Ecclesiology with(out) Margins: Defining Church in the Context of Empire
Y.T. Vinayaraj*
(Published in Asia Journal of Theology (AJT) Volume 30 Number 1,April 2016)
The
emergence of the global Empire provides the new global context of theology.
This context is ecumenical and universal. No theological reflection can avoid
this context. All faiths and religions are bound to deal with this context.
There may be different starting points, depending on the locus of the faith
community. Whether one is at the seat and center of the Empire or at its
periphery, one is not outside of the Empire.
Kim
Yong Bok[1]
As Kim Yong Bok rightly said, contemporary
theology cannot evade the context of Empire. Empire has become an all-embracing
global order from where there is no escape. Though Kim points to the crucial
situation of desperation and hopelessness, the imperative of the Church to do
theology of life and hope in the contemporary context of Empire is clearly
established in his statement. Kim’s sense of crisis about the entrapment of
human life within the all-encompassing imperial logic of Empire is shared by some
contemporary political thinkers. But the crisis provokes and invokes Christian
theology to re-constitute its theology of the Church. However, the relationship
between Empire and Church is so complicated in the history of Christianity.
Despite the illegitimate alliance with the Empire through the ages, the Church
itself many a time had assumed the role of a juridical institution and
hierarchical agency. The Church as an “enclosed community” of authority and tradition
faces interrogation as it assumes the imperial ontology and hierarchical
functioning. It is the question of marginality that destabilizes the ecclesial logic
of “enclosed community” and challenges it to be a “coming community”—as Giorgio
Agamben calls it. For Agamben, the Church is “a community of those who have no
community at all.”[2] In fact, marginality deconstructs the
ontology of the Church. Ecclesiology has been exercising a comfortable position
in theology by accommodating marginality as the “excluded within” or an “exterior
Other.” Marginality as a site of deconstruction, on
the other hand, demands the reconstitution of the ontology of the Church. Can
we think about the ontology of the Church without margins? In other words, is
there any marginal location outside of the being of the Church in order to show
its solidarity as its “missiological Other”?
The same question is also valid vis-à-vis the
concept of Empire. Contemporary
political theorists like Antonio Negri and Michel Hardt argue that there is an “enclosed
ontology” of the Empire that controls, orders, and homogenizes nations, people,
cultures, economies, and politics in favor of the multi-national corporations
and imperial regimes. The slaves, the refugees, the inhabitants of the camps,
the immigrants, the unborn, the stateless, the homeless, the transgender, the
colored, the untouchables are the people “excluded within” or “included out” who
constantly nullify the “enclosed ontology” of the Empire that determines the
marginality as a “state of exception” or “bare-life.” Positioning in this
ontological dilemma of Empire and Church with regard to the question of
marginality, this paper asks the following questions: What would be the radical ecclesiology in the
contemporary context of Empire? When the Empire assumes an “enclosed ontology”
thereby it legitimizes the marginality within its logic of domination and
subordination, how do we define the ontology of the Church in its relationship
with the marginalized? Does the
ecclesiology that defines marginality as its “exterior Other” legitimize an “imperial
ontology” through which it offers salvation to the Other? Can we have a radical ecclesiology today
without margins as it denies the logic of “Oneness” of Empire and affirms the
logic of “manyness” of the “Multitude”? Denying
the logic of “Oneness” of the Empire and signifying the logic of “manyness” of the
Multitude as it was offered by Antonio Negri and Michel Hardt, this paper explores
the possibility of offering a theoretical/theological framework for a
contemporary radical ecclesiology without margins in the context of Empire. This
paper consists of two major sections. The first explains the notion of Empire
as it is proposed by Antonio Negri and Michel Hardt in their trilogy: Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth; the second section offers
a proposal for a radical ecclesiology in the contemporary Indian context of
Empire by signifying some of the theological treatises such as M.M. Thomas’s “New
Humanity” and Giorgio Agamben’s “Coming Community.”
I.
Empire, Multitude, and
Commonwealth: Signifying Antonio Negri for a Radical Ecclesiology in the
Context of Empire
Antonio
Negri, the Italian philosopher (with Michael Hardt) offers a detailed
discussion on the project of Empire.[3] Negri’s
notion of Empire is not to be confused with the medieval/ modern imperialism.
It is not a military-imperial regime like the Roman Empire or the American
Empire. Negri’s Empire signifies a post-globalized human condition where we see
the free flow of capital, information, and technology. It signifies the uneven
development of centre and the periphery countries and the irreversible gap between
the rich and the poor. Empire, as Negri and Hardt described it, is an
imaginative geography of globalization of world space, where boundless flow of
capital, labor and information transcend the older imperialist order and yet at
the same time plant the seeds of destruction and transformation of Empire.[4] Empire has no territorial center of power and
does not rely on any territorial boundaries. As Negri explains, Empire “is a
decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively
incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”[5] By managing hybridities, differences, and
plural exchanges through modulating networks of power, Empire offers an
imperial subjectivity for all of us whether we like it or not.
Empire
is a “network power” that includes the dominant nation-states, trans-national
institutions, capitalist corporations and other powers in a hierarchical order.
In the imperial network of power or global governance, not all powers are equal.
It is a contradictory system of inequality and hierarchies. However, all partners in this system maintain
the order intact to keep up their position within. It is not a peaceful coexistence of cultures,
economies, and politics; rather, it is a coexistence of war. Empire exists by
creating the state of war or conflict within and without. Empire is a war-centered mechanism. War in
Empire is not necessarily about military action; rather, it is the biopolitical
act of “producing and reproducing” of the subjects.[6] Negri and Hardt claim, therefore, that when
“life itself is put on center stage, then war becomes properly ontological.”[7] It is this ontological war situation that
sanctions the suspension of democracy.
Empire
is a political ontology. As a constituting power, Empire has no exteriority. It
is an ontology which has no outside.
Empire is a condition in which all of us are located within. There is no
“outside” or “escape.” Both domination and resistances are located within a
unified space. Resistance does not exceed the boundary of Empire; it happens
within the boundary of the Empire. As Negri rightly points out, terrorism is not
to deny Empire but to control Empire. This doesn’t mean inertia or the end of
resistance. Negri prefers the word “exodus” of the mass immigrations and the
need to do away with borders.[8] It is
the process of doing away with borders that invokes a new global democracy of Multitude.
In order to resist the biopower of the Empire, Negri proposes the theory of Multitude
as a radical, anti-imperial, political subjectivity that resists Empire from within.
According
to Negri, Multitude is the living alternative that grows within Empire. In
Negri’s perspective, there are two types of globalization: (1) Empire that spreads
globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through
new mechanisms of control and constant conflict and (2) new circuits of
cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and
allow an unlimited number of encounters.[9] is the latter gives rise to the possibility of
living in common and acting together while remaining different. For Negri, Multitude is an open network—life
in common. “Common” is not homogeneity
but alterity and difference. Unlike the
concept of “people” which is unitary and identitarian, Multitude is many.[10] Multitude is composed of many “irreducible
singularities” of cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual
orientations. Thus Multitude is
many-colored. It goes beyond the
category of class. It is a new concept
of people that even transcends the category of proletariat. The proletariat or
the working class refers to all waged workers, separating them from the poor,
unpaid domestic laborers, all the traditional workers who do not receive a
wage. Rather, Multitude is an inclusive
concept. The Multitude is thus composed
potentiality of all the diverse agents of social production. In the democracy of Multitude, the economic,
cultural, and the social realms enacted together to envisage an alternative
life in common. Multitude offers a
political ontology where the production of subjectivities is de-imperialized. As
Negri argues, our struggles determine our subjectivities.[11] In short, Multitude is the possibility to
envisage a political democracy of “common” in the age of Empire as we are today
in the multiple forms of local struggles for basic necessities of life: food,
water, land, and human rights etc.—the “Commonwealth” of humanity.
In their third book in this
series,Commonwealth, Negri and Hardt
propose a possible constitution for the “life in common.” Through the notion of
Commonwealth, they propose a
political project of the Multitude to initiate an ethics of democratic
political action within and against Empire. Commonwealth
articulates the anti-imperial social relations and institutional forms of a
possible global democracy. It is a democracy that invites all to share and
participate in the common, that is, the air, the water, the fruits of the soil,
all nature’s bounty—the habitat of humanity.
Working on the theory of Multitude and
Commonwealth, Michael Marder calls it “vegetal democracy.” For Marder, vegetal
democracy is the “growing with (and the growing-up) of democracy [that] hinges
on fostering the capacity to live the countless voices, and especially with the
dispersed multiplicity of non-voices and non-identities, that target us both
from within and from without: to fall apart in growing-with.”[12] Hardt and Negri explain this vegetal sense of
political subjectivity:
The
notion of the common does not position humanity separate from nature, as either
its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of
interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, promoting the beneficial
and limiting the detrimental forms of the common. In the era of globalization,
issues of maintenance, production and distribution of the common in both senses
and in both ecological and socio-economic frameworks became increasingly
central.[13]
With Commonwealth, Negri and Hardt conclude
the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of
freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution
for radical democracy in the context of Empire. It is an invitation to search
for a political subjectivity which is ontologically connected to the politics
of the Multitude. To fight against Empire is to search for a life in common—the
habitat of humanity, the Commonwealth.
Does this notion of Commonwealth or
the life in common imply a radical ecclesiology in the contemporary context of
Empire?
Exposing the trajectory
of the conviviality between Church and Empire, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza
offers a theological treatise on the anti-imperial ecclesiology in her
incredible work—The Power
of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire. In this book, as we have seen in the Negri’s
theory of Multitude and Commonwealth, Fiorenza speaks about the church as a political space—”the radial democracy
of equals.” [14]
The radical democracy of Fiorenza is the ekklesia
of wo/men which offers the language and space for the imagination to
develop a public religious discourse, “wherein justice, participation,
difference, freedom, equality and solidarity set the ethical conditions.”[15] Fiorenza, contra the
kyriarchal model of the Empire, defines church as a radical political space
where the logic of domination and subordination is denied and equality and
justice for all is affirmed. As Giorgio
Agamben rightly analyzed, the Church in history inherited an imperial model especially
in the post-Constantine period.[16] Alluding to Paul, Agamben
contends that by claiming itself as the kingdom of God or the divinely
legitimized Empire, the Church denied its call (klesis) to be paroikousa
(sojourner) and ended up as katoikein
(to dwell like an empire). When the Church becomes a sovereign power of rule and
its liturgies become the celebration of the sovereign God, the calling of the Church
is nullified and reversed. The Church as a sovereign power defines its ontology
unrelated to the excluded and the marginalized. Here the marginality is legitimized
within and accommodated strategically. In the historical trajectory of the
formation of ecclesiology, the theology of the economy of salvation (Oikonomia) helped it to overcome this
ontological crisis “mysteriously” (sacramentum).[17] Here, we need to assess
the epistemological trajectory of the Oikonomia
(the economy of salvation) out of which the theology of the Trinity and
Ecclesiology has been formulated.
II.
Ecclesiology
with(out) Margins: Defining Church in the Context of Empire
Marginality signifies a contingent social
location which is neither inside nor outside of the system; rather it locates
itself in the “in-between” space.[18]
However, the Western logic of “Oneness” otherwise called “Hegelian Ontology”
has succeeded in accommodating this “othered” social location within itself as
a “transcendent Other” or “exterior Other.” Following the Frankfurt School
philosophers, the postmodern philosophers of “hyper transcendentalism,”
especially the continental philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Immanuel
Levinas and Jacques Derrida, engaged with the “Hegelian Ontology” in a
deconstructive manner without challenging the transcendent legitimizing point—the
determining factor in Western metaphysics and ontology.[19]
The
Western theological tradition has always been transcendentalist and in turn it
has exteriorized its “missiological Other” from the very being of God. Through
the notions of Oikoumene and Oikonomia, it was able to manage its “exterior
Other” within itself as an “extended Other” or a “transcendent Other.” The early
church fathers attempted to manage the dilemma of marginality by delineating
their logic of Trinity. Through the logic of Trinity, they were able to
accommodate the Other within by keeping the notion of the sovereign God intact.
The notion of the sovereign God was indispensable
for legitimizing the early totalitarian political systems in the West. As
Laurel C. Schneider argues, through the notions of “economic trinity” and “immanent
trinity,” the early church had legitimized the sovereignty of God. According to
Schneider, the theology of Trinity that re-instates the idea of monotheism is
foundational for the colonial “missiological outreaches” in the history of
modern missionary movement.[20] Concepts
like relational unity, conciliar unity and mystical unity presupposes the One,
the singular, the sovereign, the Absolute God behind everything. Whether it is
Tillichian “Ground of Being” or Marion’s “God without being,” the logic of “Oneness”
has always been foundational for the Western theological tradition. The logic of “Oneness,” whether it is theological
or ecclesiological has always been political. However, the contemporary
postcolonial epistemological context demands a deconstruction of the logic of “Oneness”
and envisages the theology of “manyness” or the theo-politics of Multitude in
order to signify theology of Church in the contemporary context of Empire.
Following
the epistemological tradition of the “Hegelian Totality” and the Marxian
dialectics, Latin American liberation theology signified the question of
marginality as a critical hermeneutical point of theology in the
post-enlightenment period. Liberation theology problematized this “state of
exclusion” and tried to overcome the dialectics between the “center” and the
margin by empowering the marginalized. The problem with their conception of the
“state of exception” is that they tried to fix the marginality as an
essentialist and identitarian position which always tries to become part of the
oppressive structure dialectically. Hegelian dialectics is located within a
totality which remains as the foundation for liberation theologies. In the
method of praxis of liberation theology, the dialectics of the “included” and
the “excluded” remains intact and the marginality is being accommodated within
the logic of totality/Oneness/Oikonomia. Unlike the colonial logic of Western
theology, for liberation theology the “other” is nothing but the “transcendent
Other” who eludes the system of oppression by its exteriority and thus pretends
to be the annihilator of the hegemonic system, but in effect remains a
dialectical partner that sustains the political program of “salvation.” This is
well evident in the notion of the transcendent/sovereign God of liberation
theology.
However,
for postcolonial theology, marginality is not a fixed “othered” identity, and
hence it does not lament over its exclusion from the system nor does it wait
eagerly for its incorporation into the system.
Rather, it is a rhetorical point where it resists both the process of
othering and the process of fixation of its “given” location of
marginality. The category of marginality
is being used in postcolonial theology to denote the point of encounter,
exchange, and engagement “in between.” As Mayra Rivera comments, marginality is
an alluring, enigmatic, and contestatory space where the transcendence touches
human flesh.[21] For Rivera, marginality is the site of the “strange
encounter” where the divine flesh and the human flesh come to its relationality
and differentiality. Here, the Western Omni God is critiqued and placed in relationality,
fluidity and multiplicity. Rivera offers
a postcolonial theology of God who asks us to feel the touch of transcendence
in every human encounter at the site of marginality which is always “in-between.”
In the same vein of thought, Catherine Keller alludes to the notion of God as
relational, embodied and multiple in contrast to the Western Christian notion
of the Omni God.[22]
Critiquing the Western self-enclosed deity, which sanctions all kinds of
hegemonic power structures, Keller defines God in terms of ever-creating
fluidity and multiplicity that substantiates the “irreducible singularities” of
being and becoming. Put differently, the Western logic of “Oneness,” emerging
from the theology of Omni-God, positions the site of marginality as its “transcendent
Other,” and thereby offers its “gift of salvation” to its Other.
The logic of “manyness” on the other hand relocates
marginality in its “irreducible singularity.” The logic of “manyness” does not
promote an anarchical pluralism; rather it is an experience of “multiplicity”
which cannot be “subtracted” to One.
Deleuze and Guattari speak about a “pure multiplicity” which is not
derived from the One, but is something “from which the One is always
subtracted.”[23]
They call it rhizome. Looking at the
bunch of roots of the plant, they say, “Look at the plant which is not the
One.”[24] The
logic of “manyness” or “Multiplicity” dismantles the logic of “Oneness” and
elucidates “plurisingularities” of being and becoming. The logic of “manyness”
or Multiplicity, of course, offers a common realm of being and becoming but it
is always fluid, relational, and internally differential. Deleuze calls it chaosmosis.[25]
The Church is challenged here to re-imagine the positioning of marginality with
respect to its soteriological end. There is no such marginality which is
eagerly waiting to be empowered and uplifted. Marginality is no more a site of
the “outreach programs” of the Church; it is not an othered space of diakonia. Rather, it is the rhetorical
space that reconstitutes the being and the becoming of the Church. This is the
challenge before the radical ecclesiology to deconstruct its “Eurocentric”
theological and administrative frameworks and to recognize that its theology of
God or mission or ethics have never been innocent and apolitical.
The
logic of “manyness” or the theology of Multitude envisages radical political
practices, which in turn, reformulate the contemporary ecclesiology.
Marginality evokes a “politics of multitudes”[26] through
which the logic and discourses of the Empire are being interrogated and a
people-centered social democratic engagement is being re-imagined. Marginality
as the site of Multitude demands a counter economy, theology, and political
practices that nullify the logic of “One world” propagated by neo-colonization
and globalization. Marginality as the political site interrogates the logic
(law) of (infinite) justice through which the powerful nations legitimize their
war on their “political others.” Achille Mbembe calls the politics of Empire necropolitics—the political process of the material destruction of human bodies and
population in the name of (infinite) justice.[27] Marginality is nothing but the point of
reconfiguration of our political life itself. For Giorgio Agamben, the politics
of marginality is an experience of bare
life—people live outside of the territory of laws of immigration,
nationality and citizenship which reconfigure the notions of state, law and
justice.[28]
Catherine Malabou, while correlating the politics of marginality with the
notion of plasticity envisages a radical politics of body.[29] For Malabou,
marginality as plasticity signifies a materialist theology of life that
problematizes the material destruction of human bodies and populations. Here,
marginalized is not just the “exterior other” so that they can be
soteriologically retrieved; rather it is the embodied matter that makes even a “enmattered”
God matters to theology, mission and politics.
1.
Church
with(out) Margins: M.M. Thomas and New Humanity
Among the
Indian Christian theologians, it was M.M. Thomas who proposed an authentic
political ecclesiology on the basis of his theology of the crucified God—a God
who denies its own sovereign ontology to nullify the rule of the Roman
Empire—in the postcolonial Indian context.
We find a theoretical and theological connectivity between M.M. Thomas
and Negri on the project of formulating a political theology of Church on the
basis of his theology of humanization and the socio-political vision of the New
Humanity in Jesus Christ. The New Humanity theology of M.M. Thomas and his
understanding of salvation as humanization demand further reading and
re-articulation in order to search for a radical ecclesiology in the
contemporary context of Empire.
Thomas
argues that on the cross, Jesus Christ disarmed the rulers and the authorities
of the world. The empire is defeated and nullified. According to Thomas, Jesus’s
cross is a protest against the sovereignty of the Roman Empire and the act of
crucifixion was to nullify its logic of domination and marginalization.
Replacing a political victim on the cross itself exemplifies Jesus’s political
identification and embodiment. Jesus’s cross signifies the end of the
totalitarian power and the beginning of a new community—kingdom community—a
universal community where there is no dichotomies. In the new community, “there
is no longer any distinction between gentiles and Jews, circumcised and
uncircumcised, barbarians, savages, slaves and free; but Christ is all and in
all” (Col.3:11). The new human community is constituted as a single body—the
body of the crucified God in history. The crucified body of Christ is not a new
thing; rather it is the body of the slain lamb from the creation of the world
and it continues to be slain till the end of the world fighting against the
totalitarian forces of powers. The mark of crucifixion continues to be the sign
of the suffering struggle of God against the principalities and powers till the
end of the world. The mission of the Church
today is to embody this mark of crucifixion and to reconstitute its ontology in
solidarity with the victims of the world.
According
to Thomas, the Church is entrusted with a prophetic diakonia to discharge its duty based on the servanthood exemplified
by the crucified God. Thomas writes: “The church in India is called to proclaim
the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ as the source of redemption of all
spiritualties underlying religion as well as ideologies, and to demonstrate the
Koinonia in Christ around the Eucharist as the nucleus of a movement of the
larger Koinonia in Christ uniting peoples of diverse religions, ideologies and
cultures—as well as the cosmos with its bio-diversity.”[30] Based on his theology of cross, M. M. Thomas
explains the features of the mission of the church in India: (1) the calling of
the church is to resist the idolatry of power and wealth and other gods of
death in India’s collective life, (2) to be in solidarity with the poor and the
oppressed in their struggle for justice, and (3) to give up communal
self-interest and self-identity for the sake of creating in India a secular
national community in the midst of India’s religious and ideological pluralism
through manifesting a fellowship in Christ, transcending class, caste, ethnic
and religious communal divisions.[31] Thomas’s definition of the New Humanity and
the signification of church as the Secular
Koinonia reverberates with Negri’s political theory of Multitude. The
theology of becoming Church with the mark of crucifixion in the contemporary
world of Empire signifies that M. M. Thomas is in the process of formulating a
radical ecclesiology in India.
Thomas’s
theology of humanization through which he upholds as the hope of the future of
humanity makes him so significant among the contemporary political
theoreticians of Multitude. Thomas finds the foundation for his eschatological
anthropology in the theology of Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, as the
first fruits of the New Creation. Thomas’s hope in the future of humanity is
incorporated in his understanding of the Risen Christ and His coming. He cites
Paul: “We await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ who will change our lowly body
to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject
all to himself” (Phil.3:20-21). Becoming the tortured body of Christ, the
Church is being composed and constituted as a Multitude to resist the logic of
Empire theologically, liturgically, and hermeneutically. It is this call and
the composition of the Church to be and becoming Multitude only signifies its
relevance in the contemporary context of Empire. Here, Thomas remains optimistic unlike the
other contemporary political thinkers. Thomas’s political theology of
humanization is closely linked to his Christology and eschatology through which
he affirms and retains the significance of the composition of the Church.
2.
Church
with(out) Margins: Giorgio Agamben and “Coming Community”
Engaging with the Pauline corpus, Giorgio Agamben,
the Italian philosopher, offers an extended discussion on the “calling” (kletos) of the Church. It is a calling
that calls back or revokes every other vocation. According to Agamben, the calling
of the Church is a call for a messianic vocation that revokes all other
vocations in the context of the reign of the emperor. For him, the Church is a “messianic community”
that lives in messianic time.[32] Messianic time, as it is
well explained in the Pauline corpus, is the time that remains—the time in-between
the ascension and parousia. It is the
time that remains in-between Church and kingdom of God—the time the ekklesia takes to come to its end. End
time, thus is not a futuristic time; rather, ir ia a qualitative “now”—the time
of redemption within the present time.[33] Agamben defines Church as
a “coming community” that locates itself in a “state of exception”—the site of
the marginalized and the excluded and thereby envisages political ontology.
By “coming community” or “the community that
comes”, Agamben means a community of those who have no community. It is a
community of people who are being “excluded in” or “included out” in the
sovereign political paradigm. It is a community that cannot be co-opted by
totalitarian forces. Or it is a community where the sovereign law is being
inactivated. It is the community of the
de-imperialized subjectivities. Agamben
finds this sense of inoperability of the logic of Empire in the cross of
Christ. First and foremost, the cross signifies the inoperability of the
biopolitics of sovereignty and offers a radical politics of community by
replacing himself on the cross in the place of a political victim in the Roman
imperial context. In his reading Paul,
Agamben comments that the calling of the Church is to “enslave” itself to this
Messiah who becomes weak for the most wretched of the earth.[34] For Agamben, Church is called to be an
ontology of the marginalized—the Multitude.
The Church as a “coming
community” embodies the messianic politics
through which it takes a turn from liturgy to politics. It is through messianic politics that the Church
becomes part of the democratic process that challenges the contemporary
socio-political and economic sovereign powers. It is through messianic politics
that the Church re-invents its ontology in relation to “social ontology.” Defining
politics as a “social ontology,” Chantal Mouffe says that “the political cannot
be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisioned as constituting a
specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that
is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological
condition.”[35]
Church as a “coming community” envisages a “social ontology” that challenges
the exclusionary practices of the sovereign power and embodies the agonistic
politics of the excluded and exempted in our democratic process. It is the messianic politics that signifies church
in the contemporary socio-economic and political context of Empire. It is the
messianic politics that makes redemption happens in the day-to-day political life
of the people.
The Church as a “coming community” shares the
social ontology with the excluded people—the Multitude. According to Negri and
Hardt, the politics of Multitude envisage a radical democracy which is not
based on sovereignty. Multitude functions as a virtual multiplicity. It is the
power to create social relationships in common.[36] It is a radical notion of democracy which is
contrary to unitary, absolute, totalitarian democracy. It is a celebration of
multiplicity, relationality, plasticity. Multitude does not mean the unity in
diversity or commonality between units; rather, it is a shared solitude—a set
of relationship without a single essence.
M.M. Thomas calls it the New Humanity. The Church in the age of Empire
cannot but embody the politics of Multitude. The contemporary people movements
such as land struggles, struggle for the preservation of life resources,
anti-nuclear movement, anti-war movements, women’s movement, dalit resistances,
the political movements of refugees etc., appear before the Church not as diaconal
spaces but as the kenotic spaces through which the Church finds itself as the
church of the Multitude. Edward Schillebeeckx is absolutely right when he says
that what we need today is a negative ecclesiology:
We need a bit of negative
ecclesiology, church theology in a minor key, in order to do away with centuries-long ecclesiocentrism of the empirical phenomenon of “Christian religion”: for the sake of
God, for the sake of Jesus the Christ and for the sake of humanity.[37]
Conclusion
In the
contemporary context, Empire in India takes many forms—cultural, economic,
political, and religious. The logic of Empire
intrudes into the every aspect of human life. It denies our rights to food, clothing,
study and belief. A piece of beef is more expensive than a human life today. There
is no security for a dalit, woman, transgender in the public spaces. Religion
has become the ideology of hatred. The power politics smell death. The economy
of the Empire is nothing but the “economy of suicide” that demands that farmers
sacrifice their life for development. The cultural, religious, and linguistic minorities
are in anxiety and fear. Dalits are termed “anti-nationals.” Intolerance
constitutes the public life. On the other hand, the national elites, the multinational
corporations, the international nuclear regimes, find home in India. Yoga,
which never has been a political resource to challenge the casteist,
patriarchal, and the elitist social setting in India, has now been projected as
the mantra of global peace and unity. It is being done in the political context
where the beef-eating is banned and the indigenous cultural rights are
saffronized. This cultural-religious-economic logical nexus legitimizes a
multifaceted sovereign political power which has no single point of
performance. This logic of Empire penetrates into the brains and veins of the “citizens.”
Citizens really do not know where to practice this logic or when to deny it. The
democratic communities in India have to be more conscious about the biopolitics
of the Empire—the imperialist formation of subjectivity. The notions of state, democracy
and the people are being transformed in favor of the global Empire. The Church
in India is not spared this biopolitics. This is evident in the silence of the
Indian Church in the contemporary context of violence, violations and death.
The
challenge before the Church in India today is not just to offer its “given” salvation
experience to the world around; rather, it is to experience the fragments of
salvation in this world by becoming the ontology of the Multitude. For Giorgio
Agamben, it is an act of retreat for the Church to “inoperate” its inherent
juridical structure and to become a “coming community”—a community which is a
community of those who have no community. The radical ecclesiology challenges
the Church to realize its call to become a political community of the Multitude
in the context of Empire. The contemporary radical ecclesiology demands, as
M.M. Thomas puts it, a kenotic experience for the Church’s being and becoming New
Humanity in Christ. New Humanity or the secular Koinonia or the Multitude in
Christ to which the Church is called to witness is the hope of the world in the
context of Empire. Radical ecclesiology is a call within the call of the Church
to become a “weak church” of the Crucified God by becoming the body of the
crucified people “now”.
* Rev. Dr. Y.T. Vinayaraj is professor of Christian theology
at the Dharma Jyoti Vidya Peeth, Faridabad and the Nav Jyoti Post-Graduate and
Research Centre (NJPGRC), New Delhi.
[1] Kim Yong-Bok, “Asian Quest for Jesus in
the Global Empire,” Madang 1/2
(2004):2.
[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 1-2.
[3] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), xii.
[4] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire, 137.
[5] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), xiii.
[6] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Multitude, 13.
[8] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Multitude, 156.
[10] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Multitude, xvii.
[11] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Multitude, 197.
[12] Michael Marder, “Vegetal Democracy: The Plant
that is not One” in Politics of the One :
Concepts of the One and Many in Contemporary Thought, ed. Artemy Magun (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 128.
[13] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009), viii.
[14] Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word: Scripture and the
Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
[15] Adriana Hernandez, Pedagogy, Democracy, and Feminism: Rethinking the Public Sphere
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 31.
[16] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and
Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2011), 104-105.
[17]Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 37-38.
[18] For a detailed study of this point, see
‘Ecumenism and Marginality’ in Y.T. Vinayaraj, Intercessions: Theology, Liturgy, and Politics (New Delhi: ISPCK,
2015), 83-95.
[19] Of course, there is an epistemological
difference between the Frankfurt School philosophers and the
postmodern-Continental philosophers. However, many scholars especially the
post-Continental and postcolonial thinkers have pointed out that there is an
epistemological continuity in them in terms of their foundation on Transcendence.
A detailed discussion of this point is beyond the focus of this essay. For a
detailed study see, Y.T. Vinayaraj, Intercessions:
Liturgy, Politics and Theology (New Delhi: ISPCK, 2015).
[20] Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of
Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2008).
[21] Mayra Rivera, The
Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville: WJK, 2007).
[22] Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
[23] Gilles Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 32.
[24] Gilles Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
[25] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia, 1994), 299.
[26] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
[28] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 2005
[29] Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction,
Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009).
[30] M.M. Thomas, A Diaconal Approach to Indian Ecclesiology (Rome & Tiruvalla:
CIIS & CSS, 1995), 82.
[31]M.M. Thomas, “The Church in India—Witness
to the Meaning of the Cross Today,” in Future
of the Church in India, ed. Aruna Gnanadason (Nagpur: NCCI, 1990), 11.
[32] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 1-2.
[33] Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans. Patricia Dailey, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 6-7.
[34]
Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (London, New
York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), 13
[35] Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 2005), 3.
[36] M. Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004),
100.
[37] Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God (New
York: Crossroad, 1994), xix.
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