George Mathew Nalunnakkal[2]
Introduction
Of all the challenges
facing Asian Christian theology today, perhaps the most pressing one is the
task of liberating Asian theology from the ‘tuetonic’ clutches of Western
captivity. A genuine Asian Christian theology has to be rooted in the Asian
soil and shaped by the socio-economic, political and cultural landscape of
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theological sense of these Asian
realities. What I endeavor here, then, is to propose certain theological
concepts and postulates that, in my view, can help us address the contemporary
Asian realities in a relevant manner.
Theology is essentially
‘God-talk’. Therefore, our understanding of God has decisive ramifications for
our perceptions and praxis. In a postmodern context such as ours today, there
is an evident revival of interest in and search for ‘God’. The collapse of Communism
has been (mis) interpreted as ‘victory of God’ by religious fundamentalists.
More and more young people are being enchanted by ‘other worldly’ and
charismatic forms of spirituality. The
progressive space that was hitherto held by movements like the Student
Christian Movement in college campuses has been hijacked by regressive groups
such as Evangelical Union, which promote individualistic and prosperity
-oriented spirituality among students.
Most college campuses have become ‘apolitical’ in orientation and
consequently the student psyche today is, by and large,
characterised by
socio-political lethargy and apathy.
In Christian God-talk,
the notion of Trinity assumes a pivotal place. The traditional understanding of
God is that God is a single, self-sufficient, individual being. This
understanding has led to the development of individualism. Trinitarian God, on
the other hand, provides a model of a ‘community of being’. God, the eternal
being is composed of three distinct beings. Our search for a new society will
have a firm basis if it is built on the edifice of a Trinitarian vision of God.
A Trinitarian society is
essentially pluralistic, as the Trinitarian God is societal and corporate in
its nature. This ontological diversity, characteristic of the divine, ought to
reflect in creation as well. Cultural and religious diversity is a hallmark of
a post-modern context. This has always been the case in the
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Asian contexts. However, the
sweeping phenomenon of globalisation with its agenda of cultural homogenisation
and the emerging religious fundamentalism and exclusivism (Hindutva in
The Biblical God is a
God of history who does make divine interventions in mundane human life situations.
This has been exemplified in the Exodus narrative, which presents a God who
“listens to the cry of people” (Ex.3: 6) and liberates them from bondage. A God
who is sensitive to the needs of people cannot be an apolitical and lethargic
God. Instead, God of history is one who journeys with the oppressed people. As
Tissa Balsurya puts it:
God of the Bible is not
a tame, spineless, neutral God, but an active and acting God. (Third Eye
Theology, p.145)
God is holy and just
because God takes part in human struggles for liberation and justice. This
perception of God is capable of waking up today’s youth from their slumber of
insensitivity and lack of social and political commitment. God’s direction is towards
history (a God of attachment), not
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away from it (not a God of detachment).
Jesus’ coming to the world has been the supreme expression of the God of
history. By citing the story of the ‘prodigal son’ (Lk.15: 24), Kosuke Koyama
maintains that God experiences history and takes part in the historical and human
drama of “the dead alive” and “the lost found”.
God of the Bible is also
a ‘Suffering God’, a fellow sufferer who participates in human agony (Is.53).
This is in contradistinction to the traditional image of God as an impassible
God, who cannot be influenced or affected by human passions. C.S. Song
conceives God as “high voltage God”. At Mount Sinai, the people of
Kittamori introduces yet
another image of God, the pain-love of God, which is of utmost pertinence in
the Asian context. Here is a God who experiences pain on behalf of humanity.
Jeremiah talks about God’s pain: “My heart is
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pained” (Jer.31: 20). “God in pain
resolves human pain by his [sic] own” (Theology of the Pain Love, p.20).
The element and essence of pain has been, somehow, lost in traditional Western
theology and Asian theology cannot afford to loose it in a context where
millions are in agony due to various structural forms of injustice. What we
require, therefore, is a theology ‘from the womb of
God of the Bible, the
suffering servant, the God of pain, is a crucified God. The God we encounter in
Jesus Christ is a ‘powerless’ and vulnerable God. Jesus had nothing except two wooden beams for
his support, which represented shame, powerlessness, humiliation, pain, and
suffering. However, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “only a suffering God can
help”. This crucified God suffers not just for us, but also with us. As Koyama puts it, the cross of Jesus Christ
was a deformed one, a “cross without handle”, the handle being the symbol of
power and control, thus identifying God-self with the powerless and the
defenseless. This God was crucified outside the city wall (Heb.13: 12), thus
affirming that Jesus was a God of the periphery. Jesus, thus, affirmed his
centrality by being on the periphery, with those who are being pushed to the
margins. The crucified God revealed the divine brokenness and vulnerability. Thus,
God in Asian theologies is one who identifies with the suffering people in
The crucified God is
antithetical to the crusading God of the Western colonial church. The crucified
God is a non-violent God. There can be no ‘just
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war’ from this divine perspective.
The God that is invoked by the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair is the
crusading God of the imperial West, not the crucified God of Christianity. “Do
not kill” is not just a divine commandment, rather it (non-violence) is part
and parcel of the very nature of God. Violence, then, is anything that violates
the image of God in humanity and creation at large. In a world where people,
especially young people are being lured towards a culture of violence, the
crucified God should challenge us to resist violence at all times and places.
Violence is savored today all over the world not just in the form of wars and
conflicts, but also in systemic forms such as globalisation, poverty, caste-ism,
racism, patriarchy and so on. The crucified God challenges us to take a stance
against both direct and indirect forms of violence.
In an age of
globalisation, everything is determined by speed. People, particularly young
generation, are after pace. Technological and cyber pace is what shapes up life
today. Those who are not able to catch up with the maddening pace of the cyber-
world, are left behind and further marginalised in the ‘global village’. In
this context, Koyama, suggests the concept of a “Three Mile, an hour God’.
Caught by the ‘wilderness image’ in the Bible, Koyama proposes this image to
those who are caught by the fast moving techno-culture of today. According to
Koyama, God’s speed is the speed of love, not of technology. God took forty
years to convey the message that humanity does not live by bread alone. Jesus
also exemplified this ‘slowness’ in his life and ministry. For instance, he was
rather slow in granting the wish of the Canaanite woman whose daughter was possessed
by demon. This image must help us to be concerned about the millions who are
being pushed aside simply because they do not have the resources to catch up
with the pace of modern technology. In practical terms, the first world
countries and the rich nations are challenged to slow down so that others can
also catch up. As some one succinctly put it:
“The rich have to lead a
simple life style so that the poor can simply live”
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In portraying God, we
must also engage indigenous categories and images of God. Masao Takenaka has
explicated one such image, which is particularly pertinent for
Heaven is Rice
We should share rice with one another
…………………………………….
Yes, Rice is the matter
We should eat together
The Chinese character of
‘peace’ is ‘harmony’. The character ‘her’ in Chinese, meaning ‘peace’ is
derived from two words which mean ‘rice’ and ‘mouth’, symbolically suggesting
that there can be no peace without food for all (justice). This is very crucial
in a nuclear age where ‘peace’ is established through arms race and violence.
The neo-imperial economic and development policies that are being pursued in
Asia under the guise of globalisation are threatening the ‘Rice’ (indigenous)
culture of
In our efforts to
transform society, our understanding of Jesus Christ is of crucial importance
because Jesus Christ is our model, liberator par excel-
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lence. In this process, we will have
to deconstruct some of the traditional images about Christ. As George Soares-
Prabhu observes:
Our task is to create
new Christologies, by confronting the cry of life, which resounds in our
In Jesus Christ, one
finds the extension of the prophetic tradition. The whole Christ-event was in
fact Jesus’ act of living out the divine manifesto of liberation of the poor
and the oppressed. Incarnation, God becoming human, was above all a great act
of Jesus Christ identifying with the victims of human rights violations. The
Son of Man, like millions of men and women today, was denied the fundamental
rights to food, shelter, and clothing. Luke brings out theses justice
dimensions in his narrative on the incarnation.
And she (Mary) gave
birth to her first born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid Him in
a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn (Lk 2: 7)
Coming from the humblest of economic backgrounds, Joseph and
Mary, on their way from
In the severe winter of
The God incarnate had no
place to be born. He was denied the basic right to shelter. Jesus, thus, became
the prototype of the homeless. John sums up his account of incarnation in just
one measured verse:
The word became flesh
and pitched his tent among the people (Jn.1: 14).
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Jesus Christ pitched His
tent among the tent-dwellers, the homeless people. Jesus Christ was a refugee,
a migrant who had to flee from His homeland for His life-yet another denial of
human rights-the right to one’s homeland.
King Herod, threatened by the news that new King of an altogether
different persuasion was born in
At no time in history
have we witnessed refugee problems on the scale as we do today. It was a threat
to Herod’s Kingship that forced Jesus to flee home. Today, though, refugees are
created all around the world, in the name of civil wars, dictatorships,
feudalistic and capitalistic interests. When Dalits and indigenous peoples are
coercely displaced from their homeland to make ay for ‘development’, they are
literally made refugees in their own land.
God’s love for all has been best expressed in God becoming a
marginalised human being in the person of Jesus Christ. This follows that the
rights of the poor and the alienated have priority over against the rights of
the privileged.
The death on the cross
was a logical consequence of Jesus’ identification with the victims of
injustice and exploitation. As Leonardo Boff puts it:
Historically the passion
of Jesus was the result of His message of universal liberation and of His
attitudes that threatened the prevailing order of His day.
Standing in the prophetic tradition, Jesus identified
violence with injustice and immorality of all sorts- social, economic,
political, cultural, and ecological. While he denounced physical acts of
violence unequivocally, his
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attack
of the systemic violence such as poverty, religious hegemony, racism and
sexism, was no less scathing. For Jesus, peace and violence were to be looked
at from the perspective of the
Love your enemies
and do good to those who hate you. (Lk.6: 27)
According to Xavier Leon-Dufour, Jesus stood firm against
the temptation to set up the
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Gentile
Court of the
The cross of Jesus
Christ is the supreme paradigm of non-violence and struggle against all forms
of violence. On the cross, Jesus took on the might of violence and crucified
it. By shedding his own blood (martyrdom), Jesus provided a radically new
meaning to the Old Testament notion of “no liberation sans blood shed.
The cross of Christ is the rejoinder to the modern axiom that violence is met
by violence. The death on the cross was the supreme act of Ahimsa. As
the proto-type of all victims of violence, Jesus exemplified the virtues of
love, forgiveness, and non-violence on the cross. By keeping quiet before
Pilate, he identified himself with the voiceless, the victims of violence, ‘the
silenced’ ones such as the poor, women, children, the outcast, animals, and
nature.
The assertion of the non-violent God in Christ is that
violence begets violence and inevitably leads to a vicious cycle of violence.
One of the classic examples of this chain of violence is found in 2 Sam.11,
where we see how a context of war, in fact, a ‘holy war’, can and does become
the breeding ground for a chain of systemic acts of violence such as coveting,
raping, and killing.
The non-violence of the
cross (Ahimsa) is not a value neutral concept. It does not compromise
with injustice. Nor does it reconcile with unjust structures. It is also not to
be confused with thoroughgoing pacifism.
Jesus Christ, on the
cross, dismantled all the divisive walls of exclusion and brought about genuine
reconciliation. This suggests that, for reconciliation to be authentic,
‘dividing walls’ or barriers are to be broken down-the walls of racism,
castesim, sexism, capitalism, eco-violence and so on. Globalisation, under the
pretext of breaking barriers (trade barriers), is actu-
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ally erecting new walls of First
World hegemony, walls that exclude the
Non-violence is the way
of love in action, action for peace with justice through non-violent struggles
and resistance, a way that had been successfully undertaken by the great souls
of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The way of the cross is today
being experimented by people’s movements all over the world, particularly in
struggles of the Dalits, tribal, and women for eco-justice. The Narmada Bachao
Andolan (NBA) in India follows a similar path. The recent non-violent struggle,
led by the Adivasi leader, C.K. Janu in Kerala, India, for land rights of the
tribal people is another case in point. The identity politics of the Dalits and
Adivasis in India for political power is yet another example. Mass conversion
of a large number of Dalits from Hinduism to other religions is also seen by
many Dalits in India, as a non-violent means of emancipation. These are
certainly concrete sings of hope, truly eschatological signs, in the midst of
the utter hopelessness that we face in our context.
When peace with justice
established and integrity of creation affirmed, violence is ultimately
overcome. This is the eschatological vision that the Bible provides us.
Paradoxically, the contemporary world tends to identify violence, conflicts,
and war as the signs of the eschaton. This, in fact, is a very
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distorted perception of the Biblical
eschatology. According to the Biblical vision, the signs of the eschaton
are not war and violence, but the very absence of them. We need to transcend
the narrow and indistinct view of the eschaton as the ‘end of the
world’. The ‘end time’ is not the end of history, but the elimination of evil,
and the establishment of peace with justice. The eschatological community is
characterised by peace, justice, and harmony of creation (Mc.4: 1-8). In this
passage, the ‘end time’ does not refer to ‘the end of the world’, rather it
refers to the end of the exile, itself a state of slavery and exploitation-a
time of violence. In this sense, eschatons continue to appear as exilic
phases of violence and injustice are overcome in various stages of history. The
end of apartheid in South Africa, for instance, was a definite eschatological
moment, a kairos, in history. Such eschatological moments will continue
to break in, as humanity strives to overcome exiles of various persuasions in
human history. Hence, eschaton is a continuous process, just as the
incarnation is an unremitting process in the life of the church; just as the
crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a recurring event in human history; just as the
resurrection of Christ is an incessant experience in the universe. So long as
the exilic experiences of poverty, racism, sexism, globalisation and other
forms of exploitation and violence continue to haunt us, we need to hold on to
a vision of a continual eschatology, a realised eschatology of overcoming
exilic states of violence through the non-violent, ‘exodusic’ way of the
cross.
I would like to conclude
by projecting a woman character as a model who personified the way of the
cross, the exodus way. She figures in a Chinese parable. Lady Meng who appears
in C.S. Song’s Tears of Lady Meng was a courageous woman. The story is
that in China, the Emperor Chin decided to build a compound wall for security
purpose. The building process, however, could not make any progress, as the
stones fell down one by one as they were placed. At this point the Emperor
sought the advice of some wise men, who advised him to put one human being in
every mile of the wall. This was agreed upon and many people were sacrificed to
this effect. At last a man suggested that it would be enough to sacrifice a man
with the name ‘Wan’ as the name meant ‘ten thousand’. Soldiers immediately rushed to seize a man by
name ‘Wan’ who was at his wedding feast with his bride. His
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wife Lady Meng could only find her
husband’s bones as the wall collapsed at her tears. The Emperor when he heard
about this, and having been attracted by Meng’s charm, wanted to marry her and
make her the Empress. Lady Meng knew quite well that she could not say ‘No’ to
him and agreed to marry the Emperor on the following conditions.
· A festival of 49 days should be held
in honour of her husband
· The Emperor should be personally
present at the burial
· A terrace with a height of 49 feet should be
built on the banks of a river, to make a sacrifice for her husband.
The demands were
sanctioned. When everything was in place, Lady Meng climbed on top of the
terrace and started cursing the Emperor on top of her voice. Then, she jumped
from the terrace into the river. Raged by anger, the Emperor ordered his
soldiers to cut her body into pieces. When they did that the little pieces of
her body turned into silver fishes in which, the author, says, the soul of Lady
Meng lives forever. Encounter with truth and justice is always costly and the
way of the cross is the way forward for us.