GENDERING MISSION, ENGENDERING MUTUALITY

                                      GENDERING MISSION, ENGENDERING MUTUALITY

                                                        (REVIEW 15) 

MODE OF MUTUALITY IN THE MARGINS OF MISSION: HERMANNSBURG WOMEN’S MISSIONS IN INDIA Gladson Jathanna (Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2015)

“The many glaring gaps, wounds, and omissions of encounters in mission call out to be minded, remembered, lamented, and transformed” (Marion Grau, 2011). Marion Grau identifies one of the manifestations of such ‘gap’ in the account of mission history is the absence of the stories of women as missionaries. Following Marion Grau, Gladson Jathanna de-archivize Hermannsburg mission documents and invokes us to listen to the stories of the native Bible Women. As he is explaining in the foreword, this search is nothing but his theological desire to speak with the dead. Of course, speaking to the dead is not an easy job! Listening to the dead ones, especially the subaltern dead ones is a disturbing experience since it is an invitation to re-live in the buried memories of marginalization and discrimination. Jathanna offers a counter-listening method in the theological research. Of course, theology is always hauntology—listening to the Holy Ghost!

Problematizing the ‘omission’ involved in the practices of the ‘Great Commission,’ Jathanna reclaims the spaces of women bodies and emotions in the ‘masculine’ act of mission. Gendering the mission is to problematize the unproblematized locations of historiography and missiology. Bringing native Bible women into the contemporary discourses of mission, Jathanna aims a counter-narration of history of church where the subalterns become the subjects not just the actors. In reclaiming the role of women in a historical paradigm, Jathanna makes a contribution to the unspoken gendered space of the mission history. By exploring the encounter between women missionaries and their native women co-workers in India, the researcher tries to attend the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the colonial narrations of mission and church history. 

Jathanna defines the site of the encounter between women missionaries and the native Bible women as the margins of mission where the ‘white subalterns’ meet Indian subalterns. Whatever it may be, it is a site of subalternity which is embodied in mutuality and hospitality. At this marginal site, the ‘other,’ ‘heathen’ is reconstructed and the ‘subjectivity’ of the subject (of mission) is re-negotiated. Modern mission was a ‘civilizing mission’ to redeem the ‘heathen,’ the dirt. The Zenana mission was also started as ‘redeeming programme’‘to reach out’ ‘the unreached Indian women (the gendered subaltern) who were enclosed in the dark rooms (Zenana means inner rooms). In contradiction to the narrations of the subaltern historians, Jathanna argues, there were some ‘intermediary spaces’ of negotiations between women missionaries and the native subaltern women in the Zenana mission through which both of them reconstituted their self-ness and the otherness and moved on to a mode of mutuality. 

Jathanna brings to us the multiple subjectivity locations within the women missionaries. There were wives of missionaries and single women missionaries involved in the mission programmes whose emotions and perceptions were neglected and misrepresented in the mission documents. Masculine mission discourses denied their subjectivities and envisioned them as ‘God chosen bodies’ for mission. Jathanna demonstrates this objectification of the bodies/ lives of women missionaries in the mission documents by highlighting the narration of a male missionary about his wife: “she is a very weak and sick woman. When she was lying on her bed during her first pregnancy, I shot a dog behind her window. And she was stricken with terror that she became slightly insane. Later she became a little better” (p. 60). It is their life ‘in between’ motherhood and mission, ‘wife’ and ‘missionary’, ‘home’ and ‘field’ reconstructed their subjectivity in association with the subalternity of the native Bible women. Thus, Jathanna argues that the site of the margins of faith is reclaimed as the threshold of fraternities in those mission paradigms which was never attended by the male historiographers. 

In line with the postcolonial theoretical framework, but affirming the multiple locations within the missional encounters, Jathanna offers a radical methodology of church historiography—the mode of mutuality. The mode of mutuality as research methodology denies the notion that the interplay between the women missionaries and the native Bible women was monolithic in constructing the self and the other. On the other hand, in the mode of mutuality the identities were constructed in fluidity and flexibility. ‘Mission field’ was the site of affirming their gendered subalterness; rather than a project of salvation or force of repression. Jathanna writes: “They stood, walked, sang, laughed, cried and lived in a mutual relationship where they negotiated a defined and designed subjectivity and demanded a mutual subjectivity” (p.136-7). Of course, mission is an invocation to live in this mode of mutuality through which we find our ‘own’ subjectivities as ‘inter-subjectivities’ and ourselves as ‘inter-beings.’

Jathanna offers us a tour—a theological journey, intruding into the mission archives to listen to the silenced (gendered) subalterns and to think about our own missiologies, church histories, theologies, Christianities and of course our ontologies. This book comes to us as a gift to re-articulate ourselves through the mode of mutuality in the world of distance, discrimination and destitution. Thank you my friend Jathanna for this incredible gift!

Y.T. Vinayaraj                                                                                                               29.07.2016 

(REVIEW 14) ECUMENISM WITHOUT TRANSITION?

ECUMENISM WITHOUT TRANSITION?

A Light to the Nations: The Indian Presence in the Ecumenical Movement in the Twentieth Century, Jesudas Athyal (Ed) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2016)

A Light to the Nations: The Indian Presence in the Ecumenical Movement in the Twentieth Century is a collection of articles that brings the evergreen memories of the Indian ecumenical pioneers into our present discourses of ecumenism. The life and witnesses of V.S. Azariah, Augustine Ralla Ram, Sarah Chakko, P.D. Devanandan, M.M. Thomas, Metropolitan Paulose Mar Gregorios, Stanley J. Samartha, Russel Chandran, Paulose Mar Paulose and Ninan Koshy are vividly narrated by the eminent scholars such as Roger E. Hedlund, Raj Bharat Patta, Aruna Gnanadason, David C. Scott, K.C Abraham, K. M. George, Wesley Ariarajah, Jayakiran Sebastian, George Zachariah, and Preman Niles. It is a historical piece of work that elucidates the Indian presence in the modern Ecumenical Movement. The significance of this volume is well-articulated by Michael Kinnamon in his foreword: “this volume reminds us that the ecumenical movement,, so often reduced to a study of texts or a listening of conferences, is actually embodied in persons who carry a vision of the church united and renewed” (p.xi).

In his historical analysis of the life of V.S. Azariah, Roger E. Hedlund portrays him as the forerunner of Indian ecumenism. It is inspiring to know that Azariah was a product of the mass conversion movement and spread the gospel among the indigenous people as a native missionary. Raj Bhrath Patta introduces Augustine Ralla Ram as the proponent of the theology of mission as political spirituality. Delineating his contribution in establishing Student Christian Movement of India as a student faith movement, Patta tries to redefine ecumenism as a program of building friendships. Aruna Gnadasan presents the story of Sarah Chakko as the testimony of “our foremother to whom the churches in India and the world over owe so much” (p.77). P.D Devanandan’s theology of religions and its relevance in the formation of ecumenical social thought are vividly discussed in David C. Scott’s essay. He argues that Devanandan’s theology of religions enriched ecumenical theology to relocate itself in pluralistic context. 

Portraying M.M. Thomas as a chief architect of the modern ecumenical movement, K.C Abraham explores the fecundity of Thomas’ theology of humanization in making ecumenical theology a revolutionary social thought. Placing Metropolitan Paulose Mar Gregorios in the process of theological dialogue between science and religion, K.M George argues that through this dialogue, Mar Gregorios was able to offer a radical perception of truth for humanity (p.119). Wesley Ariarajah, in his excellent article on the pioneering ministry of Stanley Samartha offers us the history of the emergence of the theology of inter-faith dialogue which later became one of the prominent focuses of the World Council of Churches. Russel Chandran’s liberative missiological strategies are gaudily explained in the article written by Kiran Sebastian. Kiran affirms that “the legacy of Chandran endures in the forward march of the ecumenical dreams and hopes in the 21st century” (p. 152). 

George Zachariah brings to us the ever living memory of the great humanist Paulose Mar Paulose, the architect of alternative ecumenism. Zachariah writes: “Bishop Paulose Mar Paulose’s life was short; but he still lives in the ecumenical youth student movements as they continue to remain out of control, challenging the ecumenical mafia and the pharisaic church” (p. 165). In the last chapter of this volume, the life and witness of Ninan Koshy is brilliantly narrated by Preman Niles. Elucidating his contributions in the international affairs commission of the World Council of Churches, Niles calls Ninan a great secular theologian in the household of ecumenism. In short, it is a text book of the ecumenical social thought as it was emerged from the Indian soil. The reviewer appreciates all the writers and the editor for initiating a meaningful discourse on the legacies of the ecumenical pioneers from India.

However, the inadequacy of applying methodological tools to re-present the memories archived in the written texts and the insufficiency to re-read them in the contemporary context of postcoloniality made the volume mere a historical reiteration. It would have been more meaningful if those texts could be re-read on the basis of some contemporary methodological tools like postcolonialism and post-feminism. Even though the editor claims his bail well in advance regarding the elimination of “ecumenical little narratives” in the contemporary world of “ecumenical metanarratives,” his defense becomes feeble before the question of the elimination of the stories of the people like James Massey and Kunchala Rajaratnam. Of course, this is not the error of the editor, Ecumenical Movement has always been elitist in content and practice and this legacy still continues without transition!

Y.T. Vinayaraj 

                                                                                                                                      Faridabad                                                                                                                    27.07.2016 

                    

(REVIEW 13) Asian and Oceanic Christianities in Conversations: Exploring Theological Identities at Home and in Diaspora

Asian and Oceanic Christianities in Conversations: Exploring Theological Identities at Home and in Diaspora

Heup Young Kim, Fumitaka Matsuoka and Anri Morimoto (eds)                                          New York: Radopi, 2011

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

This book is an outcome of a panel session at the “2005 International Congress on the History of Religion” held in Tokyo, Japan. It tries to address the question of “Christianity” in a post-Christendom period.  How do we address the question of universality and particularity of gospel in the post-globalized era?  What do we learn from the experience of those for whom their Christian identity is necessarily “amphibolous” in the multiplicity of origination, homeland, nation, race, color, and religion? How do we re-do theology from the Asian/Oceanic/ diasporic location today? These are the questions that set the thesis of the book.  

Asian and Oceanic theology is polyphonic and complex. The diasporic translocal citizens add new questions to Asian theology.  This has widened the task of re-defining the categories such as ‘home,’ ‘context,’ and ‘local.’  How long the Asian theology can be located in the ‘inverted Orientalist’ identity?  What difference will it be when one uses the diasporic context as a hermeneutical key?  There are the questions that this book tries to engage with.   

The chapters are divided into three sections. The first section explores issues of hermeneutic framework, sources, norms, and methods of interpretation. Here the life experiences of Asian/Oceanic/ diasporic communities are used as the major hermeneutical resources. Heup Young Kim writes about the need of the ‘owning up’ of Asian metaphors in theologizing. Anri Morimoto offers the divergent and experimental forms of Asian theology as testimony to the breath and vigor of the living Christian tradition. Peter Phan’s provocative set of questions- an Asian Christian? Or a Christian Asian? Or an Asian-Christian?-draws us out of territorial understanding of Christianity to a creative articulation of Christian identity in Asia.  

The second section embraces a critical and theological reading of the locus, social location, pain and promise emerging out of a particular context. This section explores and weaves religious and theological resources that illuminate the lives of Asian/Oceanic/ diasporic Christians. Traversing the terrain of Indian Christian Theology and surveying various attempts at responding to Christ in the Indian and Asian contexts, Jayakiran Sebastian creatively proposes the model of the guide who stands aside as offering rich theological directions in exploring Christological ramifications within an inter religious milieu. The Third section is devoted to the exploration and articulation of Asian/ Oceanic/ diasporic Christians’ visions of life. This section deals with the questions of global migration, global solidarity, and global theology.  

M. Thomas Thangaraj offers an introductory note to the whole discussion. In this overview he differentiates Christianity and Christendom. According to Thangaraj, the term Christianity stands for a religion with all its variety of meanings. Christendom, on the other hand implies a temporal and territorial connotation which is colonial in content. Thangaraj here prefers the term ‘World Christianity.’ It is to recognize all local forms of Christianity as forms of Christian faith. No one local form, whether it is European or non-European can become benchmark of Christianity. At the same time, these local forms do not exist in isolation. They are related in a dialogic existence. This book highlights the need of the dialogue between the Western and Asian theological contexts.

(REVIEW 12) churrasco: A Theological Feast in Honor of Vitor Westhelle

churrasco: A Theological Feast in Honor of Vitor Westhelle

Mary Philip, John Arthur Nunes, and Charles M. Collier (eds)

Eugene, Oregon: PICKWICK Publications, 2013

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

This book is a collection of articles written in honor of Vitor Westhelle, the well known Latin American liberation theologian and the professor of systematic theology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC). The contributors are either his colleagues or students. In his thirty years of teaching ministry Dr. Westhelle has mentored about one hundred and fifty students from various parts of the globe. churrasco is a Brazilian barbeque of variety of meets. By this title to his book, the editors meant to attend the eclectic ground of Dr. Westhelle’s theological world.

Oswald Bayer initiates a discussion on the theology of cross. Robert Kolb traces five components of the cross: 1) as a burden to help crucify the flesh, 2) as eschatological battle evidenced in the suffering of church, 3) as the means of atonement through Jesus death and resurrection, 4) exhibiting a weak and foolish epistemology as contrasted with human wisdom, 5) as distinguishing the hidden God and the revealed God. Antje Jackelen, the bishop of Lund offers an ecclesial-theological consideration of faith in the public sphere. Ted Peters and Kathleen Billman engage Westhelle’s conceptual framework of spatiality. Else Marie Wiberg Pederson is inspired by the powerful concluding pages of The Scandalous God (Westhelle’s book on the theology of cross), in which Westhelle ponders the “mad economy” of an empty tomb filled with women bearing gifts of fragrant spices.

John Arthur Nunes is moved by Westhelle’s work to attend to the questions at the intersection of theology and postcolonial studies.  Philip Hefner’s article analyzes Westhelle’s theology of creation. Claudia Jahnel offers a treatise on “The Flavor of the Other.” She argues for the reality of a “cultural interviewing… full of transgressions, exchange processes, and syncretism.” Roberto Zwetsch engages with Westhelle’s translation of what NRSV calls “to the ends of the world” (Romans 10:18). Mary Philip writes on remembrance through which she tries to analyze the theological fecundity of Westhelle’s works. Luis Dreher tries to unearth the influence of Luther in Westhelle’s theology. Kathlen Luana De Oliveira comments that Westhelle’s work is nothing but the “knowledge transfigured by love.” In an essay most explicitly engendering the place of women, Musimbi Kanyoro elucidates three considerations for our global engagement:1) be prepared to be disturbed by the chasmic socio-economic gap that divides humanity globally; 2) be ready to be in conversation concerning the place of privilege and power those in the North experience; 3) claiming God’s hope and refusing fear will lead to risk-taking for the sake of celebrating diversity. Walter Altmann’s contribution is a sermon on Psalm 90.

Reinhard Hutter offers a careful consideration of the nature and universality of human experience. Kathleen Billman reflects on the narratological dimensions of faith. Jose Rodriguez writes about the prophetic alternative to human dividedness. Barbara Rossing’s essay registers an eschatological dimension of the Oikumene. Towards the end, Deanna A. Thompson offers a prayer for the hope of an eco-living in this world of adversity. Of course, it is a theological churrasco from those who love to do theology passionately. The reviewer joins in this chorus of the well-wishers of Vitor Westhelle to thank God for the meaningful words and the challenging life of Vitor Westhelle-a passionate theologian, teacher, and a friend.  

(REVIEW 11) Alternatives Unincorporated: Earth Ethics from the Grassroots

Alternatives Unincorporated: Earth Ethics from the Grassroots   

                                                                                                            George Zachariah                                                                                                              London: Equinox, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-1-84553-689-3.

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj                                                                                             (published in Religion & Society, Vol. 56 No. 3-4, Bangalore: CISRS, 2011)

George Zachariah’s seminal work “Alternatives Unincorporated; Earth Ethics from the Grassroots,” is a remarkable book on Eco theology from the Indian context. As an academician, activist and theologian who has been actively involved in the grass-root engagements of various social movements in India for the last twenty-five years, George Zachariah shares with us his vibrant spirituality of subaltern resistance and passion for social justice. By taking Narmada Bachavo Andolan (The Save Narmada Movement) as a text, he creatively proposes the contours of a contemporary earth ethics that stems out of the crucible of grass-root subaltern political practice. As his professor Larry Rasmussen comments, this book belongs to the heart, soul and mind of the mandatory effort of validating the grass-root resistances for water, food, energy and life.  

Why an earth ethics from grass-roots?  George argues that “it is the methodological commitment to recognize the agency of the victims of environmental destruction that seems to be missing in the wider discussions of eco-justice,” that necessitates the grass-roots earth ethics. He expounds the significance of his thesis and declares that “an earth ethics from the grassroots is a vision and praxis to interpret the reality and to change it radically from the subaltern standpoint so that a different world may become a contemporary reality.”  It is an attempt to attend, acknowledge and validate the silenced voices/ lifeworlds/ epistemologies of the subjugated masses that signals a new world which is devoid of all kinds of domination, exploitation and marginalization.

The first chapter elucidates how development and the neoliberal globalization continue the colonial legacy of colonizing the life world and erasing the moral agency of the subaltern communities. The author reiterates the urgency to reclaim the moral agency of the dispossessed that would be the political and spiritual power to change the world. The second chapter narrates the stories of the people and the wider community of creation in the Narmada Valley. It interrogates the modern development gaze on the indigenous people that marginalizes them from their livelihood, social space and cultural heritage. Narmada Bachavo Andolan (NBA) - the grass-roots organizational set up that provides the consolidated space for the voices of resistance thus becomes the theological crucible from which the rationale for the new earth ethics emerges.

The third chapter exposes the hegemonic nature of the regimes of truth and underscores the agency of oppositional consciousness and knowledges that stem from the subaltern social movements. Zachariah argues that the grass-roots epistemologies are embodiments of resistance and transformation. Thus, contemporary social movements are theological texts that can inform us in our search for a world devoid of the axis of domination and alienation. It is here the author emphatically comes up with his new ways of doing theology and ethics that resist all manifestations of the idols of death and celebrates life in its fullness.

The last chapter is the constructive attempt to map the earth ethics from the grass-roots. Here, Zachariah discusses the epistemological, praxiological and political content of the emerging subaltern earth ethics. The book concludes with a manifesto of the earth ethics from the grass-roots, reclaiming the moral agency of the subalterns to dream and to midwife alternatives that are “unincorporated.” The testimony of the book is that the content and challenge of the subaltern theology and earth ethics is to keep alive the hope of transformation in the realized epiphanies of the Slain Lamb- the Absolute Subaltern who lived out an alternative politics and spirituality yet remained eternally unincorporated.  

The book invites us to the politics and spirituality of the subaltern earth ethics and envisages a new way of doing theology that stems out of the lived experiences of the struggling masses. This book has signaled the new phase of theological engagements in India. It has posed a new direction of the subaltern politics and the social practices in India.  It is a gift to the students of Eco theology, and to all those who wish to taste the spirituality of resistance in and around us.  As Arundhathi Roy exhorts us listen to the grasshoppers and sense the spirituality of the life world. It is the sense of grass-roots earth ethics that brings us the sense of infinite justice. 

The focal point of doing theology from the subaltern engagements in fact exemplifies the epistemological shifts in the discussion of theological methodology in the Indian context.  It envisions a post-Marxist method of doing theology that transcends the limitations of class analysis. At the same time it re-imagines an eco-theology and eco-practice that transgresses the modernist trappings of doing theology in a postmodern/ postcolonial context. This book offers new discussion on theological methodology, epistemology and politics that determine the content and challenge of Indian Christian Theologies in the post-Marxist/ postmodern/ postcolonial epistemological Indian context.

(REVIEW 10) Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Merold Westphal                                                                                                                             Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

Merold Westphal is the distinguished professor of philosophy at Fordham University. His other publications are postmodern philosophy and Christian thought and over-coming Onto-theology. In this book Westphal relates the current philosophical thinking with the biblical hermeneutics. This book defines church as the faithful community which is being called to interpret the signs of the world.

Why we need interpretation?  Westphal contends that we need interpretation because world is not ‘out there’ or given.’ What ‘we see’ is a construal of an interpretation mediated by a tradition that is still alive in community and in our own thinking. So, ‘just see’ is not an absolute see. It necessitates multiple ‘seeings.’ It was the modern romantic hermeneutics that offered the scientific and objective method of interpretation. Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’ (1969) and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” offered a paradigm shift in the modern Biblical hermeneutics. According to Barthes, it is not the author who speaks but the language speaks. Barthes gives more importance to the reader and the reading.  

The most important contribution of this book is the hermeneutics of revelation. Westphal opines that ‘to speak of the divine nature of Scripture and of the church as a community built on the foundation of the Scripture is to speak of revelation. To speak of revelation is to speak of divine transcendence. The divine voice is not reducible to the human voices that give us Scripture either by writing it or by interpreting it. The revelatory content of the biblical hermeneutics finds philosophical grounding in the Levinasian notion of the radical other. The other is the radical other. The other is beyond my comprehension and objectification. God is the radical other as we see in the glory and the height of the face of the other-the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The face of the other is the locus of divine epiphany. So every human community whether it is religious or political needs to be opened to the voice of the other in its immediacy. Westphal emphatically contends that it is the voice of the other that interrupts the authority and the power of the church. At the same time, it is the hermeneutical fecundity for the church today to discern its response-ability.  Whose Community? Which Interpretation? is a useful book for theologians, pastors, and laypeople.

(REVIEW 9) Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views

Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views

Stanley E. Porter & Beth M. Stovell (eds.)                                                                        Illinois: IVP Academic, 2012

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

This book provides an introduction to the variety of different methods of biblical interpretation.  It contains a survey of the key issues of biblical hermeneutics using the literary categories of “behind the text,” “within the text,” and “in front of the text.”  “Behind the text” is a traditional approach through which the scholars locate the text within the ‘original’ context and the original readers of the text in that historical context.  “Within the text” was the modern approach that looked within the constitution of the text itself.  It was a shift of focus from the evolutionary model to a communication model of hermeneutics. Emphasis on the autonomous text, but led to a focus on textual unity. This “In front of the text’ model on the other hand, discusses the effect of the text on the reader. This model is more reader-centered and attends the issue of the interaction between the text and the interpreter.

The book offers five views of biblical hermeneutics: (1) Historical-Critical/ Grammatical; (2) Literary/ Postmodern; (3) Philosophical/ Theological; (4) Redemptive-Historical and (5) Canonical. The historical-critical method view seeks for insights for interpretation from taking a critical view of the history behind the text, on the one hand, and utilizing a grammatical analysis of the text, on the other. This approach includes various forms of critical analysis such as source, form, redaction, tradition and textual criticism. The literary/ postmodern view assumes a considerable fluidity between the text, reader, and the author. There is no meaning innate in the text. Thus in this method, the politics of interpretation is very important.

The proponents of the redemptive-historical view follows the theological interpretation of the reformers. They argue that the role of Christ in his redemptive work is central to interpreting the whole of Scripture, whether the Old or the New Testament. The canonical method argues for the necessity of reading the entire canon in relationship to each part of the canon. Thus the Old Testament should be read in light of the New Testament and the New Testament in light of the Old Testament. This framework influences the goals, procedures and results of a canonical approach to biblical hermeneutics. Philosophical-theological method locates biblical hermeneutics in a postmodern context. It is more concerned about the philosophy of the hermeneutics.

This book does not offer any conclusion to the question of hermeneutics (that is impossible in a book), but provides us a very useful survey of different approaches in the history of biblical hermeneutics. This is a useful book for all those who are interested in the practical interpretation of the Bible.