BOOK RELEASE

Rev. Dr. Y.T. Vinayaraj Political Theology in Transition (New Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2020).

Foreword

Y.T.Vinayaraj is one of the few Asian theologians for whom theology is a constant struggle. Despite the general belief that the so-called liberation theology has now more or less come to an end, he continues to see in it a means of thinking through some of the most important issues and problems of contemporary church and society. In this profoundly engaging book, he calls for a church of the multitude, a church without sovereignty - an open network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally and a platform of hospitality where no one is excluded. 

Forty five years ago Paul Lehmann bemoaned the widening gap between biblical and revolutionary politics and called for the transfiguration of politics in response to an environment of growing conflict and violence around issues of racism, capitalism and imperialism. His call was accompanied by a survey of the theory and practice of revolutionaries from Marx to Mao and Ho Chi Minh; from Fidel and Che Guevara to Camillo Torres and Nestor Paz Zamora; from Frantz Fanon to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and the Black Panther Party. He wanted political revolutions to reconsider the question of violence and become more spiritual by turning toward the ideals of Jesus. However, his line of thinking seems to be that much must be said on both sides.  While reproaching revolutionary politics for its rabid materialism, he overlooked the fact that his own magisterial authority derived from an alliance of the politics of established power and the anti-revolutionary ideology of the church.

Unlike The Transfiguration of Politics, this book is produced on a different terrain. While Paul Lehmann practiced theology during the time of old imperialism which extended the sovereignty of European nations beyond their very borders with an inside and an outside, the work of Vinayaraj takes place in the context of what Hardt and Negri call Empire, the name they have given to the political form of globalization. Unlike old imperialism, Empire has no borders, no centre, and no limits. ‘It is a decentred and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the whole globe’. This does not mean that the sovereignty of nation states has vanished.  We live in a period in which the victory of global capitalism and the defeat of any political alternative to neo-liberalism seem somewhat assured.  It is also a period when global as well as national conflicts seem increasingly driven by faith-based politics.

In more and more countries those on the political right are questioning the separation between church/religion and state. Theological imperatives gain more space in the rhetoric of many contemporary political leaders. George W.Bush’s description of ‘war on terror’ as a ‘crusade’ is an example.  In order to cover up the contradictions marring the coherent identity of the nation, politicians are turning to the politics of good and evil. They depict secular politics as the battleground of good and evil. The politics of eschatology is also played out against progressive secular politics.

Any attempt toward a theology and ethics of responsible involvement in social change should take all these into account, especially, the challenges of both national politics and the politics of globalization.  Vinayaraj is well aware of this and he makes his points with admirable clarity. At a time when theory is being continuously marginalized, he draws on theories and methodologies of contemporary cultural studies and postcolonial studies for help in reflecting on the possibility of a radical political theology. Recruiting resources from Spivak’s notion of subalternity, Hardt and Negri’s ideas of Empire and multitude, M.M.Thomas’s theology of the cross, Agamben’s reflections on the coming community, Ambedkar’s contest against Brahmanical hierarchy, and Deleuz’s idea of ‘society of control’, he is exploring the possibility for theology to connect with movements for a radical democracy.

The task of theology, in accordance with Spivak’s notion of subalternity as ‘a third position of being human other than the self and the other’, is ‘not to speak for the margin’, rather, ‘to learn to listen to the unspoken voices of the margin’, and consider ‘the subaltern as teacher’. This book of Vinayaraj invites us to share this insight and, like Spivak, provokes us to attempt to change ‘conditions of impossibility – the hopeless and negative feeling that nothing will change for the disenfranchised – into a condition of possibility.’

 T.M.Yesudasan

  Book Release 

Second Book in the “Re-imagining Church as Event: Perspectives from the Margins” series of Council of World Mission by Y. T. Vinayaraj

Faith in spite of empires: a foreword

Jione Havea*

(Jione Havea is the Research Fellow, Trinity Theological College, Auckland, New Zealand and Pacific and Contextual Theology Center, Charles Sturt University, Australia.)  

Faith is born in communities when humans figure out how to navigate the circles of life, under the eyes of unseen mana that are felt to be extraordinary, as if they are out of this world, or even divine. In Pasifika and Asia, faith existed prior to the rise of empires. When empires arose, they grabbed the land and with the land went the circles of life. Over time, empires act as if they own the mana that make creatures belong in the circles of life as well as give meanings to faith.

Any attempt to release the hold of empires over lands, waters, circles of life and people must therefore seek to break their claim to the mana. This is the primary task that Y. T. Vinayaraj attempts in this timely work, Faith in the Age of Empire: Christian Doctrines in a Postcolonial Sensibility. Vinayaraj’s intention is stated clearly in the introduction:

[T]he whole intention behind this work is to de-imperialize Christian doctrines and to signify them for a postcolonial spirituality. Postcolonial spirituality is the spirituality of the colonized and the displaced through which they signify a relational God, and ever-creating fluidity of creation and planetary humanity. It intends to strengthen their political practices of becoming and belonging in the midst of growing forces of fragmentation and discrimination. This work is done with the hope that it will enhance the church and the theological community to continue their ministry of signifying faith and practices vigorously for establishing a new world of justice in this world.

The specific empire in Vinayaraj’s sight is a religious one – Christianity, which spread over India along with the colonial expansion of the British Empire. With the mana of postcolonial spirituality, Vinayaraj shows that the Christian faith could be released from the colonial legacies of Christianity. He does this by revisiting, with postcolonial sensitivity, seven Christian doctrines: (1) God, (2) Creation, (3) Humanity, (4) Christology, (5) Church, (6) Mission, (7) Eschatology.

Vinayaraj’s work shows that, and how, the Christian faith may bear the fruits of mana in spite of the Western manners of the Christian church, in India and in other colonized lands. Flowing between the lines of this work is a healthy opportunity to exercise faith in spite of (read: instead of and in resistance to) empires.  

 

Afterword

Joerg Rieger

(Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA)

 Christianity has never existed in a vacuum, even though the church and its theologians have often acted that way. In this book, Y.T. Vinayaraj, aided by many other theological voices, develops a constructive argument that takes into account the fact that for 2000 years Christianity has shaped up in the context of empire. Of course, the purpose of this book is not to put down the legacies of Christianity altogether but to point out that there are always alternatives to empire and that Christianity has been able to produce some of those throughout its history and even today. This is what I have called the “theological surplus” of Christianity, a term which Vinayaraj picks up in this volume. In other words, Faith in the Age of Empire is a hopeful book, a book that is designed to help Christianity around the globe more forward in constructive and liberating ways.

In order to get to the good news, as I have argued in many places, it is important to develop an understanding of the bad news. This is what Vinayaraj does in this volume, guiding us from the oppressions of the Roman Empire, with which early Christians had to contend, to the Medieval empires, European empires of colonial modernity, and the more current embodiments of empire in our own globalizing age where the United States and a few other countries dominate. Empire, it is becoming clearer today than ever before, can be defined as what accounts for structures of domination and oppression through the ages. In our own times, the political structures empire are shored up and shaped by capitalism in major ways, linked with various forms of oppression along the lines of gender, ethnicity, race, caste, and class. Christianity, unfortunately, has often supported those unjust structures in economics, politics, culture, and religion, and there has been a price to pay. Nothing remained untouched over the centuries, not even its innermost beliefs and confessions. For that reason, theology has its work cut out if it wants to develop credible alternatives. 

What is guiding Vinayaraj in many of his judgements and constructive moves is what he calls “postcolonial sensibilities.” Much work has been done in postcolonial theology, and a good deal of it is reported and reflected in this book. While one might consider drawing a firmer line of distinction between postcolonial theology and liberal US-theology—there is a colonial heritage to be taken into account in liberal theology as well that is often overlooked—the creativity and ingenuity of Vinayaraj is admirable as he reconstructs images of God, Jesus Christ, humanity, the church, and the future. Far too often, Christianity has developed images of God that correspond with images of power in imperial contexts: God as heavenly monarch, sitting on a heavenly throne, removed from everyday struggles, is one example. Another one is God as all-powerful CEO, an often-unacknowledged image that nevertheless seems to be widely worshipped in contemporary Christianity.  Such images, it can be argued, have all turned out to be idols and led people of faith astray. But what else should be put in the place of these images? Ultimately, I would argue that theologians do not get to decide because the most powerful alternative images of God arise not primarily form the heads of theologians but from unexpected places of struggle and marginalization that cannot be controlled by the dominant status quo. For this reason, it is important to listen not only to the cutting edge of academic research but, more importantly, to expressions of Christianity (and religion in general), as they arise from communities that have not sold out to empire.

Much theological work remains to be done, especially in relations to such communities and the resistance to empire that they are putting up, visible and invisible. While Christians have learned a great deal in recent decades, we still need to develop deeper understandings of local variations of empire, as they affect the majority of the world’s population. In some periods and in certain parts of the world, the power of empire manifested itself in softer ways, supposedly dispensing what it considered order, civilization, and happiness. In other periods and other parts of the world, empire promoted the hard power of war, enslavement, and back-breaking labor that has wiped out whole populations. Much of this continues today, even in the heart of imperial nations themselves, where the suffering is greater than often realized. COVID-19 has made visible again the deep inequalities in countries like the United States and elsewhere, where minority populations and working people die in much greater numbers from consequences of the disease, and where another world seems all but impossible.

What does all of that mean for the reconstruction of theology? I would argue that local voices at the grassroots deserve more of a hearing yet, even in the circles of postcolonial theologians. These voices are distinct—including indigenous populations around the world, grassroots movements that tackle oppressions along the lines of race, gender, and class, as well as Dalit communities in India—but closer encounters with them might make visible some of the overlaps as well. In the resistance against dominant top-down images of God, alternative images not on deconstruct dominant power but also identify alternative images of the divine that stay closer to the earth, the lives of people and communities, and that organize the powers of the “least of these,” with which Jesus identified.

Moreover, encountering a multitude of new theological voices and actors, how can resistance and alternatives be organized so that empires can be challenged successfully? Theologians need to pay more attention to how subjects of postcolonial empires organize. Armed with these insights, perhaps communities of faith can emerge as alternative spaces in our own times, not only embodying political but also economic and religious alternatives that shake the foundations of the status quo, not merely proclaiming the new world but realizing it.

Table of Contents

 Foreword

Introduction

Prologue

1.   God

2.   Creation

3.   Human Being

4.   Christ

5.   Church

6.   Eschatology

7.    Mission

Epilogue

Afterword

Index

 

Available at ispck.org.in  

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RELIGION, POLITICS, AND SCIENCE IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ERA

                  

  

Covid 19 Pandemic has evoked various responses to address the crucial issue of Life in his planet-earth. The scientific world, especially the medical scientists and the researchers in the area of public health  has offered various studies and creative responses to make the public aware of the emerging challenges. The secular writers like Slavoj Zizek signify the need to have a dream of a community of common need. However, the responses from the religious circles are discouraging and disappointing. The religious responses address only the obstacles of having church meetings and sacraments in this crucial context of pandemic. It reminds me of the sharp criticism of Johann B. Metz  and Jurgen Moltmann who responded to the German Church and the world Christianity in the post-World War era regarding the privatization of religion. The contemporary theologians of the church are not able to come out of this sin of privatization of religion and open Christianity and the church to 'face the reality of the world' (Metz). 

The immediate provocation to write this note is the write-up of O.V. Jathanna regarding the issues connected with the celebration of the Eucharist under the conditions of the lock-down. I appreciate and acknowledge his sincerity, genuineness and the theological expertise to initiate such a discussion in this regard. However,  I just want to register my contentions with those responses while I keep my respect and love towards him. My serious obsession is that this response does not go beyond the thought-pattern of a common believer; rather than a response of a theologian.  

O.V. Jathanna offers three responses on the celebration of the Eucharist during the lock down period: 1. Postponing the Celebration until Normalcy Returns; 2. Utilizing Technology in the Celebration of the Eucharist; and 3. Strengthening the Family-Altar and Reviving the Home-Based worship service, including the celebration of the Eucharist.

All these three options are helpful for the church to plan the functions of its sacraments. However, what we expect from a theologian is something different, especially in the crucial context of pandemic. The concern of a theologian should not be just the unavailability of the sacraments; rather it should be about the efficacy of religion and its practices all-together in this particular context where people listen to science for more meaningful life in this planet. Theologians are expected to think about the issues of public health, global economy,and politics under the shadow of the pandemic that affect the people irrespective of caste, color, creed and religion. I think this is the time to discuss about the efficacy of liturgy and sacraments in the public ministry of church. The Italian philosopher and theologian Giorgio Agamben raises his obsessions whether our liturgy and sacraments perpetuate hierarchy and priestocracy. He contends that it is the liturgical and the sacramental practices that legitimizes hierarchy in the church in the name of the theology of a sovereign God. Thus, let this be a time of interrogation and investigation whether we need to deconstruct these practices in order to reclaim the legacy of Jesus movement in the early church period where the people found it as a public event of sharing and to de-imperialize the Constantine's legacy which shaped liturgy and sacrament as the celebration of power. Do we think that we need to democratize those practices in order to challenge the inherent dichotomy between priest and the believer, sacred and secular, man and women, touchable and untouchable, canonized and anarchical?          

Don't we need to reformulate religion in the context where people listen to science rather than religion to find ways to confront the realities of life? The sanctity of the alter is not beyond the hygiene-protocol of the health workers. Thus, it is not to bring the sanctity of the church-alter into the homes and we create another theology of sanctity in homes which may in turn disturb the genuine secularity of our homes. What is trying to communicate here is to think about radical religiosity and spirituality even in our public engagement and service where we find the divine presence and comfort. I think Covid 19 pandemic era is the right time to overcome the dichotomy between work and worship, religion and politics, sacrament and diakonia, secular and sacred, church and society. Christian theology is invoked by the science to join hands for finding ways to redeem humanity and the planet-earth. Encountering the emerging 'corporate capitalism' or the 'disaster capitalism' should not be sidelined while we think about bringing sacraments into our 'highly commercialized' homes. I think this is the right time to reform our spiritualities, theologies, and christianites rather than reclaiming the hierarchical provisions of the established religion. I am afraid that the post-Covid era may be the era of the established religions to reclaim their practices and theologies through which they legitimize the hierarchy and power. 

Y.T. Vinayaraj

12.06.2020

Kottayam