THE best way to understand the history of empire is, it seems, to broaden the profile of those who write about it. The same obtains with theology. Once the narrow band of Western authors whose authority is taken for granted is expanded to include voices from beyond the magic circle, something new is set in train.
That, surely, is the inspiration behind Haunting Questions of Liberation Theology, edited by Jione Havea, a Methodist pastor from Tonga, who lectures at Trinity Methodist College in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and in Australia’s Charles Sturt University. He has selected academics from the global South, namely Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Oceania to write on a wide variety of questions that arise when scholars engage critically with the legacy of liberation theology.
In his introduction, he calls these “haunting questions” and divides them into three sections, addressing what should be liberated, how to liberate, and the special contribution made by the homosexual community to laying certain questions to rest. The names of his contributors will, by and large, be unfamiliar to readers in the West. Many of them are activists or have actively suffered for the profession of their faith. All are serious members of their respective academic communities.
In part one, Professor Luis N. Rivera-Pagán of Princeton sets out the ground rules. He traces the development of liberation theology, showing how it affected the lives of the poor, of women, and of black people. He analyses its roots in the experiences of Roman Catholic and Protestant communities, and demonstrates how it needed to throw off accusations of Marxism as it sought to offer a doctrine of hope to its adherents.
Maricel Mena-López then goes on to apply a liberation methodology to a specific biblical text: Jeremiah 44.15-19, while Marthie Momberg, from South Africa, explores the impact of state violence and imperialism on ordinary people in her own country and Palestine. Finally in this section, Nathan A. Esala takes the agenda into the fascinating world of biblical translation. How are oppressed women in rural northern Ghana — among whom he has worked — to read the text? How are patriarchal interpretations to be avoided? To take the message of liberation theology seriously is to engage with matters of practical importance.
In part two, Yalenlemla, a native of Nagaland and Ph.D. student at Drew University, in New Jersey, begins to answer the question how to reply to the haunting questions of the book’s title. She demonstrates the importance of listening by using the story of the unnamed woman in Luke 7.36-50 to offer a blind-siding feminist exposition of the text. Lim Chin Ming Stephen, presently teaching in Hong Kong, has a fascinating counter-cultural contribution to make. His “Celebrating Uselessness in an Age of Toxic Productivity” tackles Jesus’s parable of the barren fig tree and Zhuangzi’s story of the useless tree.
James W. Perkinson, Professor of Social Ethics at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, advocates “watching” as a method, and suggests that we examine what we watch more closely and check out how we are watched. Hadje C. Sadje, a Ph.D. student from the University of Vienna, rekindles enthusiasm when writing about “The Great Reset” with Ma. Glovedi Joy L. Bigornia, a Ph.D. student from Yonsei University, in South Korea. Their shared belief in the liberating power of a theology that does not eschew politics or economics or involvement in grass-roots movements is heartening.
And so from the general to the particular. In his introduction to the whole work, Havea had made it clear that his especial interest is in the application of liberation to bodies as well as to minds. He describes this as moving from querying to queering. Beyond the wordplay, beyond the specificity of his focus on the way in which Christian heterosexual ideology both sacralises and fixes identity, there is something that appears especially liberating about his application of the tenets of its theology to the whole messy business of human sexuality. The contexts and countries from which his contributors come cannot make it easy for them to write so freely, albeit in an academic publication.
While not always agreeing with what they say, no one can doubt the integrity with which they tackle the “colonial pedagogy of gender” which they received along with their Christianity. Ana Ester Pádua Freire is ordained in the Metropolitan Community Churches. A theological activist, she equates colonisation and compulsory heterosexuality and offers a fresh ideology based on uncoupling the two.
Inatoli Aye is an indigenous woman from Nagaland, India, presently studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Wales Trinity St David. Nagas, we learn, are transnational, neither part of India nor of Myanmar, and yet living in both. Her moving account explores both the geographical and physical experience of living in what she calls “colonized spaces”.
Three authors Ma. Glovedi David Tombs, Sithembiso Zwane, and Charlene Van der Walt, from the Universities of Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand (Tombs), and Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa respectively — present an essay, “Male Violence Against Men: A Contextual Bible Study on the Crucifixion of Jesus”. This explores the global phenomenon of gender-based violence and describes how a programme of contextual Bible study has been developed in South Africa to combat it. The idea is “not about understanding the Bible better, but to read the Bible for change” as a “dialogical tool”.
Anita J. Monro, an Australian Uniting Church presbyter and academic, addresses the mother-son relationship as revealed in the Stabat Mater as a primal birthing death scene. Anna Kasafi Perkins, an ethicist from the University of the West Indies, writes fearlessly about “filth ina di house; filth ina di school”, and — most tellingly — about “filth ina di church”.
And finally in an afterword, “Unending”, Michael N. Jagessar, originally from Guyana, makes a passionate bid for the project to roll on: for liberation theologians to continue to explore in the company of the poor, and to make practical connections and find applications that make a difference to how we all live.
Lavinia Byrne is a writer and broadcaster.
Haunting Questions of Liberation Theology
Jione Havea, editor
SCM Press £80
(978-0-334-06650-7)
Church Times Bookshop £64
