Towards a Network of Theological Enquiry
A question of mission – a mission of questions
Freedom of the human spirit from captivity
Theological and ethical issues in the age of globalisation
Towards an Asian theological agenda for the 21st century
Impulses in Caribbean theology
Beyond partnership – Towards a global theological agenda
The people of God among all God's peoples
Globalisation: A myth without a vision?
Democratic impulses in Buddhism
I am pleased to be presenting this paper at this time. It was just two months ago that we at The United Theological College of The West Indies (UTCWI) hosted a consultation on Caribbean theology. This was the second consultation in the decade of the 90s, there not having been even one in the 80s. Gerald Boodoo has referred to the 80s as the lost decade as far as the formal development of Caribbean theology is concerned.1
Those of us who are now emerging to rekindle the flame are therefore heartened by the enthusiasm shown by those who participated in the recent consultation from French, Spanish and English speaking territories of the Caribbean, as well as from North America and Britain. At the same time there is great concern at the fact that a theological vision which emerged over 20 years ago with great promise, and which invigorated many spiritually and intellectually, appears to have floundered so badly that it has not contributed to Caribbean life in the ways hoped. This mixture of excitement and anxiety constitutes the emotional backdrop to this paper, the direction of which is influenced by the appreciation of two levels of the meaning of the term 'impulse'.
Impulse has to do with force so communicated as to produce motion. Given this understanding, I will speak about those ideas, experiences, and interpretations, which converged at a point in Caribbean history to provide a kind of critical mass so that Caribbean theology could emerge as a unique departure in theological reflection. I will evaluate how the primary ideas have been processed over time and reflect on the way this has influenced the direction of this theological orientation. There is the understanding of impulse as present inclination, which allows us to identify and analyse the considerations which are now emerging and which will determine the future direction of the Caribbean theological orientation. Through this presentation I hope to provide an appreciation for a dynamic historical process, and encourage projections concerning the viable future of this theological orientation.
This paper is influenced primarily by developments in the English-speaking Caribbean. I am confident, however, that it will reflect to a fair degree the case in the rest of the region.
Robert Schreiter2 gives a clear picture of the theological ferment in Africa, Asia and the Americas during the decade of the 60s. The quest was for the development of theological approaches intended to be alternatives to traditional Christian theologising which had emanated from Europe and dominated religious thinking in the regions of the world which had been invaded and colonised by Western powers. This ferment contributed to the development of Latin American Liberation Theology, and in Protestantism influenced theological articulation in terms of contextualisation, localisation and indigenisation. It was in this general milieu, with its mix of protest and adventure, that Christians of the Caribbean began their own formal reflection on what would constitute relevant theologising for their region.
The conditions were right in the Caribbean for the emergence of a new and radical theological orientation. Throughout its history of colonisation and slavery there had been a sustained battle over the religious interpretation of life in the region. The colonisers used Christian scripture with some success to indoctrinate the slaves into accepting their lot. By this means they sought to ensure that the slaves would constitute a hardworking and compliant work force, which accepted the ideology and manners of Western Christendom as superior and God-given. Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian leader, preaching to slaves in the St. Thomas Virgin Islands in 1739, indicated:
"God punished the first Negroes by making them slaves, And your conversion will make you free, not from the control of your masters, but simply from your wicked habits and thoughts, and all that makes you dissatisfied with your lot."3
The Society responsible for the propagation of the Christian faith in Barbados sought to influence the local planters to allow evangelisation by indicating that the converted slave would be less rebellious and more industrious. We learn, however, of the complaint of Barbadian planters that the Christianity meant to soften the converts was instead causing unrest among them. Somehow the slaves' understanding of what they had gotten into was very different from the planters intentions. I will resist the temptation to speculate about the slaves understanding of the theological significance of staging an uprising on Easter morning of 1816 in Barbados, and Christmas week of 1831 in Jamaica.
Lewin Williams, however, indicates that Sam Sharp, leader of the Christmas rebellion, clearly operated within a set theological framework based on the scriptural appeal: "one cannot serve two masters. For either one will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other." Williams also suggests that Caribbean revolutionaries from Toussaint L'Overture (18th century) to Uriah Butler (20th century) were driven by a strong sense of justice and righteousness grounded in the Christian faith3 As a Jamaican, it is important for me to mention that in my country, four of our seven national heroes (including Sharp), who were leaders in acts of rebellion against the order justified by the likes of Zinzendorf, were Church leaders of high standing. It is also significant that those Christians who represented the colonial order hanged three of these heroes, and the fourth, Marcus Garvey, was banished.
Garvey is quite an important figure in a discussion of Caribbean theology. He critiqued the general structure of Jamaican society and that of Western society in general, and in 1937 issued a special challenge to black peoples which, to my mind, contributed to the inspirational sub-structure of Caribbean theology. This challenge was premised on notions grounded in Christian anthropology, that is, "every man who has a soul and every man who has a mind is after and in the image of his creator God. Thus man was not made to be a cringing, crawling being, he was made to be captain of his own ship, a master of his own destiny."
Garvey was convinced that every people had a God-given purpose, and so his call to black people was: "think with me in the hope of assuming your responsibility to be the man that God Almighty created you to be, and not the cringing, crawling creature that most of you have become without realising our place in the world."5 Material accomplishment was very important to Garvey, but he realised that this could only be achieved with a reorientation of mental and spiritual outlook. The place to begin was the generally accepted ultimate ground of the self, that is, God. Thus long before radical contextual theologising became glamorous, we find Garvey challenging the universalist presumptions of European theologians and articulating a perspective which was intentionally particularistic, and self-consciously black.
"If the white man has the idea of a white God, let him worship his God as he desires. If the yellow man's God is of his own race let him worship his God as he sees fit. We, as Negroes have found a new ideal, whilst our God has no colour, yet it is human to see everything through ones spectacles, and since the white people have seen their God through white spectacles, we have only now started out (late though it be) to see our God through our own spectacles."6
Garvey's articulations presuppose a cultural and epistemological relativism, which would eventually characterise the outlook of the pioneers of Caribbean theology. He was probably well aware of philosophical discussions from Protagoras to Kant and others whose insights inform the modern discussion on relativism. However, I have a sense that Garvey's declarations were born not from the compellingness of a philosophical notion, but from the rebellion of a proud black man against the overbearing and vulgar imposition of Euro-Christian ideology. This ideology was also inflicted on the Indians and Chinese who came later as indentured workers.
Historian Robert Moore argues that up to the point where Christianity became the religion of Europe, it had grown primarily by absorption yet in the second great age of expansion (the European stage, in which the Caribbean was colonised), the methodology shifted to that of imposition. Moore suggests that the general response to this theology of imposition was a theology of imitation, which involved "...the subsuming of oneself into a system already made rather than appropriating and therefore the modifying of the system to one's existential condition."7
I suggest that even with imitation, the oppressed of the Caribbean had much difficulty with the Christian faith as an imposition, especially the fact that it had been used to justify the atrocities of life in the region. Thus while boasting wide-spread influence in the region, Christianity has never been free from suspicion. In significant degree its non-white adherents, from Sharp to Garvey to its contemporary devotees, have been severely conflicted selves. This Christianity has to some extent remained a mere overlay, because it refused to converse with the other elements which constituted the deep psychical sub-structure of non-white Caribbean peoples.
Pronouncements like Garvey's articulated the incongruities which many sensed and agonised over in quiet. How could a faith with scripture that spoke of liberation and justice for the poor and oppressed, and which dramatised this in stirring narrative, become the justification for over 400 years of degradation? The sermonic rationalisations did not always ring true. Despite classification as pagan and demonic, African and Indian religio-cultural retention's refused to be expunged from the psyches of Caribbean Christians. While these conflicted Christians worshipped, there was an irritating question gnawing in their guts: what does Jesus, who reached out to the marginalised and sought to restore the outcast, have to do with a religio-cultural framework in which they were taught to hate themselves and blame themselves for having been victimised?
The intensity of Euro-Christian imposition encouraged an equal intensity of reaction. One extreme was Garvey's radical black theology, in which content and direction were explicitly determined by black sensibilities. The most obvious carrier of Garvey's legacy in contemporary times is the Rastafarian religion, which was born in Jamaica and has spread throughout the Caribbean and many other parts of the world. What is now described as Caribbean theology also bears the marks of Garvey's legacy, in its political and theological radicalism. The pioneers of this movement have hardly referred to Garvey, but I hear him in some of their pronouncements. Biblical theologian William Watty took up the challenge of the universalist pretensions of missionary theology. Listen to his strident declaration:
"One of the commonest ways in which theology has and still becomes prone to unreality is by the spurious claim to universality and finality. If it is true that we know only in part and see through a glass darkly, then every brand of theological formulation is partial and provisional. In other words, there is no theology so far formulated which has not been contextual, parochial and historically conditioned."8
However there was departure from Garvey's Afrocentric rhetoric. Beginning with the 1940s the region was gripped by another compelling inspiration which greatly facilitated the development of Caribbean theology. There was the growing conviction among leaders of thought that despite the pain and degradation which characterised life in the region, over 400 years of presence had made the Caribbean home, and that this history of suffering had created some kind of bond between those who together formed the bulk of its population.
Reconciliation and engagement with this fact were important to any quest for meaning. We find then that the primary assumption underlying the radical anti-colonial theological orientation which emerged in the 1970s and prevails today, is that the Caribbean not only constitutes a unique context, but that a divine purpose is being realised in and through its uniqueness. In explaining his use of the term Caribbean manî, Horace Russell asked rhetorically in 1973: "could there be for instance that that man in the Caribbean betrays certain unique cultural characteristics? Might there also be the suggestion that this mixture of peoples, characteristic of the region, is not an accident of history but an integral part of God's design for the world?"9
Later Watty challenged those who still held to the view that salvation lay in some idealised homeland outside the Caribbean. He declared: "...as long as they see themselves as Diaspora from other lands, separated and estranged from one another, they are no more than leftovers of humanity, and to speak of Caribbean culture is a sick joke."10 Together these comments reflect the conviction that Caribbean culture is bound up with the idea of God and a vision of the way God relates to different peoples and nations of the world.
Given the above, the role of Caribbean theology is to discern and interpret the presence of God within Caribbean history and culture. Further, Caribbean theology should articulate and critically reinforce a vision for Caribbean reality, grounded in the conviction that Caribbean life is caught up in the dynamic of salvation history. Here salvation history has to do not simply with the unfolding of some primordial determination by God, but also the redemptive intervention in a situation that had been organised to the detriment of those who now form the majority in the Caribbean.
This theology should be fashioned to run counter to the spirit of colonial theology, and so be intentionally contextual; that is, rather than being impositionist, it should strive for the capacity to respond to the immediate context, and respond in a way that is liberating. Given its contextual responsibility, Caribbean theology has to develop appropriate means to explore the Caribbean context so as to arrive at understanding, and amass/fashion the theological resources to provide agency in the redemptive process. This orientation requires persons to "be much more observant, much more sensitive, much more open, much more discerning and much more discriminating."11
It is significant that inspiration for the fashioning of a Caribbean theology manifested itself at a time of rising disenchantment with the capitalist system, and increasing attraction to socialism. For many in the Caribbean this coincidence was interpreted spiritually, as there was agreement with Michael Manley's view that socialism was Christianity in action. It is therefore not difficult to appreciate why in the search for new ways of interpreting context there was attraction to Marxist oriented analysis, which sees the dynamics of Western society as generated by the struggle between an oppressive bourgeois class supported by a caste of middle men and the poor masses who struggle to get out from underfoot.
This framework appeared effective as Latin American liberation theologians challenged the powers in their context, which like the Caribbean had social and economic arrangements that were the legacy of the rigid stratification of the plantation system. For those who utilised Marxist analysis, the oppressors and oppressed (internal and external) seemed obvious. If there was anywhere that Marxí notion of alienation was applicable, it was a context where slaves, indentured workers, labourers, were cut off from the fruits of their labour and from social structures which had provided nurture and engendered meaning. This cleared the way for classification in terms of good and evil, righteous and unrighteous.
Christian scripture (especially the Old Testament prophets) was utilised to denounce and declare the wrath of God on the oppressors. And whereas the Marxian proletariat was totally subject to the unfolding of a materialist process, the revolutionary Caribbean Christian could speak of a personal God who sided with and intervened on behalf of the oppressed. It is important to indicate that the apparent demise of socialism as an economic system does not of itself cancel the benefits of Marxist oriented social analysis as an interpretative tool in Caribbean theology. Those who have employed this approach embrace Jon Sobrinoís reflection on Liberation theology, that is, the real point of departure for theologising has not been socialism or Marxist inspiration, but the poor and the Gospel.12
It is clear that Caribbean theologising has benefited greatly from the Liberation emphasis on praxis. As we were reminded at our recent consultation, this has challenged Caribbean theologians to ensure that their theological formulations intentionally contributed to meaningful transformation in concrete situations of Caribbean life. The Liberation position that relevant theologising must proceed from the bottom up has given to many in our region a sense that they are vital to the process of transformation; indeed, they can move from being hapless victims to become shapers of Caribbean destiny.
Some of those involved in the analysis of Caribbean social and economic structure have been biblical theologians committed to reorient the way scripture is handled in the region. Their desire is for more faithful interpretations that replace those which have undergirded colonialism13 These theologians have utilised biblical motifs to interpret pivotal episodes in Caribbean history. Given the intensity of the slave experience, it is understandable that the Exodus would prove attractive.
Interestingly, Burchell Taylor thinks Exile should receive greater attention. He suggests that the Caribbean reality represents a unique combination of Exodus and Exile, "where Exile represents the permanent situation and one in which the exiled have become the dominant presence and chief occupants of the land." Taylor suggests that this fact has to have implications for self understanding, internal relations with each other, relations to the context, to original roots, as well as to the rest of the world, especially those sectors that imposed both exodus and exile. This indeed should be a serious part of reflection or engagement with our context.14
Unfortunately, after an initial flurry, there has not been nearly enough biblical work carried out with the Caribbean theological project specifically in mind. Sr. Theresa Lowe-Ching expresses what is now a desperate call in the region: "the scripture scholars among us must hasten to provide us with the reading of the Bible from our side of history, which, we agree, has to be the bedrock of our theological enterprise."15
Althea Spencer-Miller points to deficiency in these efforts, such as they have been. She indicates that many theologians quote from the scriptures to establish their points. They thereby attest to the role of scripture in the theological enterprise. This though is not the fundamental exercise of biblical criticism. In the spirit of Garvey and reminiscent of Watty's critique, she suggests that biblical interpretation is no innocent activity, that is, devoid of bias and prejudice. She is clear that reading the Bible with indigenous eyes requires something in addition to a hermeneutical stance. It requires a methodological repositioning. Historical criticism (the favoured methodology), she says, amounts to a position that declares that the reservoir of biblical meaning is hidden in an ancient world. She adds, "The reservoir might be there but the repository of tapped meaning lies in the world of European scholarship." She therefore asks Caribbean Biblical scholars to realise that even when we are reading with our own hermeneutic, the influence of our European teachers is still there.
"We might allow them to tell us what the text means. We might take their meaning and apply it to our context. They will tell us the texts that best serve Caribbean theology. Caribbean theology needs a Caribbean biblical theology. The biblical theology must emerge from a hermeneutical and methodological reading of the Bible that is grounded in the Caribbean world view and experience."16
Spencer-Miller's indication in 1997 that there is the need for "a Caribbean biblical theology" is quite distressing. Already in 1973 Watty had started giving attention to the necessary conceptual realignment which would facilitate the task of (re)interpretation. When one reads his piece 'The Decolonisation Of Theology' one sees a valiant attempt to rework three basic categories that he saw as vital to Caribbean biblical theology. They are divine sovereignty, salvation history, and eschatology.
Under the notion of divine sovereignty the colonisers justified their power in terms of election by the will of Providence to rule and guide the world. Election excused the excesses and atrocities wrought on the world and many of its peoples by the colonisers. Watty argued that the sovereign God of the Bible is the God of the oppressed, and there is no logical connection, indeed often an antithesis between earthly rule and God's sovereignty. There is a sense in which God's sovereignty is a hidden one, "manifested not in the power but in the tribulation of the elect."
Reflecting on salvation history, Watty suggests that the central operating principle for the colonisers was that "Jesus the saviour of men was the denial of all histories save the history of the Jews which he fulfilled and the European which he created." Drawing on texts such as Amos 9:7, he argues that nowhere in the Old Testament is God's special relationship with Israel intended to imply that God does not act (positively) in the histories of other peoples. He gives further support for his argument through analysis of the Logos in St. John 1:1-14, Paul's writings to the Galatians (chs.3-5), and his discussion with the Athenians (Acts 17:22-31). Watty's ultimate point is a far-reaching one, that there is theological authenticity in the histories of all peoples, and thus each history is potentially salvation history.
In the consideration of eschatology, Watty acknowledges its technical reference to the doctrine of the last things, and reminds us that this had always been used to defer the realisation of the hopes and dreams of the oppressed in the Caribbean. He points to another approach to eschatology that relates "to the decline and fall of nations and empires in the ongoing process of secular history." By this approach the oppressed come to realise that every worldly power carries with its growth the germs of its own death and decay Thus while they are oppressed by the powers, eschatology gives the assurance that despite appearances, "The coming of the Son of Man inaugurates a Judgement on the nations", their fate has been sealed.17
Watty went further in his attempt to contribute to a conceptual framework that would undergird a new interpretational ideology. He therefore attacked what he saw as false antitheses in traditional theology, which had undergirded colonial theology and warped the religious orientation of Caribbean peoples. Thus the biblical antithesis of belief in God is not atheism but belief in false gods. There is not in the Bible the antithesis of material and spiritual, but the antithesis of both spiritual and material to the carnal; that is, the satisfaction of the flesh to the neglect of what it means to be truly human. Again the true antithesis is between sacred and secular on one hand and the profane on the other. The profane is the use of religion in ways that are denounced by the prophets. The real antithesis is not between heaven and earth, but heaven and earth on one hand and hell on the other. It was on earth that God came to save God's people. Therefore the earthly life of God's people and others under which they live is as much a part of God's eternal purpose as their life with God in heaven. Finally there is not an antithesis between creation and salvation. In the Bible salvation is one piece with creation. Paul's theology of salvation is "set firmly within the context of God's purpose for the whole created order." The redemption which he anticipates is the redemption of our bodies. The real antithesis is between creation and salvation on one hand and damnation on the other.18
While not developing Watty's efforts directly, Taylor's recent work gives hope of the resurgence of scholarly biblical focus.19 In her evaluation of Taylor's Bible studies at the 1993 consultation on Caribbean theology, Spencer-Miller gave high commendation and expressed the hope that "his determined and somewhat intuitive exegetical/ hermeneutical stance could be elevated to a hypothesis. As a hypothesis it could be offered for experimental use in the development of Caribbean theology."20 Spencer-Miller herself made quite an impression at the most recent consultation as she engaged the participants in astute exposition of scripture. One expects that over time she will elaborate on her hermeneutical stance so that it too might be available for experimental use.