Carry Potomac Water on Prayerful 400-Mile Journey,” Acts of Faith: Washington Post, October 16, 2016, 2; Helen Davidson, “Pacific Islanders Blockade Newcastle Coal Port to Protest Rising Sea Levels,” Guardian, October 17, 2014; Anne Malijaars, “We Are Not Drowning: We Are Fighting!” How to Become a Climate Hero blog, November 20, 2016; Jione Havea, “Vaiola (Water of Life) in the Flows of Genesis 1,” unpublished manuscript, 2016, 1. 61. Zauzmer, “Do It for the Water,” 2. There is not space here to engage the question of a gendered appellation of wild features of nature in a way that would do justice to concerns over sexism except to say that many indigenous cultures speak of the natural world in terms of personhood/subjectivity and assign “maleness” and “femaleness” without either qualm or (heteronormative) rigidity. 62.  Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105–7; Aharon Varady, “Rejoining Tetragrammaton,” 2006, http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2006/05/rejoining-tetragrammaton. 63.  For many indigenous communities, natural waters (rivers, lakes, oceans) are perceived as faunal creatures similar to monster-sized fish, serpent-writhing snakes, or dragon-mouthed crocodiles. And there is typically no hard-and-fast line between things modern culture parses out as “animate” and “inanimate.” Jesus going into the Jordan is much like Jonah going into the Whale. 64. The Ruach (Wind/Breath/Spirit) incarnate in Bird-Body combination with Water finds resonance not only in the juxtaposition of Genesis Creation Myth and Gospel renditions of Jesus’s Baptism but also of the “blowing back by ruach of the waters of escape at the Red Sea for Israel-on-the-run-from-Pharaoh’s-army (Exod. 14:21–29).

Chapter Twelve

Redeeming Country Indigenous Peoples under Empires and Nation-States Mark G. Brett

A number of white nationalist movements have seen a resurgence in recent years, breaking the surface in Europe, the United States, and to a lesser extent, in Australia. They have been associated with rhetorics of resistance to globalization, but it is unlikely that such movements will yield substantial opposition to neo-imperialist movements of capital. Capitalism no longer needs to control national governments in order to achieve its ends, so a revival of nationalist fervor will probably have limited economic effects, while nevertheless generating considerable cultural energy. In the wider context of globalized capitalism, these multiple expressions of nationalism are in some respects unexpected, but when considered from the point of view of postcolonial studies, they are simply fresh permutations of the older ideology of white supremacy. It is high time that the churches engage in greater detail with the theological dimensions of colonial expansions, beginning with the colonial Doctrine of Discovery and its impact on Indigenous peoples. In this chapter, I will argue that a serious engagement with Indigenous peoples would bear fruit at several levels, not just in generating a repentant encounter with history but also in reframing Christian identities, and in forming a radical response to global capitalism in a time of climate change. A Christian praxis will need to be active first in local contexts, countering nationalist aspirations, and second in transnational contexts, countering globalization with a different kind of international relationality. The discussion in this chapter will necessarily begin from our own context in Australia, while also suggesting a pressing need for international collaboration.

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THE NATIONAL AND THE LOCAL Postcolonial studies have provided at least two basic critiques of nationalism. In the case of settler colonial states, it has been suggested that their exaggerated claims to sovereignty often mask inner doubts as to their own legitimacy. In the case of the United States, the injustice of the Doctrine of Discovery was masked by the drama of a war of independence and the declaration of God-given rights in the newborn settler regime. In Australia’s case, relationships with the old imperial center in London were more ambivalent, but our anxieties about state sovereignty have marginalized Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in ways that are comparable to the experiences of other settler colonial states. The inherent rights of Indigenous peoples have been largely ignored, and most churches have yet to understand the place and contribution of Indigenous peoples in the life of God. The second main critique of the state within postcolonial studies has been focused on postindependence native polities that have invented their own practices of exclusion, often manipulating anticolonial sentiment in the assertion of their own authority. Anticolonial celebrations of nationhood have made for potent politics in almost every part of the world, and Indonesian control of West Papua provides a particularly painful example in our own region. One strain of postcolonial literature in recent years has tended to present the kind of utopian hope that strives to overcome the limitations of states and borders, and even the limitations of identity itself. This movement of postcolonial hope has been analyzed by Bill Ashcroft, in dialogue especially with the works of Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, and Paul Gilroy, among others.1 Regardless of whether we agree with Ashcroft’s exegesis of these authors, we can certainly characterize one strain of postcolonial utopia as broadly cosmopolitan, envisaging a borderless conviviality toward friends and enemies alike, proposing a constantly mutable identity that retains no loyalty to a particular country beyond the transitory accident of residence. But this version of utopian hope stands at the opposite extreme to Indigenous connections with traditional country, even though postcolonial critique has often begun with reflection on the impact of colonialism on Indigenous lives. To articulate my concerns in this way demands several qualifications. I do not speak as an Indigenous person, since I am a white Australian, and I grew up in Papua New Guinea when it was still under the colonial rule of Australia. But if I were a Papuan or an Aboriginal Australian, it would still be necessary to confess at the outset that the label “Indigenous” is a product of international discourse and not local or tribal identity.2 As I quickly learned when working for traditional Aboriginal owners in my home state in Victoria, the term Indigenous is mainly functional at the level of engagement with the United Nations (UN)



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or other international collaborations, whereas any understanding of traditional Aboriginal owners requires that distinctions be made between the hundreds of traditional polities and languages in Australia that are still living realities. For example, I live in Wurundjeri country, and the Woiwurrung language in this country is shared with other Kulin peoples, but these complex local polities should not be confused with other traditional groups in eastern and western Victoria, and each of these should be distinguished from the many Aboriginal groups in Central Australia who still live on their traditional country, and maintain their law and ceremony even when they also identify as Christian, usually via one or other denominational label like Catholic, Lutheran, or Baptist.3 All these groups are Indigenous, if we are willing to generalize, and all of them assert their rights as Indigenous peoples. But their actual practice of collaborative politics is extremely complex, layered, and often conflicted, especially given the various histories of dispossession that shape the experience of Aboriginal and Islander groups in Australia. Some of our Aboriginal and Islander groups claim their identity as First Nations, taking up the discourse that is more common in North America, and by implication, laying claim to the international legal discourse of sovereignty. However, when the Native American theologian George Tinker visited my theological college in 2012, he caused something of a controversy by criticizing the language of sovereignty as a European invention, even though our local Aboriginal aspirations for treaties are usually linked to the idea of sovereignty.4 Many people believe that the rights and dignity of Indigenous groups in Australia will never be recognized until governments recognize nation-to-nation relationships with the Indigenous polities who live inside the borders of our state. The aspirations for treaties with First Nations in Australia are often opposed for a number of different reasons—whether by non-Indigenous people who take refuge in their democratic majority, or even by some Aboriginal people who see the rhetoric of first nations as too essentialist and out of touch with the complex hybridities especially in urban Aboriginal life.5 Currently we are witnessing heated debates between groups of Aboriginal people who seek recognition in the Australian constitution, and other groups who think that constitutional recognition distracts from the pursuit of treaties. Personally, I take my lead from Indigenous lawyers who find no contradictions between both sets of aspirations, but the main point here is that any Christian collaboration with Aboriginal and Islander groups will necessarily have to enter into these conflicts on the ground. A generalized assertion of Indigenous rights needs to be expressed in the praxis of relationships. Instead of unpacking this debate in purely political terms, however, I want to reframe the issues theologically in order to reflect on the mission of the

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church. To begin with, the praxis of Christian mission should reflect actual relationships with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, as well as international collaborations around Indigenous theologies. The lived experience of Aboriginal Christianity in Australia remains largely hidden from wider churches, and there are significant doubts among many Aboriginal Christians about the value of engaging in Western styles of theological education or tertiary studies, although dialogues with international Indigenous theologians have provided a helpful catalyst on various occasions. There are numerous expressions of vernacular Aboriginal Christianity that have flourished beyond the control of white missionaries.6 As in many other contexts, colonial biblical interpretation in Australia often rendered Indigenous peoples either as Canaanite pagans or as black-skinned children of Ham destined for menial labor, but Aboriginal Christianity has rejected all these historic degradations. Admittedly, some Aboriginal Christians in Australia have been willing to sacrifice their political aspirations for justice for the sake of a conservative missionary theology, but times have changed.7 More Indigenous leaders want to explore the intersections of Aboriginal and Christian spirituality, and consequently, they are less willing to distinguish sharply between spiritual and material realities; the contradictions of white theology are coming to the fore with renewed clarity.8 In this context, I want to engage with one international contribution to the analysis of white theology. I have in mind the significant work undertaken by the black theologian Willie James Jennings in his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. At one point in this work, Jennings provides a critique of Lamin Sanneh, arguing that “[i]f the practice of translation disrupted colonist hegemony, it did so by making room for something else, cultural nationalism.”9 The role of missionaries in provoking cultural nationalism is, of course, acknowledged by Sanneh and other historians of world Christianity, and indeed, the rise of Indigenous Christianities is often taken to be a legitimate expression of anticolonialism.10 In the Australian context, for example, some Aboriginal Christians have found hope through identification with Israel’s exodus from the imperial power of Egypt. Accordingly, when “native title” rights were finally discovered by the High Court of Australia in 1992, the traditional owner who led this campaign, Eddie Mabo, was celebrated as a Moses figure who led the people out from legal bondage.11 This episode in the history of biblical interpretation made my work as a policy officer in the Australian native title system a little easier to explain when activists discovered that I brought Christian motivations to political advocacy. It also helps explain the irony that I was asked a few years ago to work with Aboriginal lawyers on a submission to the UN Permanent Forum, outlining the effects of the Doctrine of Discovery.12



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Willie Jennings, however, pushes beyond the activism of anticolonialism into deeper theological complexities. He seems to suggest that even in the case of Indigenous Christian resistance to colonialism, cultural nationalism carries “racial, social, political, and economic signatures” that resonate with the ideologies of nation-states.13 We can hear in this argument the echoes of Edward Said and Musa Dube, insisting that every liberating exodus story is implicitly twinned with the national aspirations of a conquest narrative.14 However, this line of argument needs to be qualified in at least two respects. First, in the ancient contexts of the Pentateuch’s composition, the exodus is twinned with conquest mainly in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, which biblical scholars identify as “Deuteronomistic” tradition. The exodus story functions differently in the Priestly traditions within Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus that belong to an alternative social imaginary, which most likely formed after the demise of Israel’s political sovereignty. The Priestly version can be clearly distinguished from the nationalism of Deuteronomy and Joshua. As the apostle Paul noticed long ago, the international Abraham of Genesis 17 is not to be confused with the promise of a single “great nation,” as reflected, for example, in Genesis 12:1–3 and Deuteronomy 26:5.15 Second, in relation to histories of the Bible’s reception in colonial discourses, the national version of the exodus was less influential in Australia in the nineteenth century than it was in other settler histories. The Protestant typologies that claimed a political self-understanding as a New Israel in a new Canaan belonged more to previous centuries. This difference did not, however, prevent the Doctrine of Discovery arriving on our shores. As it turns out, the peaceful Abraham model provided sufficient support for the English Doctrine of Discovery, without requiring reinforcement from a conquest narrative.16 However, regardless of such nuances, repenting of the Doctrine of Discovery remains a complex theological task. Willie Jennings, for example, does not explore the possibility of nativist Christianities and, instead, points us toward a postracial Christian identity that in many respects resonates with the cosmopolitan hope that Ashcroft has described as postcolonial. For Jennings, the practice of postcolonial faith certainly begins with the experience of traditional Indigenous people, but it also expands radically outward. His concept of hope is focused on what he calls “the space of communion”: The space of communion is always ready to appear where the people of God reach down to join the land and reach out to join those around them, their near and distant neighbors. This joining involves first a radical remembering of the place, a discerning of the histories and stories of those from whom that land was the facilitator of their identity. This must be done to gather the fragments of identity that remain to learn from them (or at least from their memory) who we

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might become in that place . . . so that land is never simply released to capitalism and its autonomous, self-perpetuating turnings of space inside commodity form.17

This conception of communion has become central to my own work: the first priorities in the practice of faith will include an embrace of the land and its traditional Aboriginal owners. From them we can learn “who we might become in that place,” and learning from traditional Indigenous wisdom entails resistance to the urgings of capitalism to transform land into a commodity, severed from the traditional relationships that give it meaning—relationships that weave together both human and nonhuman creation in very particular places. Without this starting point, a multicultural Christian faith will continue to trade on stolen goods extracted during the colonial past. Along with my substantial debt to Willie Jennings, however, I need to register some disagreement. He argues that the fundamental problems of white theology were conceived in the error of supersessionism—taking over Israel’s story and making it one’s own. The Spanish took this hermeneutical path in the imperial conquests of Latin America, for example, reading the Hebrew Bible as Israelites instead of as Gentiles.18 In their own eyes, they became the New Israel in the New World, and the pattern is well known elsewhere in the Americas and in Africa. Israel was superseded by the ideology of whiteness, according to Jennings, with tragic consequences for all concerned. To be clear, I agree that racist and colonial assumptions will continue to infect the life of the Christian churches to the extent that we resist the call to read the scriptures, and to read the world, as Gentiles. But Jennings tends to avoid the Hebrew Bible and to focus on familiar New Testament examples, such as the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21–18. We, the Gentiles, should be identifying with this Canaanite woman, he argues: “we are to be counted among the goyim.” This kind of point has repeatedly been made in postcolonial biblical criticism,19 but my approach takes a broader view of scripture, and does not succumb to the temptation to read the Old Testament only as foil to Christian enlightenment. We need to take up Jennings’s challenge, I think, not so much in reading the New Testament, where the place of the Gentiles is in many respects assured, but also in interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, where reading as Gentiles often presents a more complex set of hermeneutical issues. Expanding on Jennings’s proposal, I suggest that Christians need to read the Hebrew Bible from the point of view of the Gentiles. To do so, however, implies that the national imagination within Israel’s scripture—the Deuteronomistic imagination—cannot be the center of a Gentile hermeneutic. Christians are not baptized into Moses. We also need to confess, however, that the modern idea of nationalism was born in Protestant stables, especially when the Treaty of Westphalia



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created the idea of separate jurisdictions for the various denominations of Christianity. Ironically, the Zionist philosopher Yoram Hazony has recently celebrated the achievements of Protestantism in the making of seventeenthcentury nationalism, implicitly endorsing the idea that Gentile nations might be inspired by Deuteronomy in articulating resistance to Catholic empire.20 In some respects, Hazony celebrates precisely what Jennings decries. Many critics would want to contest Zionist readings of the national imaginary in Deuteronomy, but this is not my central concern in this context. The point here is that in reading scripture as Gentiles we should acknowledge the tension in the Hebrew Bible between its national and international imaginaries; the relationship between Israel and her foreigners is repeatedly contested between the major traditions. As I have argued in Political Trauma and Healing, the international imaginary stretches from the Priestly Abraham in Genesis to the wise foreigner, Job, whose ethics rest entirely on creation theology rather than Israel’s covenantal traditions. When Job says “Speak to the earth, and she will instruct you” in Job 12:8, his speech presents a wisdom theology for Gentiles that is entirely compatible with the Priestly tradition. Moreover, Job presents a starting point in creation theology that we would expect to find in Indigenous Christianities, or Indigenous spirituality more broadly.21 Having suggested a distinction between national and international imaginaries in scripture, it is now possible to formulate a question for Willie Jennings more precisely: is he implying that there is an inherent danger in Aboriginal Christianity that it will be subsumed into a larger Indigenous nationalism, and in effect, lay claim to the national imaginary within scripture? Was this the case in the Te Kooti rebellion in Aotearoa–New Zealand, for example, where particular Maori groups configured themselves as Jews?22 I would not presume to understand all the complexities of this particular story in Aotearoa, but I do want to make a more general suggestion. It seems to me that there are many different kinds of cultural self-assertion. A cultural group does not need the machinery of a nation-state to support its collective identity. The Chin and Karen peoples, for example, have transnational identities that are sustained both inside and outside of Burma (and some have lived for many years in the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border before migrating to Australia and elsewhere). Aboriginal communities in Australia embrace a similar complexity, living both inside and outside their traditional country, and they are far from being nation-states.23 Their advocacy of self-determination is often linked to demands for cultural acknowledgment from the wider population and from the various agencies of government. Shortly after native title was first discovered in Australia, for example, Aboriginal lawyer Michael Dodson proposed a model of double citizenship— one belonging to the Commonwealth and one belonging to each Indigenous

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nation. But even in this case Dodson explicitly excluded the secession of new Aboriginal nations, as did the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.24 He drew attention to layers of sovereignty embedded in federal constitutions, which devolve a number of sovereign powers to their constituent states, as long as these powers do not substantially conflict with a federal government’s jurisdiction. Just as constituent states maintain certain sovereign powers under federal arrangements, so also Dodson proposed a layered approach to Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction, which, in effect, would promote more respectful relationships within the public domain and require the acknowledgment of corporate Indigenous rights, rather than simply the individualist conceptions of human rights at home in Western cultures. Dodson’s approach implicitly addressed the enduring problems of the individualist conception of democracy (one person, one vote) that in effect awards power to the group who can muster the largest number of voters, regardless of historic injustices. Wherever Indigenous people are minorities within settler colonial states, their interests cannot be asserted via a democratic weight of numbers. And, once again, cosmopolitan versions of hope usually do nothing to support the agency of minority Indigenous groups within democratic states. As a consequence, I think that Christian mission should resist a generalizing postcolonial embrace of a cosmopolitan utopia, even when it is presented in theological dress.25 There are of course significant strands of diaspora Christianity that may well find ways to embrace cosmopolitan ideals. But I think we should begin with Indigenous experience, not just because this is unfinished business in settler colonial contexts but also because renewed engagements in this context will also renew Christian practice in many other areas. The local vision of communion reaches first down to the earth, and to the traditional owners of that earth, before expanding outward as Willie Jennings suggests in movements of Christian faith across cultural boundaries. The first movement of communion embraces the task of learning from the traditional custodians of that locality within the particularities of its ecology. The second movement of communion recognizes that every bioregion is ultimately linked within a planetary web of life. Both movements will provoke new practices of repentance on the part of transcultural Christian churches. ON GLOCALIZATION Having defended a localized Indigenous beginning point within Christian mission, it now becomes necessary to engage with the planetary realities of ecology, as well as the collaborative possibilities within world Christianity. I



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want to continue with Willie Jennings’s vision of “the space of communion” and especially the challenge he offers in a vision of resistance to the deterritorializing march of global capitalism. My own awareness of economics grew significantly through the years 2005–2008, when I was working with an Aboriginal representative body in Victoria on renewing the vision of their traditional economies. In the absence of treaties, this advocacy attempted to expand on the vulnerable legal foothold created by native title legislation, linking native title rights and interests to broader strategies of economic development. Native title jurisprudence in Australia has demonstrated a notoriously deficient economic hermeneutic. In the eyes of our Federal Court, native title rights and interests are seen as essentially the same rights and interests exercised two centuries ago when the British first asserted sovereignty—hunting, fishing, and gathering resources on traditional country. The rights to these activities are generally defined in our law as noncommercial, and therefore they are very difficult to utilize in the development of Indigenous economic aspirations.26 However, all the current research and consultations indicate that despite the examples of intra-Indigenous political conflict, most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are seeking a kind of “fusion of horizons” between traditional culture and contemporary economic participation. To borrow Ashis Nandy’s terminology, these aspirations could be understood in terms of “critical traditionalism,” a hermeneutic that seeks to revitalize key features of traditional cultures, notably their ecological, spiritual, and communal values.27 Instead of allowing movements of capital to roll over an undeveloped terra nullius, critical traditionalism looks for a cultural match between trade arrangements and local participation, or as Jon Altman puts it, “economic hybridity.”28 These notions of critical traditionalism and economic hybridity have great significance for biblical hermeneutics and Christian mission. In thinking through our economic practices, the churches need to be exploring the possibilities for collaboration with Indigenous peoples around initiatives that promote holistic understandings of well-being over the dominant capitalist measures of consumption and growth. Ellen Davis has provided one perspective on this kind of hermeneutical work in her book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, which combines biblical exegesis with a critique of modern agribusiness in order to produce a theological vision for ecologically sensitive economics. In her chapter “Covenantal Economics: The Biblical Case for a Local Economy,” she sets out the reasons why the agrarian models of family land in the Hebrew Bible, both Deuteronomistic and Priestly, can provide a social imagination for renewing spiritual bonds between people and place. She argues that the modern departures from biblical ideals of “local communities with local food economies”

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have led our culture into grave danger.29 In terms of her practical hermeneutics, Davis translates this argument into an embrace of local farmers’ markets and an ethical aversion to imports.30 Davis does not begin with the international discourse of Indigenous rights, as I have done in this chapter. Rather, her work promotes biblical motifs of local redemption, rooted in ancient Israelite discourse concerning the restoration of families and their traditional lands. Her advocacy dovetails into international concerns by taking the more humble path of scriptural reasoning. But her reasoning about “covenant economics” may prove illuminating for dialogues with Indigenous groups precisely because she has taken a somewhat literalistic turn in her approach to the redemption of “country”—to use an Australian term favored in Aboriginal English. In comparison with Davis’s agrarian arguments, some other strands of “covenant economics” are evidently assimilated within urban environments. For example, Richard A. Horsley confesses that the economic basis of a livelihood within industrialized societies is not the possession of ancestral land but simply “having a job.” Accordingly, he calls for an infrastructure to support health, education, and safety concerns that underpin employment within an industrialized America.31 Similarly, the Relationships Foundation in the United Kingdom highlights the ways in which an individual’s employment within a modern corporation should be framed by principles of “covenantal” relationship that both constrain and enable the ethics of an organization. The advocacy of covenantal principles in these two examples has no necessary consequences for a return to agrarian models of redemption, as Davis has suggested.32 One other biblical scholar working in the area of economics, Roland Boer, is ironically more directly disposed to an agrarian future not because he has any interest in rehabilitating biblical norms, but because an embrace of subsistence economies is fast becoming the last solution left standing. After providing a taxonomy of ancient economies, Boer suggests that imperial exploitation and tribute relations were inherently unstable in part because they were predicated on class divisions. Similarly, the extremes of inequality today are beginning to create new forms of instability. Subsistence regimes, on the other hand, operate according to an “optimal rather than maximal engagement with nature.” Opposing the neoclassical celebration of maximal efficiency, Boer proposes that “an optimal approach does not operate for the sake of prestige, power, profit, or greed, but to ensure survival in the lean time that is always just around the corner.”33 Subsistence is the most resilient form of life, with the least impact on the environment, and the small commune is for Boer apparently the only sustainable alternative. Although there are numerous small-scale examples of local communes, it is very unclear how the transitions toward more comprehensive economic



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habits of this kind would be effected. It seems to me that any Christian participation in the construction of local communes should first engage with Aboriginal people. The longest-standing examples of subsistence economy are clearly the Indigenous societies whose traditional ecological knowledge is among the planet’s most precious resources if we are to preserve a sustainable planet for future generations.34 At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there are certain achievements of the modern world that would never have arisen from within subsistence societies: our modern health sciences and information technology would be just two of the most important examples. Each of these domains are fraught with pressing questions of justice, but unless societies are willing to live without these benefits of modernity, some kind of economic hybridity will be necessary into the future. Local and international economies will need to be framed cooperatively within the constraints of planetary ecology. LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL WELL-BEING Once it is recognized that local economies are ultimately located within larger ecological webs of life, it becomes necessary to think through the relationships between local and international economies. Recent economic critiques of inequality have been steadily gaining traction, but ironically, detailed strategies for the promotion of equality inevitably encounter a range of practical and philosophical difficulties. If we are to avoid a new round of imperialist impositions of development theory, it will also be necessary, in my view, to avoid abstract aspirations for equality. More helpful is the “capabilities approach” proposed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, which offers some postcolonial potential while grappling with the tensions between local and international norms. Sen and Nussbaum argue that well-being is best thought of as a basic set of capabilities that may take shape differently depending on the particularities of a culture. Characteristic capabilities concern such things as life expectancy, health and safety, education and employment opportunity, freedom of expression and religion, social affiliations, and connections with nature. The fact that there is no definitive list of capabilities demonstrates not that they are hopelessly relativistic, but rather that the description of their content cannot be clarified without the aid of deliberative political processes, processes that are themselves held accountable by critical media within civil society. In her own version of the capabilities approach, Martha Nussbaum has argued that generalized talk about equality and development is likely to be ineffective unless it emerges from concrete communities and from their own

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conceptions of well-being and agency. National sovereignty therefore plays a part in this political philosophy, at least to the extent that it embodies the expression of a people’s capacity to make laws of their own choosing. “The nation,” she argues, “has a moral role that is securely grounded in the Capabilities Approach, because the approach gives central importance to people’s freedom and self-definition.”35 International statements of the core capabilities may be possible, and even necessary, but these can only be formulated through the patient work of demonstrating how each political tradition can arrive at intersecting norms. I would suggest that the long and complex processes that led to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples might be taken as exemplary of the kinds of international debate that might be necessary in order to articulate generic statements of Indigenous capabilities. But such international statements will remain detached from actual application if they are not entrenched in national and domestic legislation, and given practical expression through the development of institutions and agencies at work on the ground in each local context. The international churches need to work through the same kind of process in more overtly theological terms. I have been encouraged recently to see Canadian churches supporting a bill that would see this particular UN Declaration entrenched in their domestic legislation, and it is also worth noting that the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation process led to recommendations that called on bodies within civil society, including churches, to engage with the legacies of Indigenous dispossession and to invest in new conversations and strategies for the healing of intergenerational trauma.36 We need careful theological reflection on the reasons for denying Aboriginal spirituality in the past, and proposals for a renewed solidarity with Indigenous praxis, inside and outside our churches. To this end, it will be helpful to reflect further on Priestly theology within the Hebrew Bible. Not only does this theology provide us with a vision of universal human solidarity in Genesis 1, but it is important to remember that the Priestly vision of creational solidarity was forged in a counter-imperial imaginary, rather than via the nationalism of Deuteronomy and Joshua. It was the Priestly tradition that established not only the unity of all human beings but also the unity of human and nonhuman creatures in Noah’s covenant in Genesis 9. In the context of climate change and the dramatic global losses of biodiversity, it is time to rethink these Priestly foundations in Genesis.37 Nevertheless, I find myself endorsing the tension that Martha Nussbaum has described between the international scope of a capabilities approach and the necessity for local political deliberation. In relation to the Hebrew Bible, this tension arises in the enduring validity of both the local and international



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imaginaries. The national imaginary remains problematic for all the reasons articulated at the beginning of this chapter, but the weaknesses of the nationstate should not lead us to conclude that cosmopolitan internationalism is the only way forward, as has sometimes been suggested in postcolonial depictions of hope. In partial agreement with Nussbaum’s capabilities approach (although not for her reasons), I would conclude that in seeking a redemptive communion between cultures, as well as between human and nonhuman creatures, it will be necessary to live in the tension between national and international imaginaries. A theologically informed internationalism cannot be content with a superficial embrace of the world church, but must first repent of the refusal to learn from Indigenous testimonies to the Creator Spirit. NOTES 1.  Bill Ashcroft, “Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope,” Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia 1 (2009): 12–22; Bill Ashcroft, Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2016). 2. Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour, and Richard Wilson, Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–26. 3.  Cf. Graham Paulson, “Towards an Aboriginal Theology,” Pacifica 19 (2006): 310–20. 4.  See the interview with Tinker in the short film Doing Two-Way Theology, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u8uu2_Qq78. Selected papers from this conference were published in Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea, eds., Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theology: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 5.  See, for example, Yin C. Paradies, “Beyond Black and White: Essentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity,” Journal of Sociology 42 (2006): 355–67. 6.  Cf. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989). 7.  See, for example, Neville Naden, “Aboriginal Land and Australia’s First Nations Peoples: Calling for Treaty, Recognition, and Engagement,” in Postcolonial Voices from Downunder: Indigenous Matters, Confronting Readings, ed. Jione Havea (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 47–58. 8.  See, for example, Anne Pattel-Gray, ed. Aboriginal Spirituality: Past, Present, Future (Blackburn: HarperCollins, 1996); Paulson, “Aboriginal Theology”; Steve Bevis, “New Songs and Old Songlines: Aboriginal Christianity and Post-mission Australia,” in Religion and Non-religion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples, ed. James L. Cox and Adam Possamai (New York: Routledge, 2016), 129–56. 9.  Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 157.

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10. Sanneh, Translating the Message, 106; cf. Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, Nationalism and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). 11.  Mark G. Brett, Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2008), 26–27; Djiniyini Gondarra, “Overcoming the Captivities of the Western Church Context,” in The Cultured Pearl: Australian Readings in Cross-cultural Theology and Mission, ed. Jim Houston (Melbourne: JBCE, 1988), 180. 12.  Report from the Indigenous Peoples Organisations (IPO) Network of Australia to the United National Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Eleventh Session— New York, May 7–18, 2012. The Doctrine of Discovery: Its Enduring Impact on Indigenous Peoples of Australia and the Right To Redress (articles 28 and 37 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). 13. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 161. 14.  See Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Reading the Hebrew Bible in Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” Ecumenical Review 68 (2016): 36–61; on the Australian context see Ann Curthoys, “Whose Home? Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Mythology,” Journal of Australian Studies 61 (1999): 1–18; and Mark G. Brett, “Feeling for Country: Reading the Old Testament in the Australian Context,” Pacifica 23 (2010): 137–56. 15.  On the relevance of Priestly theology after the demise of Christendom, see Mark G. Brett, Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 91–109. 16.  See Mark G. Brett, “Feeling for Country”; Mark G. Brett, “A Suitably English Abraham,” in Postcolonial Voices from Downunder: Indigenous Matters, Confronting Readings, ed. Jione Havea (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 110–21. 17. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 286–87. 18. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 96–98; cf. Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992). 19. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 262. See further, James W. Perkinson, “A Canaanite Word in the Logos of Christ,” in Postcolonialism and Scriptural Reading, ed. Laura Donaldson (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), 61–85; Alan Cadwallader, Beyond the Word of a Woman: Recovering the Bodies of the Syrophoenician Women (Adelaide: ATF, 2008). 20.  Yoram Hazony, “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom,” Mosaic, September 6, 2016. 21.  Mark G. Brett, “‘Speak to the Earth, and She Will instruct You’ (Job 12.8): An Intersection of Ecological and Indigenous Hermeneutics,” in Where the Wild Ox Roams: Biblical Essays in Honour of Norman C. Habel, ed. Alan Cadwallader (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2013), 1–19. 22. Judith Binney, Redemption Songs: A Life of the Nineteenth-Century Maori Leader Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997). Cf. the comparable example of Hendrik Witbooi in Namibia, discussed in Hendrik Bosman, “A Nama ‘Exodus’? A Postcolonial Reading of the Diaries of Hendrik Witbooi,” Scriptura 108 (2011): 329–41; Werner Hillebrecht, “Hendrik



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Witbooi: Ikone und Inspiration des antikolonialen Widerstands und des unabhängigen Namibia,” in Namibia–Deutschland. Eine Geteilte Geschichte. Widerstand, Gewalt, Errinerung, ed. Larissa Förster, Dag Henrichsen, and Michael Bollig (Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva, 2004), 144–53. 23.  See James F. Weiner, “Diaspora, Materialism, Tradition: Anthropological Issues in the Recent High Court Appeal of the Yorta Yorta,” in Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title, Issues Paper 18, 2002, www.aiatsis.gov.au/rsrch/ntru/ntpapers/ IPv2n18/pdf. 24.  Michael Dodson, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and Citizenship,” address delivered at the Complex Notions of Civic Identity Conference, University of New South Wales, August 20, 1993. 25.  See, for example, Namsoon Kang, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Theology: Constructing Public Theology from the Future,” in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality and Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 263–64. 26.  See, for example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Native Title Report 2004 (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2005), 72–79, http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/ntreport04/. 27.  See, for example, Ashis Nandy, “Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo,” Alternatives 12 (1987): 125–52, reprinted in Ashis Nandy, Bonfire of Creeds: The Essential Ashis Nandy (New Delhi: Oxford University, 2004), 17–29. 28.  See especially Jon Altman, “What Future for Remote Indigenous Australia? Economic Hybridity and Neo-liberal Turn,” in Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, ed. Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 259–80. 29.  Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 101–19, 106; cf. Rajula Annie Watson, A Christian Understanding of Land Ethics (Delhi: ISPCK, 2004). 30.  Luke Bretherton’s work on “political consumption” provides another helpful perspective on international trade and questions of equity, which might be brought into dialogue with Davis’s conception of covenantal economics. Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 184–87. 31.  Richard A. Horsley, Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 166. 32.  See especially Michael Schluter and David Lee, The R Factor (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993); Michael Schluter and John Ashcroft, eds., Jubilee Manifesto: A Framework, Agenda and Strategy for Christian Social Reform (Leicester: IVP, 2005). 33.  Roland Boer, “On the Feasibility of Subsistence Economics,” in Reading the Bible in an Age of Crisis: Political Exegesis for a New Day, ed. Bruce Worthington (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015), 109–29. Roland Boer, The Sacred Economy (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2015). 34. See, for example, Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008); Serena

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Heckler, ed., Landscape, Process and Power: Re-evaluating Traditional Environmental Knowledge (New York: Berghan Books, 2009). 35.  Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), 114, cf. 92, 111. 36.  See, for example, Steve Heinrichs, ed., Wrongs to Rights: How Churches Can Engage the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Winnepeg, MB: Mennonite Church Canada, 2016). 37. See extended argument in Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006); cf. Brett, Political Trauma, 91–109.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized aboriginal, 10, 152, 168–79 activism, 90, 106–15, 171 activist(s), 2, 25, 105–108, 112–14, 156, 170 adivasi(s), 58, 60, 130 alternative(s), x, 7, 17, 21, 23, 26, 32, 34, 38, 72, 75, 76, 78, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 112, 113, 126, 136, 142, 156, 171, 176, ambivalence, 91, 100, 101, 115 ambiveilence, 89 anansi, 87–101 anarchy, 125 ancestor(s), 8, 12, 94, 129, 162 Arrival, The, 3–4 babbler, 6, 133, 145 Babylon(ia), 4, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 152, 160, 162 belonging, 26, 58, 88, 107, 131, 173 beyond, 94, 96, 108, 124, 128, 130, 168, 170, 171 black, 6, 7, 37, 59, 80, 98, 133, 134, 135, 137, 154, 155, 170 Black Lives Matter, 8 blessing(s), 2, 5, 35, 152, 158, 159, 162

Cañedo, Emard, 5 capital(ist, ism), 55, 60–64, 72, 73, 76–79, 94, 124–26, 134, 134, 139, 167, 172, 175 caste(ism), 18, 21, 31, 58–62, 72, 125, 126–30 catchment, 154, 159 charity, 49, 50, 124 chicano(s), 105–15 civil rights, 59, 63, 81, 82 class(es), 2, 20, 38, 44, 46, 47, 58, 60–62, 71, 73–82, 88, 109, 114, 115, 127, 137–39, 176 climate change, 151, 153, 167, 178 collaboration, 1, 2, 3–5, 7–10, 12, 158, 167, 169, 175 color blind, 5 common good, 4, 44, 74 commune(s), 98, 176, 177 communion, 49, 51, 171, 172, 174, 175, 179 consciousness, ix, 55, 58, 60, 127, 171 contest(ed, ing), 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 126, 131, 135, 173 convulsion, 142–43 203

204

Index

dalit(s), 18, 58–60, 66, 125, 127, 129, 130 democracy, 19, 37, 58, 94, 124, 126, 127, 174 development, 19, 20, 58, 59, 64, 72, 80, 156, 175, 177, 178 dhamma, 125, 126, 128, 130 dignity, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 34, 47, 59, 136, 142, 159, 169 discipleship, 26–27, 31, 32, 36, 38–40 discourse, 27, 37, 46, 55, 58, 62, 66, 72, 76, 87, 88, 97, 98, 109, 110, 129, 168, 169, 171, 176 discrimination(s), 5, 18, 25, 31, 37, 55, 114 dismantling, 87, 141 disputation, 133 doctrine of discovery, 167, 168, 170, 171 domination, 22, 50, 55, 60, 66, 77, 82, 87, 91, 100, 109, 115, 123, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 151 eat(ing, en), 76, 96, 100, 142, 152, 153, 157 ecology, 150, 152, 174, 177 egalitarianism, 127, 129 ekklēsia, 43–45, 125 elder(s), 8, 97, 162 elite(s, ism), 37, 58, 61, 80, 81, 109, 125, 136, 137, 141, 145, 150, 151, 159 emancipation, 8, 20, 90 ethnicity, 18, 47, 74, 76–79 exclusion(ary), 18, 23, 25, 28, 34, 37, 60, 123, 124, 126, 140, 168 exploitation, 21, 52, 63, 64, 93, 95, 133, 135, 176 fair trade, 78 fascism, 31, 64 fear(s), ix, x, 20, 21, 26, 31, 35, 97, 100, 130, 141, 155 fundamentalism(s), 19, 31, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 66, 134, 139

Garibay, Emmanuel, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 glocalization, 174 greed, 20, 31, 93, 174, 176 hegemony, 24, 62, 91, 92, 97–100, 151, 170 hierarchy, 33, 58, 93, 107, 109, 125, 127, 153, 161 hope(s), x, 7, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37–40, 44, 47, 78, 94, 97, 98, 135, 137, 142, 148, 157, 168, 170, 171, 174, 179 hybridity, 73, 89, 100, 175, 177 identity, 19, 22, 34, 46, 48, 55–58, 73, 76, 88, 94, 99, 127, 131, 150, 162, 168, 169, 171, 173 imagination(s), 24, 37, 38, 40, 79, 88, 89, 92, 97, 109, 110, 114, 123–25, 130, 142, 161, 162, 170, 172, 175 impoverish(ed, ment), 89, 95, 98, 155 indigenous, 10, 18, 108, 115, 125, 149–63, 167–79 intercultural, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100 justice, ix, x, 10, 17, 23, 24–28, 33–35, 38, 39, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 90, 91, 106, 107, 108, 111–14, 116, 123, 126, 128, 129, 130, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 170, 177 kenosis, 36, 40 Kim, Min Jung, 5 Latinx, 107, 114, 134 leadership, 10, 31–36, 40, 106, 141 liberty, 126, 128 Life in Fullness, 5 Mandumbwa, Crawford Kayombo, 5 manipulation, 56, 64, 66, 135, 138, 145, 154 margin(s), 18, 26, 27, 32–34, 38–39, 46, 58, 60 marginality, 114



Index 205

marginalization, 18, 25, 34, 52, 114, 140 marginalized, 7, 17, 18–24, 62, 79, 92, 123, 125–27, 129, 168 market(place), 18, 28, 32, 50, 56, 58, 63, 64, 145, 151, 176 mask(ing) 2, 3, 97, 141, 168 memory, 22, 96, 100, 134, 151, 154, 158, 159, 162, 171 middle passage, 134 military, 18–20, 50, 57, 80, 91, 93, 125, 141 mimicry, 99, 101, missio Dei, 38, 51 modernity, 46, 55, 56, 126, 127, 177 Mulenga, Barbara, 5 municipal(ities), 155 myth(ical), 64, 66, 90, 91, 92, 112, 114, 127, 142, 152, 153, 157 nation(alism), 2, 3, 19, 20, 31, 45, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 71, 75, 81, 90, 93, 95, 112, 113, 127, 133, 141, 143, 167–74, 178–79 native, 1–5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 88, 109, 152, 168, 169, 170, 173, 175 navayana, 127, 128 Nazism, 48, 133 negotiation(s), 8, 60, 111 occupation, 19, 45, 60, 98, 159 occupy, 1, 74, 75, 79, 100 oppression, 90, 96, 125 orthodox(y), 7, 43–52, 74, 125, 126, 130, 131 pantokrator, 149, 150 paradox(es, ical), 78, 91, 94 peasant(s), 78, 139, 160 Pharaoh, 8, 138 pilgrimage, 26, 39, 123, planet(ery), 92, 150, 151, 152, 154, 158, 162, 174, 177 polis, 43, 44, 45 polydoxy, 131

poor, 6, 10, 27, 31, 33, 34, 46, 48, 49, 50, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 81, 90, 94, 130, 136, 139, 155 poverty, 93, 155, 21, 43, 48, 49, 52, 63, 64 protest(ed), 1, 2, 7–9, 57, 97, 106, 156, 161 public, 2, 6, 11, 19, 20, 22, 43, 44, 48, 50, 57, 60, 64, 75, 97, 99, 155, 160, 174 rabble, 6, 133, 145 race, 47, 60, 71–74, 76–80, 92, 93, 95, 114, 170 racism, 21, 31, 39, 72, 75, 77, 80, 107 rage, 97, 143–45 rastafari, 87, 89 rat, 11–12 reconciliation, 49, 77, 141, 178 reformation, 133, 134 refugee, 143, 173 resistance, 2, 7, 8, 9, 17, 19, 25, 27, 28, 34, 37, 38, 45, 57, 61, 71–82, 87–101, 125, 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, 150, 155, 156, 167, 171, 172, 173, 175 sacred, 71, 76, 88, 101, 107, 109, 110, 111, 114, 116, 126, 128, 130, 135, 140, 143, 157 salvation, 5, 23, 26, 33, 37, 124 scriptures, 4, 7, 8, 9, 51, 111–16, 135–38, 140, 172 secular, 18, 33, 45, 55, 106, 126 service(s), 19, 20, 21, 22, 34, 49, 50, 56, 57, 137, 155, 156 sexuality, 6, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 114, 115, 119 shepherd, 149 shitstem, 87–101 slavery, 3, 38, 63, 81, 133, 135–37 solidarity, 18, 19, 22, 71–82, 123, 178 sovereignty, 33, 56, 83, 125, 130, 168, 169, 171, 174, 175, 178 species, 150, 151, 153, 154, 162

206

Index

struggle(s), 2, 17–19, 22–25, 26–28, 32–34, 58–60, 75, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 89, 91, 93, 106–107, 110, 112, 114–16, 126, 135, 136–37, 139–40, 149, 155, 157 subaltern(s), 72, 73, 126, 131 subjugation, 45, 133, 135, 139 suspicion, 55, 58, 137, 138 talanoa, 1–12 tradition(s, al), 8–11, 17, 18, 19, 21–23, 25, 26, 31, 33, 37, 47, 48, 55–57,

59–61, 64, 66, 73, 74, 78, 79, 81, 82, 111, 115, 123, 131, 136, 137, 145, 150, 151, 157, 161, 168–78 un-end(s, ing), 88, 89, 96, 100 utopia(n), 32, 33, 105, 111, 113–16, 168, 174 watershed(s), 151, 152, 153, 163 white(s, ness), 2, 6, 7, 10, 19, 59, 72, 75, 78, 80, 82, 133–39, 142, 143, 154–57, 167, 168, 170, 172

About the Contributors

Allan Aubrey Boesak is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric, a politician, and an antiapartheid activist. He was sentenced to prison for fraud in 1999 but was subsequently granted an official pardon and reinstated as a cleric in late 2004. Along with Beyers Naude and Winnie Mandela, Boesak won the 1985 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award given annually by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to an individual or group whose courageous activism is at the heart of the human rights movement and in the spirit of Robert F. Kennedy’s vision and legacy. Boesak recently published Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters: Prophetic Critique on Empire: Resistance, Justice, and Power of the Hopeful Sizwe—a Transatlantic Conversation (2017). Mark G. Brett teaches Hebrew Bible and ethics at Whitley College in Melbourne, within the University of Divinity. His research has focused on the book of Genesis, ethnicity, and postcolonial studies in the Australian context. He is the author of Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity (2000), Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (2008), and Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World (2016); editor of Ethnicity and the Bible (1996); and co-editor with Jione Havea of Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific (2014). Jione Havea, a native Methodist pastor from Tonga, is research fellow with the Trinity Theological College (Auckland, New Zealand) and the Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT) research center of Charles Sturt University (Australia). Havea edited, among others, Sea of Readings: The Bible in the 207

208

About the Contributors

South Pacific (2018) and Postcolonial Voices from Downunder: Indigenous Matters, Confronting Readings (2017). Jacqueline M. Hidalgo is associate professor of Latina/o studies and religion at Williams College. Her research examines scriptures and the shaping of relations of race and gender among U.S. Latinas/os, whose scriptures may include not only the Christian Bible but also other traditions, texts, images, songs, and stories. She is the author of Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (2016) and president-elect of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States. Michael Jagessar is a Caribbean wanderer at large who brings plenty of experience to subversion and plain-talk. He happens to be a minister of the United Reformed Church (UK), adding color to the leadership and helping to reshape its global and intercultural ministries. In his teaching he has dabbled in ecumenical theology, interfaith studies, and black and contextual theologies and practice at the Queens Ecumenical Theological Foundation (Birmingham, United Kingdom), from 2002 to 2008, and in liturgy and worship and practical theology at the Cambridge Theological Federation, from 2010 to 2014. Visit his webpage for more on him and his writings (https://caribleaper.co.uk/). M. P. Joseph is professor of ethics at the School of Theology, Chang Jung Christian University, Tainan, Taiwan. His work is done at the interface between people’s movements and academic/theological reflection, and he is attentive to the impact of globalization on the marginalized. He serves as chief editor of the journal theologies and cultures and recently published Theologies of the Non-person: The Formative Years of EATWOT (2015). Eleni Kasselouri-Hatzivassiliadi is a Greek Orthodox theologian who works as a gender expert and research and studies officer at the Greek National Center for Public Administration and Local Government. Additionally, she teaches at the Master Program on Orthodox Theology of the Hellenic Open University. Her main research area is women in the New Testament and in modern Orthodox churches. Jooseop Keum is former director of Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) of the World Council of Churches, based in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also the editor of International Review of Mission, the missiological journal incepted by the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. He teaches history and issues of ecumenical missiology as guest professor at Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul,



About the Contributors 209

Korea, and as research professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He served the Council for World Mission in London as the executive secretary of Mission Programme. He is the main editor of the new WCC mission statement, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, and he is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church of Korea. Deenabandhu Manchala, a theologian from India, has served as program executive in the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, coordinating the theological reflection for the Decade to Overcome Violence (2000–2006) and Just and Inclusive Communities initiatives (2007–2014). Earlier, he was on the staff of the National Council of Churches in India and Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, Chennai, India. Currently, he is the area executive for Southern Asia in the Global Ministries of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), United States, and works from Cleveland, Ohio. He holds a doctorate in theology from the South Asia Theological Research Institute, Bangalore, India. He has been engaged with a number of ecumenical initiatives and social movements at national and international levels and has also published many articles on ecumenism, mission, ecclesiology, justice, peace, and on the issues and resources of marginalized communities. James W. Perkinson is a long-time activist and educator from inner-city Detroit, currently teaching as professor of social ethics at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and lecturing in intercultural communication studies at the University of Oakland (Michigan). He holds a PhD in theology from the University of Chicago and is an artist on the spoken-word poetry scene in the inner city. He is the author of White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (2004), Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion (2005), Messianism against Christology: Resistance Movements, Folk Arts, and Empire (2013), and Political Spirituality in an Age of Eco-apocalypse: Communication and Struggle across Species, Cultures, and Religions (2015). Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and holds the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies. His main interests are social movements that bring about change and the contributions of religion and theology. Author and editor of twenty books and more than 135 articles, his most recent books include No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future (2009), Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude (with Kwok Pui-lan, 2012), Faith on the Road: A Short Theology of Travel and Justice (2015), and Unified We Are a Force:

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About the Contributors

How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, 2016). His books have been translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, and Chinese. Y. T. Vinayaraj is an ordained minister of the Mar Thoma Church, India. Currently he teaches at the Episcopal Jubilee Institute, Thiruvalla, Kerala. He holds a PhD from Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago. He is the author of Intercessions: Theology, Liturgy, and Politics (2015), Dalit Theology after Continental Philosophy (2016), Theology after Spivak (2016), and Empire, Multitude and the Church: Theology after Hardt and Negri (2017).