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(Ronald Stone is Professor of Christian Ethics at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, USA.)

Our Christian contributions to the struggles for social justice make use of the broad social resources of our institutions and our thought. These Christian contributions also utilize our particular conceptions of Christian love. This essay, a contribution honoring the thought of our brother and mentor K.C. Abraham, focuses on the meaning of Christian love as a foundation for our explorations on ethics and the struggles for justice in our pluralistic societies.

Walter Rauschenbusch, the leading interpreter of the social gospel in the early 20th century, is recognized to have the Kingdom of God as his major concept. However, he could rise to lyrical passion in interpreting Christianity as a religion of love. Paul’s chapter 13 of I Corinthians summarised the Christian message and was the motif of Dare We Be Christians? ¹ His little book of 1914 is written as a book of inspiration and perhaps apology for Christianity. It is not an academic treatise that bears up under analysis. That, however, is the nature of much of the Christian literature written for ordinary people like the conflicted Corinthians and not particularly for professors. Aside from the hymn-like praise of love its meaning is found in love as the force that brings human beings together.

Love is the social instinct, the power of special coherence, the sine qua non of human society. What was Paul requiring but the social solidarity of the Corinthians when he called for them to assert their unity in Christ? "In demanding love he demands social solidarity? ² Rauschenbusch holds to this meaning of love as that which calls people together as he discusses sexuality, family, parenthood, social amelioration, charity towards the helpless groups, patriotism. Love was the force that brought people together and formed society.³ Love by business people was the force he called on to reform society in this book as he dismissed class divisiveness as separating what should be united. The demand of love is universal excluding no one. Towards his conclusion he moves from Pauline solidarity to Johannine theology "God is love." He calls all Christians to affirm it and live it. The little volume does not reflect the sociological sophistication of his earlier volume Christianity and the Social Crisis ⁴ which dealt realistically from a hopeful socialist perspective with class conflict. Nor does it reflect the theological development of the latter volume A Theology for the Social Gospel,⁵ but this latter volume refers to the social portrait of love in Dare We Be Christians? and the earlier volume interpreted Jesus’ teaching of the virtue of love largely as social attraction and solidarity.

Rauschenbusch concentrates his theological reflection on the Kingdom of God and its reforming social implications. His discussions on the concept of God emphasize the reformation caused in the concept of God when it is undertaken by different social groups. His hopes are to democratize and make ethically relevant the concept of God. Consequently, most of his writings on the double love commandment is on the love of neighbour, and the imperative of love of God does not receive equal emphasis. It should be noted that for Rauschenbusch the community defines the concept of God while love produces community.

Though writing at the same time neither Rauschenbusch nor Ernst Troeltsch utilized the work of the other. Rauschenbusch might have raised Troeltsch’s estimate of the dun prospects for a revival of social Christianity. Troeltsch would have dimmed some of Rauschenbusch’s optimism. Troeltsch’s The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches only came to have great influence in the United States after its English publication in 193l.⁷ Both of the Niebuhr brothers had come under its influence using it much earlier from its German editions. Though Rauschenbusch, the son of an immigrant German and who himself had studied in Germany, did not rely on Troeltsch’s major work of 1911.

For Troeltsch the essence of the Christian ethic by the end of the nineteenth century had come to mean four essential theses, all derived from the double love commandment. The first is the personalistic theism recognized in the unity of heart, mind and soul oriented toward God. The second is the social solidarity which in love embraces everyone and grounded in metaphysical reality overcomes competition, compulsion, reserve and strife. The third is the ethical orientation of "mutual recognition, confidence, and care for others" which resolves the inescapable issues of equality and inequality. Finally, the Christian ethos produces to relieve the suffering of the world which is inevitable. Beyond these four contributions all desirable from the character of life confronted with the love commandants is the vision and promise of overcoming life in the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is for God to realize, but Christian life is also lived anticipatorily in it now.⁸

Before coming to his concluding theses Troeltsch had ransacked nineteen centuries of Christian history condensing it in a thousand-page text. What had begun as a religious idea of reality and ethics had in its evolution compromised with both the world and other philosophies. Such a compromise was necessary and fitting and each age would need to work out its own compromises between the ethic of Jesus and its historical reality. His present Lutheran church was ill-equipped to do so and its reality cast a Teutonic gloom over his historical perspective.

Jesus’ ethic or the gospel ethic seemed straightforward to Troeltsch. Jesus’ inspiration was religious and social, it came from its relationship to God. Troeltsch’s insistence upon "the religious idea" is similar to "spirituality" discussed later. The first concept is the Kingdom of God as meaning "the rule of God upon earth." Its date of completion is unknown, but probably soon. Jesus called followers to a purity of heart and a radical loyalty to God. It involved self-renunciation and a centring of life upon God. The way was severe but not socially radical in Troeltsch’s perspective. In emphasizing the "spirituality" of Jesus he wrote:

To love one’s neighbor, that is, that in intercourse with him we are to reveal to him or to arouse in him the Divine spirit of love.⁹

Once establishing the religious devotional quality of Jesus and his call to discipleship, Troeltsch can then investigate the sociological characteristics of the "gospel ethic". Without wanting to deny a distinction between spirituality and political economy, it is wise to set aside some of Troeltsch’s extreme statements. Jesus’ ministry was brief and the records are fragmentary, but we need not agree with Troeltsch that Jesus did not fight oppression, did not found a church, and had no idea of the state. The conflicts of Jesus with authorities, the organization of the twelve, and his political-religious execution all assert that Troeltsch had more to learn about Jesus. Of course, Troeltsch still had to go through World War I, see his church changed, and serve in a revolutionary government before his last thought on social order was written.

These theses of the socially powerless Jesus, the compromise of the gospel ethic with world and other systems of thought, the centrality of the love commandments, the need for a viable social ethic utilizing social philosophies, and the understanding by all this in relationship to the history of social philosophies had a forceful impact upon both H. Richard Niebuhr and his older brother Reinhold Niebuhr. It controlled Reinhold’s ethic throughout his career. H. Richard Niebuhr interpreted Troeltsch’s work in a typological method in Christ and Culture’¹⁰ while Reinhold’s first book Does Civilization Need Religion?¹¹ presents it in a linear model. He then continued to rewrite this history of the ideal hopes and norms and the reality for most of his career and in many ways in his books until Man’s Nature and His Communities,¹² his last volume.

Reinhold Niebuhr was not centrally interested in exact definitions of ethical terms. He was more committed to writing and speaking so that people would be encouraged in compassionate actions. In his course on theological ethics he explicated agape in terms of the considerations of Anders Nygren, M.C. D’Arcy, Soren Kierkegaard, and Emil Brunner while referring to the classical sources in scripture, Plato and Aristotle. In the end he found a middle position between theological liberalism which he believed regarded agape as a human possibility and Anders Nygren who regarded it as a human impossibility. For Niebuhr agape is a vision of life that is obligatory upon humanity for it reflects human possibilities under grace. The rich young ruler who came to Jesus knew that beyond particular requirements which he had fulfilled there was a deeper commandment. The requirement of total commitment was too much. The disciples asked how anyone could be saved, and Jesus responded salvation was only possible with God and not by human effort. Agape as an expression of love contained reference to the perfection of the unity of person in heart, mind and spirit in relationship to God and to the harmonious relationship of one to the neighbor. Under conditions of existence either harmony with God or neighbor was not to be normally expected. "Love is the final form of that righteousness."¹³ Love as the ultimate rule of human relations is for Niebuhr a derivative of the complete faith and trust in God. The further extension of this to justice as a work of love is considered elsewhere in this volume.

Anders Nygren, Lutheran bishop of Lund, contributed a sharp distinction between agape and eros to the 20th century discussions. In a profound survey of the history of the discussion of love in biblical, classical, and Christian sources he concluded agape was the central Christian idea. In its truest form in Martin Luther agape as God’s disinterested love for humanity was radically distinguished from eros as human love for the good. Love for Martin Luther and Nygren was not human love but divine love which God poured through humanity as through a tube. It had ideally nothing to do with human striving or fulfilling a law. This meaning of love ignored egocentricity or self-love. Only one loved by God and blessed could pass on this love.¹⁴ Metaphorically agape flowed down from God’s love to neighbor love to love for God and denied self-love; eros flowed up from self-love to love for God, to neighbour love and ignored God’s love. Now Nygren recognized these distinctions as ideal types or motifs which in many Christian thinkers and practices were mixed. But to the extent possible he wanted to sharpen the contrast and to theologically overcome the Roman Catholic tradition which had, from Augustine until Martin Luther, mixed agape and eros under the motif of charity. The ideal types may be too ideal in their presentation. Are not most expressions of Christian love mixtures of grace, obligation, trust, and even unfaith? If God desires human response, is even the divine love free of eros? But most of all any type of Christian agape that attaches little emphasis to human love to God as Nygren’s schematic does ¹⁵ is deficient, for that is still the first commandment.

The realization that Nygren has divided agape and eros too sharply requires that the understanding of agape be sought elsewhere. Gene Outka surveyed the literature on agape from 1930, the culmination of Nygren’s research, to 1967, the date of his dissertation defense at Yale, and refined his work with Basil Mitchell at Oxford in 1968-69. His work combines knowledge of Continental theology, American Christian ethics, and British analytic philosophy. He succeeds in sharing the conceptual difficulties in discussing this love imperative.

He chose to restrict his work to concerns about agape as neighbour love recognizing that such a choice exacted a price.¹⁶ "Agape is a regard for the neighbour which in crucial respects is independent and unalterable"¹⁷ He set out to analyse how agape is the requirement: "to consider the interest of others and not simply his own."¹⁸ The choice not to examine more fully the reference to love God in the first commandment led to neglect of obvious theological references in the texts he analyzed. An example is a very full paragraph of H. Richard Niebuhr’s from The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry ¹⁹ in which Outka claims "The richness of the meaning of neighbour regard is nicely exemplified" ²⁰ But the text actually is referenced to the love of God and neighbour by Niebuhr on the preceding and following page. One cannot explain Christian neighbour love without reference to the love of God and the meaning of Christ. Christian ethics without their theological context appear conceptually confused. The left tablet of the ten commandments presupposes the right tablet and the second commandment depends upon the first and the theological context of the New Testament witness to Christ.

It seemed strange to find the Christian ethics of Reinhold Niebuhr discussed under the rubric of "self-sacrifice" in Outka’s book because Niebuhr never talked much about "Self-sacrifice" in his ethics courses. His courses were more about the history of Christian Ethics, power issues in society, relative natural norms, criteria of justice. etc. The 300-page book of his writings entitled Love and Justice edited by D.B. Robertson discusses love as "the ideal of pure disinterestedness,"²¹ "an attitude of the ideal of spirit without any prudential or selfish consideration."²² and "love in which every life affirms the interest of the other." ²³

Niebuhr does talk about sacrificial love as an ideal and also as a solvent in human affairs. Christ’s acts in accepting the cross and initiating atonement were sacrificial love. So Niebuhr refers to sacrificial love as the pinnacle of love. Agape has for Niebuhr qualities of ecstasy which define "the ultimate heroic possibilities of human existence (including of course martyrdom).²⁴

But agape is also forgiving love in emulation of God and a universal sense of obligation which transcends particular obligations. We are obligated to love which is the meaning of love affirmed by Outka as equal regard for the welfare of the other. Outka has discovered a dimension of love implied in Jesus’ commandment, but in his neglect of the other dimensions in Niebuhr’s interpretation he misses aspects of Christian agape. Agape includes self-sacrifice as in Christ or in Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Niebuhr and Outka’s own history. Niebuhr was concerned that agape not be reduced simply to achievable good acts that liberals suggest as the meaning of love. They may be loving, but they may lack the profundity of agape. The differences between Niebuhr’s broad Christological use of love and Outka’s rather humanistic use of love reflect both theological differences and sociological differences Another pivotal point is that Niebuhr understands love to be the overcoming of the cleavage between essence and existence. In love what is and ought to be is overcome. It is a commandment but it is literally fulfilled. The commandment itself shows that the separation is not overcome in history.

The love imperative for Niebuhr is a religious symbol confronting egoism, promoting humility. We will not have the perfectly united self to be utterly directed to God with all our mind, heart and soul. Nor will we perfectly love our neighbour with the interest we serve ourselves. But still to do so would be the harmony of God. Yet with the full religious message of the gospel, people in Christian community can and do produce moral fruit utilizing agape in family and social strategies of mutuality and forgiveness. So Niebuhr’s understanding of love is both more religious and more communal than the relatively rationalistic, individualistic ethic²⁵ of Outka. In his presentation of most theologians’ views in Agape: An Ethical Analysis Outka suppresses their theology except for Karl Barth. In doing so at least in this case of the Niebuhrs he misses their meaning. But the sociological clash is even more acute. Niebuhr would have little but scorn for the youthful Outka’s social optimism. Outka wrote:

Or he recognizes that the conflict with Niebuhr is over different estimations of the human possibilities in history and then he writes:

Both Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch understood love as its base to be a drive for union or unity. Niebuhr expressed this more transcendentally and Rauschenbusch more immanently. They were both in the tradition of the social gospel as Niebuhr affirmed in Interpretation of Christian Ethics. The more recent Outka does not emphasize this harmony and seems not to be in this same tradition of the social gospel.

In summarizing the results of his analysis Outka concludes that agape expressed "equal regard" for the other. The other is treated with an "active concern for the neighbour’s well being" without undue emphasis upon the particularity of the other.²⁸ Each neighbour is equally in their relationship to God in their need for freedom, the meeting of basic human needs. This understanding of agape as regard carries to his understanding of justice which finds equalitarian ideas of justice overlapping with agape. He does not intend to collapse the distinction between love and equalitarian justice. The goals of meeting needs equally may require unequal distributions and different characteristics may be treated differently, but equal regard is required by justice. Outka’s conclusions in his careful analytic book are meagre, but they point in helpful ways toward further development of the relationship of the norm of justice.

The New Testament presents us with many uses of agape. It is from God for the world, the law of humanity toward God, and toward each other. Its context is the radically theistic context of the prophetic tradition culminating and transformed in Jesus Christ. Paul Ramsey was certainly correct when he explained that: "To be in the world with transforming power, the agape of Christ must be clearly understood as not of this world. Such as insist shows again the need for consideration of agape in terms of revelation, paradox, and theism. Ramsey is correct in relating this revealed norm to the nature of humanity and showing it to be expressed in a radical revisioning of natural law. The dangers of the expressions of natural law are in association of natural law with time bound statements of natural law and in the neglect of the degree to which natural law reflects its historical context. Also the conclusions of natural law theorists reveal the very relativity of the perceptions of natural law. So in this attempt to explicate Christian ethics love is related to a particular tradition of moral norms understood as both revelation and natural law in a particular communal context. The ten commandments are taken as the most important summary statement of both Hebrew morality and Christian morality and related to agape. Yet before the stipulated meaning of agape is finalized two voices from communities critical of the analysis so far need to be included: the feminist and the African-American.

Sally McFague’s metaphorical theology expresses the Christian gospel as radical love. Love becomes the essence of theology for her expressed in her metaphorical trinity. The parenthood of God is expressed in agape which seeks the fulfillment of life as a mother nurtures and cares for the next generation. Lovo no ero is expressed as the second of the trinity which seeks union with humanity in God’s body of the universe. And as philla seeks in express the companionship and friendship of the divine with the world. She tends to find the double love commandment as incapable of achievement, but affirming its direction she expresses it in terms she regards as more adequate for a nuclear and ecologically threatened age. Each of the expression of the trinity has its own characteristic ethic. That of the divine-universal parent is justice. Here the drive is for humans to model the loving presentation and fulfillment of life in concrete actions. The model of God’s love and by extension human love.

The work of God as friend is to be with humanity in the world, and the human ethic is to accompany the other and not in betray life in the enemy. The friendship with God requires the struggle for justice and the identification with the suffering by the friends of the Friend of the World.

She playfully suggests the enrichment of our models of the trinity. In her elevation of love to the center of her theology she is faithful to the New Testament and especially the Johannine emphases. The recognition that God’s love can be expressed persuasively as divine parent, lover, friend each with their own developed ethical meaning is a welcome joining of ethics with her theology. The theology of the trinity in her care is ethical in its essence, expressed it also has ethical consequences.

The political symbols of the older traditional theology Father, King. Monarch, Creator may have more of the Janus- faced character than she elaborates. In the words of Jesus these symbols express love not oppression or heteronomy. The preference for organic metaphors in much of her theology and the displacement of political-social metaphors like the Kingdom of God may not be as helpful to Christian thought as she thinks. Is it not the case that the issues of nuclear terror have been reduced by political choices and changes? Wise ecological choices too must be made politically before the organic death and responses themselves overwhelm politics. She is correct to recognize the need to include the material-organic in her theology, but she errs if this emphasis trivializes the political-social symbols.

She is correct that theology articulates models of God and that metaphor is a large part of the model building. She is wise in her middle way between fundamentalism about religious symbols and the cynical deconstruction of religious symbols. Christian realism in the spirit of Paul Tillich or Reinhold Niebuhr is closer to the reality pole than the deconstructionist pole. For here the symbols express hypotheses about human nature which are verifiable in human experience. For our time when one of the great human advances is the gender revolution, the need for her symbols of love, parent, love and friend, for God can be accepted with less tentativeness than characterized in her bold book.

Barbara Hilkert Andolsen’s research into feminist ethics is a strong reminder that partiarchialism has haunted the tradition. From the 19th century women have protested that they do not need counsel from male ethicists to sacrifice themselves. Margaret Farley represents the tradition in recognizing agape as full mutual love marked by gender equality.³⁰ Andolsen affirms agape as a norm applicable to all realms of life. I think she erred in regarding Niebuhr as following "in the footsteps of Nygren condemning self-love and emphasizing sacrifice as the primary historical manifestation of agape".³¹ The textual evidence is clear that Niebuhr warns against egoism as corrupting mutuality. Christ as a religious symbol participates in sacrifice. Our old weak patriarchal dependent selves need to be given up, but the goal of his ethic in fulfilled people is as much as is possible under the limits of sin.

Beverly Harrison had preceded Sally McFague in using the term of radical love to discuss passionate, engaged, embodied love in relational terms, Also she had made the point that anger is part of love. Anger reveals the connected relationality of the bearer of the anger. She fears that Christians have nearly stamped Out love and become loving because of their refusal to express anger. Anger, for her, expresses caring and is "a sign of some resistance in ourselves to the moral quality of the social relations in which we are immersed."³² Anger becomes both the recognition that change is needed and part of the energy to achieve the change. The model of God as a mother angry at the mistreatment of her children is a powerful image and one worthy of our imaging as we enact our Christian ethics. Of course, one may mistakenly direct anger at the wrong source, the wise use of anger implies adequate analysis of the cause of anger. Anger itself may blind one to truth or energize a foolish cause. Anger like passion requires appropriately directed action.

The theory and practice of love in direct action for social change received new impetus in the 20th century. Out of anger for servitude, oppression and anti-colonialism Mahatma Gandhi was able to fashion organized force to impel the British to surrender India to its people. Combining the respect for life from his lain-influenced Hindu traditions with the image of love from the Sermon on the Mount he evolved a theory and practice of non-violent action. By articulating just needs for change, negotiation, purification, disciplined man’s suffering and further negotiations he organized the expression of love which moved the empire. From the success in India, world-wide decolonization became the world’s agenda. Massive non-violent civil disobedience carried forth from India would eventually win civil rights for African-Americans in the United States and be an important ingredient in the overthrow of Communism and apartheid in the closing years of the century.

Gandhi was impelled by agape as he learned it from Christian example and study. But British justice in which he trained as a law student in London failed in India and as an Indian or Hindu he utilized love and strategy to force justice to cede power and become more just. Martin Luther King, Jr. as an African-American minister grafted Gandhi’s methods onto the African-American church’s own non-violence and his Christian theological studies. In his life and thought non-violent direct action became agape in action. This certainly is correct. The church as a spiritual community ought not to adopt the tools of violence for social change even though the world always presupposes violence. The non-violent tactics are necessarily more loving than the violent and more intimate to the nature of Church. The Church cannot deny all violence in the world, particularly it cannot deny the violence of self or communal defense against violent attack. But it can and must teach that agape governs church tactics directly and non-church tactics indirectly. In its ecumenical discussions the Church having learned that God is love will have to insist that the religious utilization of violence for social or political change is a failure. If dialogue partners argue for violence for other than justifiable defense the Christian criteria of agape will incline Christians to argue that the other religious tradition be amended. Christianity has amended its tradition in light of agape and others can learn from that growth that agape governs methods as well as goals of religious life, and crusade or fanatic religious mentality is outdated and wrong.

Summary

This running commentary on selective 20th century interpretations of agape in Christian Ethics reveals certain convictions and trajectories. The interpretation is undertaken from a Christian realist perspective rooted in John Calvin’s sense that Christians and others need moral instruction. The love commandments require their theological roots, they ultimately matter. We also need their practical illustration. The parable of the Good Samaritan follows upon the lawyer’s recounting of the double love commandment. The lawyer needed to know who his neighbour was. It was the other encounter in need. The response was to care for and provide what the other needed. So agape is ultimate, universal and particular with broad consequences.

To reduce these broad theories of love to a single (even if complex) insight is hazardous. Still for summary a single emphasis may be isolated:

Our understanding of love is as Jesus recognized a summary of our total ethic. It is also that on which all our prophetic religion and moral guidelines depend. It governs religion and ethics, if a teaching cannot be reconciled with love it is not Christian ethics. We recognize its source in the nature of God and God’s will for humanity. Beyond these general guidelines which determine the shape of Christian ethics, it is the meaning of the particular need of our encountered neighbour as if it were our own needs.

J. Russell Chandran related his reflections on the basis for a Christian social vision to the unifying "bond of love" which carried the same meanings as Rauschenbusch half a world and eighty years removed. Analyzing the vision in relationship to both India and the world ecumenical movement he wrote:

In commitment to Dalit liberation S. Arokiasamy, S.J. put it pointedly:

The meaning of love is that it unites God and humanity and neighbour to neighbour. In so doing it liberates people and changes structures toward the justice it seeks.

Notes:

1. Walter Rauschenbusch, Dare We Be Christians? (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1993) Originally published 1914.

2. Ibid., p. 14.

3. ibid., p. 30.

4. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964) Originally published 1907.

5. Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1917).

6. Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 67.

7. Ernst Troeltsch. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: The Macmillan Company. 1931).

8. Ibid, pp. 1004-1006

9. Ibid., p. 54.

10. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951).

11. Reinhold Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion? (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929).

12. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965).

13. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941).

14. Andres Nygren, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 8.

15. Ibid. p. 219.

16. Gene Outka. Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 8.

17. Ibid., p. 9.

18. Ibid.. p. 8.

19. H Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1956). p. 34-36.

20. Outka, p. 8.

21. D.B. Robertson, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1957).

22. Ibid., p. 220.

23. Ibid., p. 50.

24. Ibid., p. 28.

25. Stephen J. Pope finds Outka still working for a individualistic bias in his more recent essay on the love commandment. "Love in Contemporary Ethics," Journal of Religious Ethics (Spring, 1995), 23.1, pp. 157-197.

26. Outka (references)

27. Ibid., p. 43.

28. Ibid., p. 260.

29. Sally McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p.149.

30. Barbara Hikert Andolsen "Agape in Feminist Ethics, ‘The Journal of Religious Ethics (Spring, 1981) 9/1, pp. 69-83.

31. Ibid., p. 70.

32. Beverly Wilding Harrison "The Power of Anger in the Work of Love" Union Seminary Quarterly Review, XXXVI (Supplementary, 1981) p. 49.

33. J. Russell Chandran, "Biblical and Theological Basis for a Christian Social Vision" Religion and Society (June-Sept), No.2 and 3, p.67.

34. S. Arokiaswamy "Faith that does justice" Religion and Society, (December, 1990), XXXVII, No. 4, p.67.

(Charles C. West is Professor-emeritus at the Princeton Theological Seminary, USA and was K.C. Abraham’s guide for his doctoral studies there.)

One always runs a risk in entering a dialogue from out of another society ten thousand miles away, even when the conversation is within the community of the Church. The risk is somewhat less great, however, when the occasion is to celebrate the ministry of an old friend and colleague. K.C. Abraham is no stranger to the ecumenical search for an effective social witness today, with all the controversy it involves, and the new directions it takes: It is a pleasure to join him in that search.

Let me begin with a concept that has become popular in ecumenical circles during the past few years: that of "paradigm shift." Konrad Raiser, now General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, uses it to describe, a change in theological perspective which affects the whole range of ecumenical work.¹ His colleague and former student Martin Robra applies it specifically to a change in perspective on social ethics in World Council work.² K.C. Abraham describes it as a change in theological and ethical perspective brought about by the participation of the Third World in the ecumenical movement.³ They all make important points. I would like, however, to suggest that "paradigm" has a broader and deeper meaning than these changes indicate. There are paradigm conflicts in theology, philosophy and ethics. Unlike natural sciences, whence the term was borrowed, one does not replace the other as investigators become convinced that the new one is more meaningful. Rather they exist side by side. They influence and often subvert one another. Decision for one or the other is a commitment of faith that is more than the rational insight of which Thomas Kuhn speaks. It is more complete, though of the same character, as Michael Polanyi’s "personal element" in all knowledge. What the authors cited above are describing is differences of perspective and experience within one basic paradigm. It is inclusive enough to hold them all in one community of faith and discourse. It deepens and changes through the dialogue between them. But it is one of at least four that compete with each other, both within and outside the Christian tradition. Let me briefly enumerate them.

A. The Paradigms

1. The first, and probably the oldest, is the paradigm of participation in an order of being. For the ancient civilizations of Babylon and Egypt it took the form of a union between cosmology and political order. Gods and human rulers interacted in a sacred sphere to sustain this order. Nature and humanity were defined by their part in it. The Greek philosophers projected the essence of this order more in terms of reason than mythology. Chinese Confucian civilization found it in a system of relationships which bound together heaven and earth, emperor and officials, government and families in an unchanging harmony. There are undoubtedly parallels in Hindu cosmology as well. In all these societies, and in many others, human life was given meaning and direction by participation in an eternal order which embraces all things, and determines the place and the right behavior of all who are a part of it. Ethics is participation in this order.

The classic struggle with this paradigm took place in Christian history during the early centuries when neo-Platonic metaphysics was conquered by the biblical drama of creation and redemption. But it still is with us today where eternal life and immortality of the soul replace the hope of resurrection. It faces us afresh when ever the order of a traditional society with its apparent timeless harmony of nature, humanity and religion offers to absorb or replace the Christian message. It arises in demonic forms when cultures, threatened by change, idealize their own past and try to enforce it against enemies within and without.

2. The second paradigm is that of reality, human and divine, defined by an absolute structure, doctrine of law. The modern form of it we call fundamentalism, but it has its ancient forms. Jesus faced it among the Scribes and Pharisees of his time. There was a Chinese philosophy known as Legalism two centuries before Christ which served the emperor well in efforts to establish his authority. Islam is based on a revealed doctrine and law which embraces the whole of life, both personal and social, though it is often softened by interpretation. Legalism has dogged Christianity throughout its history whenever a particular structure of the Church, a particular doctrinal statement, or a particular form of behavior, has replaced the living Christ as the expression of divine revelation and the guide for human life.

Absolute law is a derivative paradigm. It arises in troubled times to protect an embattled society when its religious confidence fails, or to create order when chaos threatens. It replaces participation in cosmic reality with power in the form of positive divine and human authority. In the Hebrew-Christian context it replaces the living God with a structure of organization, doctrines and laws that claim to embody God on earth. Human beings become creatures of law. The meaning of life, the way to salvation, is obedience to the structure.

3. The third paradigm is more modern, that of Enlightenment humanism. It, too, has ancient roots, both in Epicurean materialism and in Stoic rationalism. One finds suggestions of it in the Confucian model of the true scholar. Gandhi found many of its values in the Bhagavad Gita. Still, as a full paradigm it is a post-Christian redefinition of idealized Greek humanism. It dismantles Greek cosmology and Christian revelation alike, yet retains the confidence in human reason which characterized the one and the hope for a fulfilled future that is derived from the other. It turns the human being into an individual, and places all confidence in the goodness and power of that individual pursuing his or her own objectives in freedom from restraint to understand, master, and organize all reality -- personal, social, natural and even divine -- for the greatest good of all. Ethics then becomes the rational pursuit of subjectively defined goals, private or as agreed upon in groups. Public ethics require only that a social context be maintained by law and custom, which maximizes the freedom of individual self-determination.

Marxism has presented itself as the total nemesis of this worldview, and in a way it was. Yet it is still a variation on the same paradigm. The individual is replaced by collective humanity, a vision of the free individual expressed in and through the whole species creating itself and universalizing its power over nature by its labor. History, to be sure, is not only the progress of humanity but also the drama of class war, brought about by the division of labor, private property, and exploitation. Salvation comes therefore through revolutionary action by the dehumanized victims of this process who rediscover in the solidarity of their total deprivation, the true humanity which will finally triumph. The ethic is provisionally revolutionary, finally rational planning by one humanity working in harmony to universalize itself. The paradigm is militantly, if collectively, humanist.

Christian ethics has learned many things from this paradigm, both good and bad. Human rights, both political and social, have been dramatized as a command of God. The relation between freedom in Christ and freedom in political and economic life has been newly conceived. The dynamic of God’s justice judging and transforming the powers of this world has been grasped in new contexts. The dimensions of divine blessing on human enterprise and of the vast new responsibility it brings for creation and the quality of human life, have expanded beyond previous imagination. In all these ways this post-Christian humanism has reminded the Church of whole ranges of its gospel which it had restricted or forgotten.

At the same time this paradigm poses a constant temptation for the Church, the more so because its humanism is post-Christian and draws so heavily on a vision of the human which is inspired by Biblical revelation and the person of Christ. It is tempting to turn the perfections of God -- God’s justice, mercy, holiness, faithfulness and love -- into perfections of human nature. It is easy to forget the self-centred perversity of our human ambitions and causes, and therefore to turn the struggle against sin into a self-righteous crusade against evil. We have learned from the Enlightenment and its Marxist negative image some bad lessons: a self-righteous view of human nature, individual or collective, a good-evil dichotomy in our judgment on others and in our social action, a shallow sense of human community, and an exaggerated confidence in the power of human beings to manage and control their own destinies.

4. The fourth paradigm I will call, though the term is too weak, relational. Reality is found not in an order of being, not in a law, not in the free self-expression of human beings pursuing their individual or collective ends, but in the relationship established by the one who created us, has made himself known to us, called us, made a covenant with us, remained faithful to us when we have broken that covenant, who has come to us in Jesus Christ, redeemed us and our world in the victory of Christ over sin and its powers, and made us witnesses by the power of the Spirit to his coming in glory. Ethics in this paradigm is to live in this relationship, to trust its promise, to repent and be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:2) In response to the one who calls and forgives us, and to discern our responsibilities to the world around us in the light of this creator and redeemer. K.C. Abraham, following Martin Buber, puts it well: "Who Yahwe is, is known only in the events of his continuing relation to the Hebrew people, a relationship in which the knower is transformed."⁴ So it is also with Christians who seek to understand and respond to the triune God in the world today.

Ethics, then, is the exploration of this relationship, of its claim on us and on the world. In this relationship we discover our own unfaithfulness, our self-centred misuse of divine gifts, our distorted ideological perspectives, and all that is included in the word sin. We know ourselves and the world as being judged by a righteous God, brought to repentance and restored to life. We see this happening to the world around us as well, and it determines our engagement with that world. We are in the midst of a history, the total meaning of which we do not know, whose limits we cannot escape, but which we know to be directed toward its fulfillment by a God of justice and love. We know ourselves to be stewards of the gifts of this God, responsible for such power and dominion as is given us, to the one whose character is revealed in the powerlessness, the servanthood and sacrifice of Christ. Being judged and transformed ourselves, we try to realize in our time the gracious purposes of a God who reaches out for the poor and marginalized among us, and who calls us into a community of mutual acceptance and forgiveness.

B. The Ecumenical Context

It is my thesis that the last paradigm has been basic for ecumenical ethics from its earliest expressions to the present, and that it is the context which continues to make encounters between radically different social experiences and theological perspectives fruitful. Let me list, without claiming to be exhaustive, a few characteristics which it gives to this dialogue.

First, it is a dialogue which is open at every point to new insight from the word of God. A dynamic of judgment and repentance, directed first at the Church itself, operates in it.

Second, it is a dialogue of mutual confrontation, correction and new direction among the participants who bring it not only different but often conflicting analyses of the world, engagement in social action, and convictions about the work of God.

Third, it is an open search for new ways by which the Holy Spirit works and Christ takes form in the world, and for patterns of faithful response. This too may lead to clashing styles of piety and social engagement which challenge and correct each other.

Fourth, It is a dialogue about human responsibility to confront the powers of this world with the power of God, to bring about justice and peace through human action and witness. It presupposes that Christians are so engaged, that their praxis in the faith is subject to reflection and reform in the midst of life not in some theory apart from it.

Fifth, it is a dialogue among Christians about their stewardship of God’s non-human creation in the light of God’s purposes for it and for the future of humanity.

Within these parameters the dialogue is open to an ever-increasing variety of perspectives and points of view, based on the vast plurality of human solidarities, of culture, of class, of nation, language, and common experience. It is relationships among all these that are built and transformed in the encounter.

It is in this context, I believe, that the changes which Raiser, Robra, and in a different way Abraham, call paradigm shifts, should be understood. Raiser maintains that "Christocentric universalism," a phrase which he quotes from his predecessor WA. Visser’t Hooft, was the early paradigm of the Ecumenical Movement but that after 1968 it was no longer adequate. Robra extends his argument. Christocentrism could no longer cope with the challenge of religious pluralism; universalism did not grasp the depth of alienation among the poor and the marginalized; salvation history did not do justice to the plural histories of the world’s many cultures and nations; the unity of the Church in Christ offered no power or guidance in overcoming sexism, racism and human exploitation. Pragmatic realism as an ethical method expressed in the concept "responsible society" could not expand its perspective to include these new challenges. Even liberation theology, its still Christocentric successor, failed to come to terms with both technology and the human relation to nature.

Therefore, say Raiser and Robra, the search is on for a new concept of ecumenical theology and ethics. A new way of seeking truth, especially moral truth, is replacing the old linear logic of Western rationality. A spirit of mastery is yielding to a spirit of solidarity. Conceptually structured systems of truths known by experts are giving away to an "ethic of discourse" in the "living world." Raiser suggests that image of "Oikoumene, the one household of life" and suggests three emphasis in it: (1) "a Trinitarian understanding of divine reality and of the relationship between God, the world and humankind;" (2) "life" understood as a web of reciprocal relationships as a central point of reference (instead of history);" and (3) "an understanding of the one church in each place and in all places as a fellowship in the sense of community of those who are different from one another."⁵ Robra sees in the meetings and actions of the World Council of Churches during the past fifteen years a new style of "dynamic interactive reality" in ecumenical ethics. He finds in the 1990 Seoul Conferences on "Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation" not the chaos and confusion most observers reported, but "a case study in paradigm change". There was conflict. No longer did "the transnational global definition of reality expressed in abstract terms as above" controlled the proceedings. Rather concrete, often contradictory experiences were taken seriously and a covenanting process took place outside "the model of the great church councils."⁶ Out of this process, he maintains new concepts will emerge to discern the will and purpose of God in social mutuality, participation, and sensitivity to the marginalized and excluded people of the world.

To this perspective two things should be said. First, the elements of what Raiser and Robra call the emerging new paradigm are not new. They have characterized the ecumenical encounter from the beginning. "Christocentric universalism" in theology, and "pragmatic realism" in ethics, so far as they played a strong role, were always provisional. They were forms of human response and human witness, constantly being judged and reformed in dialogue with other partners, even though they were, as they still are, coherent and responsible witnesses. The context of the theological and ethical debate has always been dialogical interaction in which voices from all parts of the oikumene joined, and which have expanded over the years to include more and more partners. The process is continuing. They are a part of it.

Second, the concept "paradigm shift" inhibits rather than promotes dialogue. It divides Christians into two camps, those who operate in the old framework and those who participate in the new. This can only be done by drawing contrasts that mislead, even to the point of caricature: e.g., Christology "from above" vs. Christology "from below," or "oikoumene of domination" vs. "oikoumene of solidarity."⁷ One perspective is stigmatized; the other is idealized. There can be no mutual challenge and correction. The result is a curious combination of intolerance toward the theological and ethical work of the past and celebration of the most diverse and unreflective expressions of the present so long as they emerge from groups designated as marginalized or oppressed.

C. Contrasting Styles

K.C. Abraham’s concern is somewhat different. His use of the term "paradigm shift" is, I think, mistaken, but his concern is real. He describes the change from "naturalistic/substantialistic forms of thought to historical/ personal categories."⁸ Within this latter paradigm, which is just the one we have described above as ecumenical, he pleads the case for new theologies which are non Euro-centric but emerge from the faith and witness of churches among the people of the Third World. "These theologies are not marginal," he says, "although they arise out of the experience of the marginalized. Rather they are in the classical tradition of the fundamental reformulations of the Christian faith, just like Augustine, Luther or Schleiermacher." ⁹ These theologies, and the ethics that flow from them, make universal claims from particular perspectives. They "provide what they believe to be the central vision of the Christian faith." They are essential participants in the ecumenical dialogue which has the same objective.

Within this dialogue there are contrasting styles and they create areas of controversy over social ethics and policy. Let me here delineate just two. Both are represented by Indians, though both are ecumenical in the scope of their allegiance.

1. In a recent book M. M. Thomas speaks of being asked in a public lecture to "expound the Scripture with some degree of autobiography. The suggestion," he writes, "led me to ask myself what particular aspect of the Gospel of Jesus Christ provided for me the continuing crucial link first between the spiritual experience of my adolescence and of my adulthood, and second, between my inner spirituality and my concern for religious renaissance and social change in India. And it was not difficult to come to the conclusion that it was the Gospel of Divine Forgiveness offered in the Crucified and Risen Jesus Christ. It is intensely personal, sustaining a person’s faith, in spite of his/her moral failure, intellectual doubt and spiritual despair of his/herself and the world; and it gives to personal life a sense of direction and destiny. But it also gives him/her a realization of solidarity with all men and women before God, both in sin and in divine forgiveness and opens up the vision and power of a new fellowship and a new humanity in Christ. In that sense the divine forgiveness offered in Christ is deeply social in character, and provides the source, the criterion and goal of the struggle everywhere today for new societies which can do justice to the dignity of the human being. ¹⁰

This confession, rooted in the ancient piety and worship of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church and nourished in the ecumenical movement, underlies an ethic of profound involvement in the struggle for social justice, profound realism about the powers of this world including those which possess the righteous, and a profound hope which is never satisfied by the achievements of this world. A dialectic is at work here, between the just cause and the sin of those who espouse it, between the vision of a new humanity in Christ, and the forgiveness of sins that makes it possible, between hope and realism about social change. There is a style of engagement in the struggle and openness to repentance and correction in the midst of it, of combat with the enemies of justice and readiness for the reconciling word that transforms the conflict. It is one way of doing Christian social ethics, one form of Christian witness on the ecumenical stage.

2. There is another way. The American Black theologian James Cone writes: "When the meaning of Christianity is derived from the bottom and not the top of the socio-economic ladder, from people who are engaged in the fight for justice and not from those who seek to maintain the status quo, then something radical and revolutionary happens to the function of the "holy" in the context of the ‘secular’. ‘Viewed from the perspective of oppressed people’s struggle for freedom, the holy become a radical challenge to the legitimacy of the secular structures of power by creating eschatological images and legends about a realm of experience that is not confined to the values of this world."¹¹ To interpret the story of Jesus, "from the standpoint of the marginalized" (Abraham) in the view of many liberation theologians, leads to an ethic of liberation directly and without dialectical restraints. Christ is in the struggle, against all the forces which support and justify the domination of the poor by the rich, the weak by the powerful. Salvation is continuous with the efforts of the oppressed to achieve their humanity through it.

Between these two styles there are many controversies. Let me list a few:

a) Both styles are rooted in the biblical message. How do we deal with the profound differences in our understanding of how the power of God in Jesus Christ is at work in the world and in the life of the believer?

b) Both styles are aware of the role of ideology in distorting truth and reality in the world. Where does each go for correction of ideological perspectives? What role does revelation play for each?

c) Both are dedicated to human liberation. What, for each, is the relation between freedom in Christ and freedom from the oppressive powers of the world?

d) What role does repentance play in each style, and reconciliation with God and with enemies?

e) The two styles differ basically in their understanding of the powers of this world and the form of Christian action toward them. How total are they? How are they related to human motivations? How can they be made to serve human justice and peace? What is the interaction in Christian witness between resistance to and responsibility for them?

f) What, for each style, is the basis of our common humanity? How do (1) solidarity of the oppressed in their marginalization, and (2) community of forgiveness and grace in Christ, relate to each other?

g) What community is given us in Christ, and what community can we achieve socially and politically among people of (1) different cultures and nations, (2) different class and social conditions (e.g., caste), (3) different ultimate commitments of faith, whether secular or religious? How do changing relations between men and women affect all these solidarities?

h) What is the reality of the Church and what is the role of the Church in realizing community and justice, and in bearing witness to God’s reign in the world?

i) What is the form of God’s promise for human community and for the relation between human beings and the achievements human struggle for justice and peace can achieve in our time?

This is only a list. Behind each question is a field of controversy to be explored in ecumenical encounter. The plea with which I close is that this encounter continue with passion, with conviction, with a determined wrestling for each other’s souls and faithfulness as Christian believers, but with a recognition that the Triune God is our judge and our redeemer. Before this God all of us are called to repentance and new understanding.

Notes:

1. Ecumenism in Transition (Geneva, 1994).

2. Oekumenische Sozialethik (Bochum, 1994).

3. "Third World Theology: Paradigm Shift and Emerging Concerns" in M.P. Joseph (ed.), Confronting Life: Theology out of the Context (Delhi: ISPCK. 1995).

4. op. cit.. p. 203.

5. Raiser, op. cit., p. 79

6. Robra, op. cit.

7. Raiser, op. Cit., pp 59, 63.

8. Joseph, op. cit., p. 203.

9. Ibid.. pp 204-205.

10. M.M. Thomas, The Gospel of Forgiveness and Koinonia, (Delhi & Tiruvalla, 1994), pp. 1-2.

11. "Christian Faith and Political Praxis" in Joseph (ed.), op. cit. p. 12.

(Virgil Elizondo is Director of the Mexican-American Cultural Centre in San Antonio.)

Introduction

Allow me to introduce myself so that you may read this presentation from the perspective from which I am attempting to reflect on -- the great frontier between Mexico and the USA. I am a native born Mexican-American Tejano from San Antonio, Texas, USA. I have always lived and worked among my own people -- except for very brief periods of time when I went away to do advanced studies or on special assignments in different parts of the world. My own family and the people from my barrio have been my basic formation team and it is from them that I have acquired my most cherished values, beliefs and religious expressions. It is through them and with them that I have experienced God, Jesus and the communion of saints -- all of them have become very good friends.

As I practice and reflect on the popular tradition of faith of my own Mexican-American people, I become more and more fascinated with its meaning and function in the everyday lives of the people and the enriching contribution that these faith traditions can make to the universal church and to society in general. Many have tried to force us to give up our language, culture and even religious expressions of our faith. But we have resisted and to the degree that we have resisted, we continue to be el pueblo.. la raza. What ultimately makes us who we are? We continue to re-create annually the ancient traditions which are the very substance of our collective soul.

Formation of Mexican American Religious Tradition

Religion and religious expression is power -- but will it be a power unto life or a power of sacralized and legitimized oppression, marginalization, exclusion, ethnocide and even genocide? I am involved in the praxis of what theologians and social scientists tend to call "popular religiosity." And from within the praxis of "popular religiosity" I can say honestly that I find very few authors that seem to know what he/she is really talking about -- they always seem to be speaking about the faith expressions of someone else who does not have the "pure faith" the author seems to presuppose about him-/herself. I do not believe that anyone can penetrate the deep mystery of the religious expressions of a people from the outside. Outsiders can describe it and analyze it, but they will never know it for what it truly is. To the outsider, the ways in which people express their faith will always appear as religiosity while to the people themselves, they will be the ultimate, tangible expressions of the ultimately inexpressible: the mystery of God present and acting in our midst.

Our Mexican-American religious expression, as we have it today, started with the prodigious mestizaje of Iberian Catholicism with the native religions which were already here. The rich and original synthesis did not take place in the theological universities or the councils of the Church, but in the very ordinary crossroads of daily life. This mestizising process started in 1519 and is still going on today. It is in the pantheon of these religious symbols and rituals that the Mexican-American experiences the deepest belonging and cultural communion. They need no explanation for those of us for whom they are meaningful, and no explanation will suffice for those who live and operate in a world of different religious symbols. We Mexican-Americans do not need or seek explanations about Our Lady of Guadalupe, Nuestra Señora de los Lagos, el Cristo Negro de Esquipulas, San Martin de Porres. . . . We know them well as living persons. In them, we experience the mystery of our own identity. They are our collective alter ego.

The Christian word of God was inculturated deeply within the collective soul of Mexico not by the intention of the missioners, but by the process of symbolic interchange which took place in a very natural way in the cocinas, mercados, plazas, hogares, tamaladas, panteones, milpas y fiestas del pueblo. In these places, the free interchange of life and ideas between the Iberians and the Nahuatls took place in a very natural way. Nobody was planning it or organizing it, it was simply taking place as naturally as the new flowers blossom in spring time.

Because the ordinary Spaniards of that period of time were mostly illiterate and came from the medieval world which was so rich in imagery and the native world of the Americas communicated mainly through an image-language, it was much more at the level of the image-word than of the alphabetic spoken word that the new synthesis of Iberian Catholicism and the native religions took place and continues to take place today. This synthesis became flesh in the gastronomic world which produced the new Mexican foods for which Mexico is famous today. Our cuisine, rich in contradictory flavors, is the earthly expression of the heavenly banquets referred to in the Scriptures. As Mexican cuisine emerged, so did the Mexican soul. Our mothers struggled to prepare tasty dishes out of the little or nothing they had available. They managed to nourish both our bodies and our spirit out of the same domestic tabernacles of life: Las cocinas.¹ Here they were free to talk, discuss, imagine, think, formulate and understand without coercion or control from higher authorities. This interchange at the grassroots level has gradually given birth to Mexican Christianity.²

Ritual, mystery and image might well be called the trinity of the Mexican and Mexican-American cultural-religious identity. Dogma and doctrines seem to be so Western, while ritual and mystery seem to be so mestizo Mexican. It is only in Our Lady of Guadalupe that the dichotomy is both assumed and transformed into synthesis. It would be the madrecitas in the cocinas who would gradually unfold and transmit the innermost meaning of this theophany which ushered in the new Christian tradition of the Americas. The male theologians have imposed Western Marian categories on Guadalupe and have missed the creating and generative power of Guadalupe which has been articulated, developed and transmitted by the abuelitas, storytellers and artists.³ It marks the beginning of our own tradition of Christianity -- or what some people call "popular religiosity."

Function of Religious Tradition

Popular religiosity is simply the religious tradition of the local church.⁴ The term itself "popular religiosity" is what others call the religious expressions of my people. For us, they are simply nuestra a vida de fe! They are our own sacramental life which has arisen out of the common priesthood of the people acting in the power of the Spirit. The Word has become flesh in us in the form of our religious practices and traditions. They are the visible expressions of our collective soul through which we affirm ourselves to be who we are in our relationship to each other and to God. Others may take everything else away from us, but they cannot destroy our expressions of the divine. Through these practices we not only affirm ourselves as a people, but we likewise resist ultimate assimilation. Thus they are not only affirmations of faith, but the language of defiance and ultimate resistance. In our collective celebrations, we rise above the forces which oppress us and even seek to destroy us and celebrate publicly our survival. But it is much more than survival; through them, the new born babies and growing children are initiated into the God-language of our people and thus we are assured that life will continue unto the next generation and generations to come.

By popular expressions of the faith I do not refer to the private or individual devotions of a few people but to the ensemble of beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, devotions and prayers which are commonly practiced by the people at large. It is my contention, which is beyond the scope of this paper to develop but which will be its point of departure, that those expressions of the faith which are celebrated voluntarily by the majority of the people, transmitted from generation to generation by the people themselves and which go on within the church, without it or even in spite of it, express the deepest identity of the people.

The popular expressions of the faith function in totally different ways for various peoples depending on their history and sociocultural status. For the dominant culture, the popular expressions of the faith will serve to legitimize their way of life as God’s true way for humanity. They will tranquilize the moral conscience and blind people from seeing injustices which exist in daily life. For a colonized/oppressed/dominated group, they are the ultimate resistance to the attempts of the dominant culture to destroy them as a distinct group either through annihilation or through absorption and total assimilation. They will maintain alive the sense of injustice to which the people are subjected to in their daily lives.

They are the ultimate foundation of the people’s innermost being and the common expression of the collective soul of the people. They are supremely meaningful for the people who celebrate them, and meaningless to the outsider. To the people whose very life-source they are, no explanation is necessary, but to the casual or scientific spectator no explanation will ever express or communicate their true and full meaning. Without them, there might be associations of individuals bound together by common interest (e.g., the corporation, the state, etc.), but there will never be the experience of being a people un pueblo.

It is within the context of the tradition of the group that one experiences both a sense of selfhood and a sense of belonging. Furthermore, it is within the tradition that one remains in contact both with one’s beginnings through the genealogies and the stories of origins and with one’s ultimate end. We are born into them and within them we discover our full and ultimate being. I might enjoy and admire other traditions very much, but I will never be fully at home within them. No matter how much I get into them, I will always have a sense of being ‘other’.

From the very beginning, Christianity presented a very unique way of universalizing peoples without destroying their localized identity. People would neither have to disappear through assimilation nor be segregated as inferior. The Christian message interwove with the local religious traditions so as to give the people a deeper sense of local identity (a sense of rootedness), while, at the same time, breaking down the psycho-sociological barriers that kept nationalities separate and apart from each other so as to allow for a truly universal fellowship (a sense of universality). In other words, it affirmed rootedness while destroying ghettoishness. Christianity changed peoples and cultures not by destroying them, but by reinterpreting their core rituals and myths through the foundational ritual and myth of Christianity. Thus, now a Jew could still be a faithful Jew and yet belong fully to the new universal fellowship and, equally, a Greek or a Roman could still be fully Greek or Roman and equally belong to the new universal group.

In the same way, Christianity, without destroying our ancient rootedness, allowed us to enter into a universal family by sharing in a new common faith and in universal religious symbols. It changed our native ancestors and their mestizo descendants not by the elimination of our religious ways, but by combining them with the Iberian-Christian ways to the mutual enrichment of both. This has been the consistent way of the Christian tradition as it has historically made its way from Galilee, to Jerusalem, through Europe, Asia and North Africa and to the ends of the earth.⁵ Without ceasing to be who we had been, we have become part of a broader human group -- the Christian family which takes its members from all the nations of the world without destroying their nationalities.

Two Distinct American Religious Traditions

The beginning of the Americas introduces two radically distinct image/ myth representations of the Christian tradition. The USA was born as a secular enterprise with a deep sense of religious mission. The native religions were eliminated and totally supplanted by a new type of religion. Puritan moralism, Presbyterian righteousness and Methodist social consciousness coupled with deism and the spirit of rugged individualism to provide a sound basis for the new nationalism which would function as the core religion of the land. It was quite different in Latin America where the religion of the old European world clashed with those of the world they were conquering and in their efforts to uproot the native religions, found themselves totally assimilated into them. Iberian Catholicism with its emphasis on orthodoxy, rituals and the divinely established monarchical nature of all society conquered physically but itself was absorbed by the pre-Colombian spiritualism with its emphasis on the cosmic-earthly rituals expressing the harmonious unity of opposing tensions: male and female, suffering and happiness, self-annihilation and transcendence, individual and group, sacred and profane, life and death.

In the secular-based culture of the United States, it is the one who succeeds materially who appears to be the upright and righteous person -- the good and saintly. The myth of Prometheus continues to be the underlying myth through which all religions of the USA are reinterpreted and reshaped. In the pre-Colombian/Iberian-Catholic mestizo-based culture of Mexico it is the one who can endure all the opposing tensions of life and not lose one’s interior harmony who appears to be the upright and righteous one. Our religions and culture are constantly reinterpreted and reshaped through the combined myths of the suffering and crucified Jesus -- as Jaime Vidal has stated: "El Señior del gran poder" -- combined with the myths of Cuatemoc: the young Aztec prince who allowed himself to be burned to death slowly rather than give the Spaniard the secret of the Gold and Quetzalcoatl who sacrificed himself for the good of his people.

Prometheus sacralized the power to conquer for self-gain while El Señor del Poder and Quetzalcoatl sacralized the power to endure any and all suffering for the sake of the salvation of others -- two very distinct foundations for the main religions of the Americas.

The Catholicism of the USA and the Catholicism of Mexico accept the same creed, ecclesiology, sacraments, commandments and official prayer. But the ways these are reinterpreted, imaged, and lived are quite a different question. The use of sacramentals and prayer forms and the relationship of people to the institutional church is totally different in Mexican and Mexican-American Catholicism than in the USA. For example, it seems to me that in the USA, we tend to see the Pope as the President/CEO of our giant, worldwide Catholic "multinational," while in the Mexican-American group, we see, love and reverence him as the "papa grande" of the big family. The implications of this are quite different! In the USA, the sacraments have been the ordinary way of church life, while throughout Latin America it has been the sacramentals. The written and spoken alphabetic-word (dogmas, doctrines and papal documents) are most important in US Catholicism while the ritual and devotional image-word have been the mainstay of Mexican Catholicism. The US has been parish-centred while the Latin American church has been home, town and shrine-centred.

With the great Western expansion of the USA in the 1800’s, 50 per cent of northern Mexico was conquered and taken over by the USA. The Mexicans, living in that vast region spanning a territory of over 3500 kilometres from California to Texas, suddenly became aliens in their own land . . . foreigners who never left home. Their entire way of life was despised. The Mexican mestizo was abhorred as a mongrel who was good only for cheap labor. Efforts were instituted to suppress everything Mexican: customs, language and Mexican Catholicism. The fair-skinned/ blonde Mexicans who remained had the choice of assimilating totally to the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture of the USA or be ostracized as an inferior human being. The dark-skinned had no choice! They were marked as an inferior race destined to servants of the white master race.

Today, social unrest and dire poverty force many people from Mexico to move to the former Mexican territories which politically are part of the USA. Newcomers are harassed by the immigration services of the USA as illegal intruders -- a curious irony since it was the USA who originally entered the region illegally and stole it from Mexico. Yet the descendents of the original settlers of this region plus those who have immigrated continue to feel at home, to resist efforts of destruction through assimilation and to celebrate their legitimacy as a people.

Religious Symbols as Roots, Core and Aspirations

The Mexican-Americans living in that vast borderland between the USA and Mexico have not only survived as a unique people but have even maintained good mental health in spite of the countless insults and putdowns suffered throughout its history and even in the present moment of time.⁶ Anyone who has suffered such a long history of segregation, degradation and exploitation should be a mental wreck.⁷ Yet in spite of their on-going suffering, not only are the numbers increasing, but in general they are prospering, joyful and healthy, thanks to the profound faith of the people as lived and expressed through the common religious practices of the group. I could explore many of them,⁸ but I will limit myself to what I consider to be the three sets of related core expressions which mark the ultimate ground, the perimeters and the final aspirations of the Mexican American people: Guadalupe/Baptism; polvolagua bendita; crucifixion/los muertos. They are the symbols in which the apparently destructive forces of life are assumed, transcended and united. In them, we experience the ultimate meaning and destiny of our life pilgrimage.

Guadalupe/Baptism

There is no greater and more persistent symbol of Mexican and Mexican-American identity than devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Thousands visit her home at Tepeyac each day and she keeps reappearing daily throughout the Americas in the spontaneous prayers and artistic expressions of the people. In her, the people experience acceptance, dignity, love and protection ... they dare to affirm life even when all others deny them life. Since her apparition she has been the flag of all the great movements of independence, betterment and liberty.

Were it not for Our Lady of Guadalupe ⁹ there would be no Mexican or Mexican-American people today. The great Mexican nations had been defeated by the Spanish invasion which came to a violent and bloody climax in 1521. The native peoples who had not been killed no longer wanted to live. Everything of value to them, including their gods, had been destroyed. Nothing was worth living for. With this colossal catastrophe, their entire past became irrelevant. New diseases appeared and together with the trauma of the collective death-wish of the people, the native population decreased enormously.

It was in the brown Virgin of Guadalupe that Mexicanity was born and through her that the people have survived and developed. At the very moment when the pre-Colombian world had come to a drastic end, a totally unsuspected irruption took place in 1531 when, in the ancient site of the goddess Tonanzin, a Mestizo woman appeared to announce a new era for "all the inhabitants of this land." Guadalupe provides the spark which will allow the people to rise out of the realm of death like the Phoenix rising out of the ashes of the past -- not just a return to the past but the emergence of a spectacular newness.¹⁰ In sharp contrast to the total rupture with the past which was initiated by the conquest-evangelization enterprise, Guadalupe provided the necessary sense of continuity which is basic to human existence. Since the apparition took place at Tepeyac, the long venerated site of the goddess Tonanzin, it put people in direct contract with their ancient past and in communion with their own foundational mythology. It validated their ancestry while initiating them into something new. The missioners had said their ancestors had been wrong and that the diabolical past had to be totally eradicated. But the lady who introduced herself as the mother of the true God was now appearing among them and asking that a temple be built on this sacred site. She was one of them, she was clothed with the colors of divinity, but she definitely was not one of their goddesses. In her, there was continuity and newness; rootedness and breakthrough. Out of their own past and in close continuity with it, something truly new and sacred was now emerging.

Furthermore, she was giving meaning to the present moment in several ways for she was promising them love, defense and protection. At a time when the people had experienced the abandonment of their gods, the mother of the true God was now offering them her personal intervention. At a time when new racial and ethnic divisions were emerging, she was offering the basis of a new unity as the mother of all the inhabitants of the land. At a time when the natives were being instructed and told what to do by the Spaniards, she chose a low class Indian to be her trusted messenger who was to instruct the Spaniards through the person of the Bishop and tell them what to do. In her, the conquered, oppressed and crushed begin to conquer, liberate and rehabilitate.

Finally, she initiated and proclaimed the new era which was now beginning. Over her womb is the Aztec glyph of the centre of the universe. Thus she carries the force which will gradually build up the civilization which will be neither a simple restoration of the past nor simply New Spain but the beginning of something new. The flowers, which she provided as a sign of authenticity, was for the Indian world the sign which guaranteed that the new life would truly flourish.

Thus in Guadalupe, the ancient beginnings connect with the present moment and point to what is yet to come! The broken pieces of their ancient numinous world are now re-pieced in a totally new way. Out of the chaos, a new world of ultimate meaning is now emerging. The Phoenix had truly come forth not just as a powerful new life, but also as the numinosum which would allow them to once again experience the awe and reverence of the sacred -- not a sacred which was foreign and opposed to them, but one which ultimately legitimized them in their innermost being -- both collectively as a people and individually as persons.

The complementary symbol of Guadalupe is the baptism of infants. The Lady of Guadalupe had sent the Indian Juan Diego to the Church. The Indian world immediately started to go to church and ask for baptism. Yet, they were no longer being uprooted totally from their ancient ways in order to enter into the church which the Lady had sent them. They were entering as they were -- with their customs, their rituals, their songs, their dances and their pilgrimages. The old Franciscan missioners feared this greatly. Many thought it was a devil’s trick to subvert their missionary efforts. But the people kept on coming. They were truly building the new temple the Lady had requested: the living temple of Mexican-Christians. It is through baptism that every newborn Mexican enters personally into the temple requested by the Lady.

Through baptism the child becomes part of the continuum and is guaranteed life in spite of the social forces against life. The physical birth of the child is completed by the spiritual birth and both form an integral part of the biological life of the child. For our people, baptism of infants is not just a sacrament of initiation of our Catholic Church, but also a biological-anthropological event which binds the child and the community together in a profound and lasting blood-spiritual relationship.

Through baptism, the community claims the child as its very own and with pride presents to the entire people -- no matter how it was conceived or what might be the social status of the child. In the group, the child will receive great affirmation and tenderness. This will give the child a profound sense of existential security and belonging. Whether others want us around or not is of little consequence because we grow up knowing that we belong. He/she will be able to affirm selfhood in spite of the putdowns and insults of society: they will dare to be who they are -- and they will be who they are with a great sense of pride! This deep sense of security and belonging will develop through participation in the multiple religious rituals of the people -- posadas. rosarios, velorios, peregrinaciones, viacrucis. . . .

For a people who have a historical memory and contemporary situation of degradation, insults and rejection, baptism is the recognition that this child, regardless of what the world thinks of it, is of infinite dignity. It is the sacred rite of initiation into the community and the ancestors. Through it, not only are the newborn welcomed into the group, but the continuity of the life of the group is assured ... the life of the ancestors will continue in the future generations because of our religious celebrations today.

As the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac were the beginning of an anthropological resurrection event for the native and mestizo peoples of Mexico, so is baptism the individual entry into the life of these resurrected people. Through baptism a child not only becomes a child of God according to the Christian tradition but equally also a child of our common mother of the Americas, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.

Cenizas y Agua Bendita (Ashes and Holy Water)

For anyone who knows anything about the Mexican and Mexican-American religious expression, there is no doubt that ashes on Ash Wednesday is one of the most popular rituals of the entire year. In my parish of San Fernando in San Antonio, we have a service of ashes every half hour averaging 1,200 persons per half hour. By the end of the day, we have had over 30,000 persons go through for the ashes. The church does not really promote this, yet it is one of the most popular rituals of the entire church year. Why?

For us, the earth is sacred. We come from the earth and in time we return to the earth. The earth, and especially the portion of the earth out of which we originate is the very source of our life, subsistence and existence. In a survey I conducted a few years ago of Mexican-Americans living in the Southwest, to the question, "What would you like to leave your children?", the most frequent response was: "una tierrita". Precisely because we are so bound to the earth, one of the deepest sources of our suffering as a people is that we have been deprived of our own land. Without even having migrated, the natives of the Americas have been forced to live as aliens in the very lands of their ancestors. Only the languages, dress, food, customs and religion of the foreigners who invaded and robbed the natives of the lands are considered true and legitimate while the ways of the natives continue to be despised as pagan, savage and inferior. In our own land, we cannot be at home! We are treated like squatters without rights to be thrown around as the powerful see fit. We are thrown around from one space to another without any regard for our families or cemeteries. Our natural resources are taken away from us and replaced with garbage and toxic wastes. Whatever the rest of the society does not want -- jails, public housing, garbage dumps -- is conveniently placed in our neighborhoods.

What is life without connectedness to our own proper earth? Polvo!

On Ash Wednesday, as the people come up to receive the ashes, they hear the words: "Polvo eres The ashes of the beginning of Lent are a curious and mysterious religious expression of the Mexican tradition which finds its full socio-religious meaning when coupled with the Holy Water which is blessed during the Easter Vigil -- when, through God’s power, justice triumphed over injustice in the resurrection of the innocent victim from the death inflicted upon him by the unjust "justice" of this world. The one whom the world had rejected and killed, God raised and installed as the Lord of all nations.

For people who have been forced to become foreigners in their own land, who have been driven from their properties and who have been pushed around by the powerful like the mighty wind blows the dust around, ashes, as a moment of the continuum of the pilgrimage of life become most powerful. They mark the radical acceptance of the moment -- actually there is no choice -- like Jesus accepting the cross. This is a ritual reenactment of the burning of Cuatemoc’s feet while he refuses to give in to the demands of the Spaniards. He endured rather than giving in to the unjust demands of his captors. But this acceptance does not indicate approval in any way whatsoever. It is the acceptance of an unjust situation without the acceptance of its disastrous consequences: the destruction of our people. The very fact that we are here in growing numbers and walking up to receive the ashes is an act of public and collective defiance of the destructive situation that has been forced upon us.

We will not be eliminated from this earth, we might be dust today, but dust settles down and can take roots when it receives moisture. The people do not only come for ashes, throughout the year they come for holy water to sprinkle upon themselves, their children, their homes. . . everything. They are very aware that our entire world yearns and travails in pain awaiting to be redeemed -- a redemption which in Christ has indeed begun but whose rehabilitating effects are yet to take effect in our world of present day escalating injustices. The use of the regenerative waters of baptism in every aspect of life is a constant call to God to right the wrongs of our present society. If God is truly God, God must intervene. God cannot remain distant and passive in the light of the great misery and suffering of God’s people. We know that God hears the cries of the poor and God will come to save us. God will redress the unjust situation which has been imposed upon us. God opened the sea to allow his people to escape enslavement, God called his assassinated Son to life from the tomb and this same God will convert us from aliens to children in our own land. The present situation will not last forever for the God of justice and mercy will bring about change.

The sprinkling with the waters of the Easter Vigil is a constant call for the regeneration of all creation. The dust which is sprinkled with the water will be turned into fertile earth and produce in great abundance. As in the reception of ashes there is an acceptance, in the sprinkling of holy water there is an unquestioned affirmation: the ashes will again become earth: the dust-people will become the fertile earth and the earth will once again be ours. The dust-water binomial symbolizes the great suffering of an uprooted people who refuse to give in to despair but live in the unquestioned hope of the new life that is sure to come.

Crucifixion/"Muertos" (Dead)

The final set of religious celebrations which express the core identity of the Mexican-American people is the Crucifixion which is celebrated on Good Friday, and The Dead whose day is celebrated on November 2. For a people who have constantly been subjected to injustice, cruelty and early death, the image of the crucified is the supreme symbol of life in spite of the multiple daily threats of death. If there was something good and redemptive in the unjust condemnation and crucifixion of the God-man, then, as senseless and useless as our suffering appears to be, there must be something of ultimate goodness and transcendent value in it. We don’t understand it, but in Jesus, the God-man who became the innocent victim who suffered for our salvation, we affirm it and in this very affirmation receive the power to endure it without destroying us. Even if we are killed, we cannot be destroyed.

Jesus was killed but not destroyed. He is alive and his cross has become the source and symbol of the ultimate triumph of goodness over evil, courage over fear, love over righteousness. No wonder that in their faith-filled evangelical intuition, at the moment when the scourged and crowned with thorns Jesus of Nazareth appears to be the most powerless, the people spontaneously acclaim him as "El Señor del Poder. . . el señor de la Gloria." He had the incredible power to sustain the most cruel suffering for the sake of our salvation. This, in the minds of our people, is the ultimate power of God -- the power to endure for the sake of those we love. And this is precisely the power that we see missing in today’s world -- husbands or wives abandon their sickly partners because they can no longer endure the pain, children abandon their elderly parents because they can no longer endure the pain of seeing them helpless, society abandons those who have made mistakes to like imprisonment because they cannot endure to have them around; multinationals abandon their faithful workers rather than endure a loss or diminishment of profits. The power to conquer might be glamorous and appealing, but only the power to endure for the sake of others is truly divine and life-giving. Animals conquer by force, God conquers by enduring love -- enduring even unto death on the cross. The power to conquer diminishes with time and remains only in the dust of unread history books while the power to endure lives on in the lives of those who are saved through it -- the crucified Jesus lives today but the conquering Caesars and armies have long been dead, buried and hardly remembered. The crucified is alive, but the executioners are all dead and gone.

In the presence of el Señor del Poder (The Lord of Power) we see and celebrate our own inner strength which has allowed us to endure for the sake of our families and our people. What others ridicule as weakness, we see as the divine power alive in us. We are not a fatalistic people who enjoy suffering, but a powerful people who will not allow suffering to destroy our lives or even our joy of living. The radical acceptance of the cross of life is the basis for our festive music, dances and fiestas. We do not celebrate because we suffer, but we celebrate because we refuse to allow suffering to control or destroy our lives.

Dia de los Muertos/The day of those who are ultimately alive!

People who know us from the outside claim that we are so fascinated with suffering and death that we ignore joy and resurrection. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are so totally wrong about us -- they see us but they do not know us. Often the ones who make this claim are the very ones who have no inner appreciation of the fullness of the paschal mystery themselves. Our people accept openly the harshness of suffering and death only because we participate already in the beginning of resurrection. Certainly we celebrate our collective resurrection on the early morning of December 12 at our sunrise service to our Lady of Guadalupe; certainly we celebrate resurrection every time we use the agua bendita in reaffirming God’s power over sickness and death. But at no time do we celebrate resurrection and the communion of living saints more than on "el dia de los muertos" which in effect is the day of the living -- the day of those who have defied death and are certainly more alive than ever!

We know the secret of the mystery of life. Those whom the world takes for dead, we know beyond doubt are alive not only in God -- and God is the fullness of life -- but in us who remember them. Because they are no longer limited or imprisoned by "this body," they are more alive than ever. The final, absolute, definitive death beyond which there is no earthy life left is when there is no one around to remember me or celebrate my life. Thus in remembering -- "re-cordando" -- we keep alive our ancestors as much as they keep us alive and continue to guard over us. The pain which we experience when someone we know and love dies is transformed into an innermost joy at the annual celebration of those who through death have entered ultimate life. The memory of their lives becomes a source of life and energy. As we bring them flowers, build altars of remembrance, light candles, share in the common bread and punch of the dead, we truly enter into the ultimate fiesta. In the mystical moment of the celebrations of el dia de los muertos, the veil of time and space is removed and we are all together on earth and in heaven, in time and in eternity singing the same songs, enjoying the same drinks and sharing in the same life that no earthly power can take away from us.

It should be noted that our dia de los muertos is the very opposite of Halloween. Our "dead" do not come to spook us, but to visit, comfort and party with us. We do not fear them. We welcome their presence and look forward to having a good time with them. Sometimes we even take music to the cemeteries to share with them their favorite songs. We celebrate together that death does not have the final word over life and that life ultimately triumphs over death. Our family and our pueblo are so strong and enduring that not even death can break them apart. Thus what is celebrated as the day of the dead is, in effect, the celebration of undestructive life -- a life which not even death can destroy. Society might take our lands away, marginalize us and even kills us, but it cannot destroy us. For we live on in the generations to come and in them the previous generations continue to be alive.

Conclusion

The conquest of ancient Mexico by Spain in 1521 and then the conquest of northwest Mexico by the United States in the 1840’s forced the native population and their succeeding generations into a split and meaningless existence. It was a mortal collective catastrophe of gigantic death-bearing consequences. Yet the people have survived as a people through the emergence of new religious symbols and the reinterpretation of old ones which have connected the past with the present and projected into the future. The core religious expressions as celebrated and transmitted by the people are the unifying symbols in which the opposing forces of life are brought together into a harmonious tension so as to give the people who participate in them the experience of wholeness. In them and through them, opposites are brought together and push towards a resolution and the people who celebrate them experience an overcoming of the split. Where formerly there was opposition, now there is reconciliation and even greater yet, synthesis. This is precisely what gives joy and meaning to life. indeed makes life possible in any meaningful sense regardless of the situation and it is in the celebration of these festivals of being and memory that the people live on as a people.

I have carefully limited my observations and attempts at interpretation to my own personal Mexican-American experience, not because I am not interested in all the Hispanics, but precisely because I do not dare to have the arrogance to speak for the others. I have not lived their experience and even though I respect their religious symbols and practices deeply, they are not my own. I am convinced that you can only understand religious symbols correctly from within and not by mere observation -- even the best and most critical -- from the outside. In seeking to understand religious symbols correctly, the so-called "objective distance" of Western scholars is a sure guarantee of falsification and objective error, especially if it is not in dialogue with the believers themselves. Only by a patient and prolonged listening to the believers can one begin to understand the real meaning of their practices and rituals. They cannot be judged by criteria of another cosmovision or world-view.

I very much admire what Richard Flores is doing with the Pastorelas and how he has gone through the process of becoming a pastorsito himself, has personally taken part in all the aspects of the process and is gradually beginning to understand them from within. I very much appreciated what Ana Maria Diaz Stevens is doing with the development of religious thought of the Puerto Rican women. Her insights have opened up a whole new field of reflection for me. All of a sudden "las cocineras" were not just the women in the kitchens, but the creative thinkers who were cooking-up new and profound theological thought. Woo! We need Hispanic theologians and social scientists who will reflect from within the common experience of faith of our people, not as outsiders but as believers who are seeking to understand, clarify and enrich our own life of faith.

I am anxiously awaiting and looking forward for the other Hispanic groups in the United States to begin speaking and writing about their own religious expressions of their culture. To the degree that this takes place, we will be able to begin a very fruitful dialogue among ourselves. I long to see deeper studies on the Cuban American devotion to N. S. de Caridad and their Afro-Cuban sense of santeria; on the Puerto Rican devotion to San Juan Bautista and other religious practices; on the Cristo Negro de Esquipulas of Guatemala and other devotions and rituals of the various Hispanic peoples living in the United States. I trust that PARAL will be able to continue encouraging this type of socio-theological reflection and dialogue among the various groups -- each from within its own lived experience of enculturated faith with its corresponding religious symbols. These religious symbols and rituals are the keys that will unlock the secret to the deepest and most far-reaching elements of the cosmovision of our people and thus provide the ultimate basis of our earthly identity.

Notes:

1. We do not intend to indicate that women should stay in the kitchens, but only to bring out a very important aspect of life which has not been properly recognized. It was Anna Maria Diaz Stevens during the PARAL symposium who first made me aware of this fascinating contribution of how much more had come out of the kitchens than mere food. They had been the most exciting place where new life in all its aspects had truly blossomed and developed.

2. O. Espin has some very good articles on the relation between popular expression of the Faith and the Roman Catholic tradition. In particular. I would recommend: Tradition and Popular Religion" page 69 in Allan Deck’s book: Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the U.S.A. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1992); a classical work on this subject is: J.MR. Tillard et al: Foi Populaire Foi Savante (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1976).

3. For more in-depth studies on Our Lady of Guadalupe I recommend my own book: La Morenita: Evangelizer of the Americas (San Antonio: MACC Publications) and subsequent articles on this subject in Concilium. Also the coming book of Jeanette Rodrigues on this topic by the Texas University Press in Austin, Texas.

4. For some very good clarification on the concept of the Local Church. consult, J.M.R. Tillard.

5. Jean-Louis Aragon: "Le ‘Senus Fidelium’ et ses fondaments neotestamentiares" in op. cit., Foi Populaire.

6. R. Acuna, Occupied America (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972).

7. Roberto Jiminez, "Social Changes/Emotional Health," Medical Gazette of South Texas, vol. 7, no. 25, June 20, 1985.

8. For a greater discussion of other religious symbols, consult my previous works: Christianity and Culture (San Antonio: MACC Publications); Galilean Journey. The Mexican American Promise (New York: Orbis Books, 1983).

9 For other aspects of Guadalupe, consult my previous articles in Concilium, No. 122/1977 and No. 188/1983.

10.J. Ruffie, De La Biologie A La Culture (Paris: Flammarion. 1976), pp. 247-252.

(Hans Ucko is on the staff of the Dialogue Unit of the World Council of Churches, Geneva.)

Consideration of ethical issues is or should be a continuing concern for any Church. Changes in relation to production, political organization, ideological struggles continue to raise a number of questions for which the traditional theological and ethical repertoire of the confessional churches may have little or nothing ready-made to say. The ecumenical movement has therefore in many ways come to serve as a vehicle for common reflection on the challenge of contemporary ethical issues. This continued reflection has, in fact, become an intrinsic part of the ecumenical movement. Ethical considerations remain an ongoing obligation. As time goes by and circumstances change, we continue to need mentors, guides, philosophers, teachers, prophets, who raise questions and challenge established systems. We are dependent on them to enable us to confront reality and the complexity of our world, not as a problem to overcome but as a condition to life itself. There are many in the ecumenical movement, who in this respect have contributed to this ongoing discussion on the significance of Christian witness and ethical considerations. Among those, the ecumenical movement recognizes with gratitude the contribution of K. C. Abraham. It is an honor to share some reflections on the topic of ethics in this setting.

Religion and philosophy as agents fostering ethical considerations must at the same time also reckon with their in built inclination to congeal in perspectives, which allow the living tradition to harden. Renewal is therefore necessary as tonus firmus in both religion and philosophy. But breaking up is hard to do, though necessary if God is not to be reduced only to the God of our fathers and mothers. The God of our fathers and mothers, the God of our traditions is to be our God today, which is not an affirmation of relativism, but of aggiornamento. The semper reformanda should not become a peg for the history of reformation but serve as a calling into questions of that which has just been adopted and accepted as a rule. This implies an awareness of the choice as an ever present condition of being human.

Sören Kierkegaard reacted against Hegel’s seemingly impenetrable system by raising the existential ethical concern, the problem of choice. Theological and philosophical systems such as Hegel’s run the risk of obscuring this crucial problem by making it seem an objective matter capable of a universal solution, rather than a subjective one that each person must confront. As time continues to enfold the complexities of life itself, it becomes ever more apparent that old models do not always suffice. Both the ascetic saint and the detached sage, exalted in various hagiographies as the true beacons for humanity, may in the final analysis in themselves prove to be poor human models, because they are, in spite of their perfection, incomplete human beings, static and unchanging. Ordinary human imperfection on the other hand has an inbuilt aspiration, prodding us to continue searching, probing, questioning. There are many ways of expressing this thrust towards a semper reformanda or a permanent revolution.

The following anecdote wants to illustrate that the question is superior to the answer. There was once a little boy in the Polish town of Lublin, who came running out from his Talmud class shouting, "Is there anyone who has any good questions? I have a good answer!" A good answer may be, but still cheaper than the good question, because the good question leads on, continues. There is no end to it. One question stimulates another question. In the same vein, Wittgenstein said that philosophy must end, where it begins, in bewilderment or may be rather in confusion. In bewilderment instead of a grasp, the uncertain choice instead of the unquestionable forward march is of course threatening. One prefers not exposing oneself to incertitude and unknowing and become vulnerable. "Wondering is a mode of human being. But wondering may just be sheer wandering, moving aimlessly, roaming, rambling. Channeling our wondering into the form of a question is the imposition of a pattern and a procedure upon the mind," says Abraham Joshua Heschel and continues: "To know that a question is an answer in disguise is a minimum of wisdom."¹

Propositions, answers, proclamations may come across as strong, safe and reliable also in ethical considerations. The wisdom of the question seems less responsible. It is open to vulnerability. The wisdom of vulnerability is however a good biblical insight (1 Cor. 1), it is also part of human experience as, e.g., in the pregnant formulation by Chuang Tzu:

"No man is an island." Also, ethical considerations underline the interrelationship. A vis-à-vis, whether another human being or creation itself, is always required. Martin Buber taught us through his philosophy of dialogue an existentialism centered on the direct, mutual relationship, the "I-Thou," in which each person confirms the other as of unique value. The ‘I’ is accomplished in relationship with the Thou’. Life is, in itself, an encounter. The importance of interrelationships, in ideas as well as in other phenomena, is the only truly effective tool for our journey through life. It creates a mutual responsibility between I and Thou. I am responsible for Thou in reciprocity, where I will be Thou and Thou will be I. There is an ethical interrelationship, where someone having the possibility of confronting the transgression of the other and for various reasons neglects to do so, actually will be held responsible in his or her place. "Whoever can stop. . . the people of his city from sinning, but does not . . . is held responsible for the sins of the people of his city. If he can stop the whole world from sinning, and does not, he is held responsible for the sins of the world."³

If I am not accountable and answerable for myself, what am I and have I then not really ceased to be I? This interrelationship is even more complex than the I being at time the Thou and the Thou at time the I. There is an ever changing asymmetry built into the relationship of the I and the Thou. It is important that the Thou, the other remains other, i.e., different from the I. The other is not as other only my alter ego. The other is the he or she and I am not, never can be and never should be. The other is as other important for me in my journey through life, in my pilgrim’s progress. It is of utmost importance that we remain distinct, different from each other. This is the only guarantee that I have against my becoming self-contained, self-supporting, self-sufficient, full of answers. The other needs to remain other in his or her integrity to make me realize that I don’t hold the entire truth, that I need the other in order to fathom more. I need the other as other for my formation as a human being. I am not helped by the other becoming me, confirming me. There is an existential need for an interrelationship, where I am not Thou, an insight, which is essential for continuation, for keeping on, pursuing, prodding, questioning. "If I am I" said the Rabbi of Kotzk, "because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you, and you are you because I am I, then I am not land you are not you."

"We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love another" wrote Jonathan Swift.⁴ He may be pressing his point, but it seems as if religious language is more specific articulating the role, place, needs, concerns of its own people and is if anything rather general when addressing the other as significant other. It seems to be in the nature of religions to be mainly preoccupied with themselves and the people adhering to them through rites and beliefs. The main thrust in every religion seems to be to concentrate on their own tribe, followers, believers. The other is either passed over in silence or without distinction looked upon as the stranger, the foreigner, the pagan, the one who is different, the outsider and the threat, the unbeliever, the one to be ministered to, the object for mission. The horizon of each religion seems limited to the world-view of its own people. It uses its own yardstick to measure the entire world. This may have worked well as long as each religion was content with living each in its own confined place. The limited interaction with the other did not require changed parameters or perspectives. Today we live in a different world, where people of different religious traditions live together side by side. This holds true also for places and countries, which since time immemorial have been religiously plural. Religious plurality is in itself no guarantee that religious traditions will create space for the other.

The very fact that every society today is or has become religiously plural demonstrates to each and everyone that there are parallel and competing claims how to interpret the conditions of life. There is no longer any possibility of emulating the ostrich and getting away with it. Each religion may in itself have universal aspirations and claims, expressed in many and sometimes almost contradictory ways. Where Christianity and Islam are very articulate as to their universal validity and as the only way for the entire humanity, the other world religions display in different ways a similar penchant for monopoly. There may, according to the Hindu world-view, be room for every religion but only as long as the stage remains the Hindu pantheon.

The dream of Judaism is about the day when "ten men from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, "Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you" (Zech. 8:23). One is of course entitled to maintain the hope that all the others will one day realize the ultimate truth of one’s religion and be converted, see the light or realize the truth. It seems intrinsic to religious discourse to have the other-rather confirming my own choice, whether it is now or in the eschaton, than providing space for the integrity of the other. And yet, we know, particularly in our time that religious plurality seems here to stay. How do we deal with the insight that the whole world will probably not become Christian or Muslim or...? Is it a problem, a defeat for our religion or do we discover that the interrelationship of people of different religious traditions is of benefit for our life as human beings in this global village? Could the continuous dialogue on ethical issues between people of different religious traditions building new communities bring about a sustainable world?

Religion as the means of well-being for a community and thus for each individual, who has a role in that community, requires a common understanding between like-minded involving faith in a creed, obedience to a moral code set down in sacred Scriptures or participation in a cult. Religion is not only a set of ideas for the individual but requires an interpersonal relationship with the other. But religion does not end with a relation between an I and a Thou. It requires a community of believers, of like-minded. "The community’ said Abraham Halevi Kook, "must first find itself within itself; then it must find itself in all of humanity." Community-building is something basically human and is probably more fundamental than anything else. "No man is an island." Every human being needs to relate to the other and to others, a community.

But the community is more than ever before threatened with fragmentation. There are in many ways and in many places obstacles and threats to the well-being of the human community. The human community and creation itself are exposed to and are part of an environment in which destructive forces threaten to undermine life. The human community is frustrated and impeded through pervading patriarchy, caste and class systems in society, through institutionalized and bureaucratic power-structures of religious organizations and communities and through compliancy towards rampant capitalism and consumerism, acquiescent to unchecked individualism and a culture of competition. Religions continue to play an ambiguous role in many political, social and economic conflicts in our world. Religious fundamentalism and its equivalence in many of the religious traditions today hinder the formation of a new community. There is a tendency towards monocultures threatening the mosaic of religious plurality and an open human community. It is in such an unmerciful environment that destructive and violent forces, hatred and lust for power, emerge and take over. Although different from each other and functioning on various levels, psychological, socio-political, economic or cultural, they are all intertwined and are obstacles to the development and well-being of the human community. There is a need to take a stand against the exploitative dominance and destructive character of the present free market policy. The changing economic system requires an ethical evaluation of the practice of charity and the meaning of solidarity in support of developing countries, a sharing of resources paving the way for equality and self-reliance in the human community. The human community is today, as maybe never before, confronted with the choice as an ever present and ominous condition that may have a bearing on the future of life and creation itself. "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live . . ." (Deut. 30:19). It seems to us as if these words bear a particular meaning in our time.

And yet almost as a counter-movement to the continuing fragmentation of many societies in our world today, there seems to be a quest for community in different and sometimes also contradictory ways. Barriers of religion are sometimes broken down and new bonds of solidarity and constructive building together emerge. In situations of common threats new partnerships come forth and common ethical considerations evolve. Transforming visions and possibilities of an enhanced humanity within an ethos of mutual responsibility and accountability can develop in the quest for a new human community. There seems to be some room for the insight that that which we can do together, we should not do separately.

There are, in the midst of fragmentation, signs of a changing society in the context of religious plurality, where people of different religious traditions are instrumental in building new communities and where interreligious dialogue promotes a new understanding of the other. What emerges is not one human community, but a community of communities. which is neither a paradigm of a super-community, nor a ‘kingdom’ of dominance and hegemony. The community of communities is not an entity in and by itself. but relational and open. It has no boundaries, but exists as an organic relationship, spontaneous and creative.

People of different faiths have specific and distinctive contributions to make to the new community, provided they are given space for their own integrity and identity. One of the "commandments" of interreligious dialogue has been the insistence that everyone has the right to define him/herself. No one should be the object of the other. We are interchangeably subject and object, I and Thou. There are possibilities to build new communities provided we are willing to accept others as others. The context of plurality obliges an openness that goes beyond our own confines.

People of different religious traditions are today experiencing a changed world, where they discover the interconnectedness between religions. This is important in order that people of different religions be not obsessed with themselves in self-sufficiency and self-containment. We need to discover that we, although we can and should live a full life in the realm of our own religious tradition, may be enriched and helped by the other to discover unknown depths in our own religious traditions. Each religion can be a teacher to the other, providing ethical suggestions for common learning growth, as a prophet challenging the other, as a mystic intriguing the other, shedding new light, hinting at new directions, provoking the other to a breaking up from that which has become congealed and hardened.

We are far from having exhausted our own traditions as sources for our ethical considerations. But we may need to have new light to discover it. Through interfaith dialogue we are led into the very center of our own being and given keys that open doors we had never known existed before. This is a profound outcome of interreligious dialogue: the unexpected discovery about oneself! French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote to a French student, who was about to leave Paris for one year’s studies in London: "Living in London for one year does not automatically imply that you will know England very well. But in comparison, in the light of the many surprises that you will have, you will suddenly have understood some of the deepest and most original features of France, those you did not know before and could not learn in any other way."⁵

We live today in a culture of war, which has made it increasingly important that our religious traditions contribute to generating social change towards peace. We may as Christians think that the notion of peace has sufficiently penetrated the life and history of the Church to secure a satisfactory ethical basis for Christian conflict resolution, a peace ministry or to carry out the World Council of Churches’ "Program to Overcome Violence" and that the Church, therefore, is not pressed for other alternatives. And yet it is exactly in such a situation, that the Church needs the other, needs another reading of that which is so well known. May be it is precisely in a situation of abundance of Christian ethical considerations on peace that the interaction with the other can offer new dimensions and insights. In this latter part of the essay, I would like to highlight a few Jewish leanings about peace as a possible contribution to an enriched Christian discourse on the same topic. We share the major part of the Bible with the Jewish people, but remain nevertheless strangers to each other. The Old Testament is part of the Christian Bible and yet it is as if Jews and Christians read different books. Whereas Christians traditionally have tended to read the Old Testament as "salvation history" Jews have looked upon the same books as part of their patrimony, their history and their identity. The Old Testament tells a story, which is a history of a people, a history to learn from or to forget. It is the story of having neighboring states and being obliged to relate to them one way or the other. It is a history of waging war, terrible bloodshed and long and strenuous attempts towards peace. In this history there is little room for any spiritualization. Traditional Christian reading may not primarily have used the Old Testament as an experience of what it means to live in a world of war and peace. For our ethical considerations on peace, peace-ministry, conflict resolution, Christians may profit from reading the Old Testament, our Holy Scripture, as a witness to the experience of a people in war and peace with other nations and as a reflection on what peace requires of the community.

The word shalom has gained coinage in Christian discourse. It is well known that shalom is not peace as in absence of war and that it is not a static notion. Shalom is the positive enjoyment of physical, economic and social well-being. Shalom is not only an ideal to attain in days to come or in a spiritualized realm. It is important that religion does not allow its otherworldly concerns to anaesthetize people to the reality of the global dangers. In a secular age when people are exercising their freedom not to follow blindly religious authority, people of religion must begin taking risks for peace. The very meaning of shalom suggests that there is no shalom without an effort. The very root of shalom has to do with shalem, to pay. Peace is costly and requires sacrifices. It is not sufficient to love peace. It requires more. "Depart from evil, and do good; Seek peace, and pursue it" (Ps. 34:14), and "Be like the followers of Aaron: love peace and pursue it." ⁶ The mere talking about peace is not enough. "For the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace" (Jer. 6:13-14). It is equally wrong to engage in wishful visions of peace, where none exists. "Prophesy against the prophets of Israel, who are prophesying; say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: ‘Hear the word of Lord!’ They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination; they say, ‘Says the Lord’, when the Lord has not sent them. They have misled my people, saying, ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace" (Ezek. 13:2ff).

Another aspect of shalom is that it gives room for difference. President Woodrow Wilson hinted at the same in an address to the Senate in 1917: "It must be a peace without victory. . . . Only a peace between equals can last." The Jewish liturgy and the daily prayer for peace, "Let there be peace on earth as it is in heaven" highlights this perspective. The rabbis asked, "how is then, peace in heaven, since it is to be model for peace on earth?" It became imperative for the rabbis to find out about the quality of peace in heaven. What is the substance of the heavenly peace? They found the answer in the word for ‘heaven’, which in Hebrew in shamayim. The rabbis construed that two words were hidden in shamayim, two words which are each other’s absolute opposites: esh, ‘fire’ and mayim, ‘water’. Peace in heaven is then the living together in unity and communion of two opposites, fire and water. Water doesn’t quench fire. Fire doesn’t make the water vaporize. Fire and water are reconciled. One does not defeat the other. There is no separation between fire and water. There is true reconciliation.

The ambiguity of victory over one’s enemies is reflected in a midrash on Ex. 15. The Egyptians are drowning in the sea. Of course there was reason for jubilation -- the people were finally liberated. And the enemy was no more. But the Israelites were saved through the death of the Egyptians! The angels, wanting to join Moses and the Israelites in their song of praise to the Lord, saw that the Lord was neither singing nor did he look pleased. They asked him why. God answered, "How can I sing when the work of my hands is drowning in the sea?" The midrash rejoins here texts in the Old Testament and in the Jewish tradition, which are attentive to the risks of a cult of the nation and the temptation to a mythology on the Ûbermensch. It is in the history book of the Jewish people that we read sobering verses like "Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage" (Isa. 19:25) or ‘Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the Lord. Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?" (Amos 9:7). It is also in this context that the rabbis wanted to make sure that there should be no room chauvinism, "Because of the mipnei darkei shalom (ways of peace), we support the non-Jewish poor along with the poor of Israel, and visit the non-Jewish sick along with the sick of Israel and bury the non-Jewish dead with the dead of Israel. . . ." ⁷ and similar texts in the Old Testament and in the Jewish tradition show that ample space is given for self-criticism.

If two persons had quarreled with each other Aaron would go and sit with one of them and say to him: "Son, do you know how your friend is taking it? He is breaking his heart and tearing his garment and saying, Woe is me, how can I look my friend in the face. I am ashamed on his account because it was I who misbehaved towards him." Aaron would sit with him until he dispelled the resentment from his heart. Then Aaron would go and sit with the other one and say to him: "Son, do you know how your friend is taking it? He is breaking his heart and tearing his garment and saying, Woe is me, how can I look my friend in the face. I am ashamed on his account because it was I who misbehaved towards him." Aaron would sit with him until he dispelled the resentment from his heart. And when they met they embraced and kissed each other. This is why "they wept for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel" (Numbers 20:29). Whereas with regard to Moses, who rebuked them with harsh words, it is stated: "and the children of Israel wept for Moses" (Deut. 34:8).⁸

Another example is the so-called Divine emendation of Sarah’s actual words, when God addressed Abraham. Sarah had said laughing within herself: "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?" (Gen. 18:12). But this is how it was reported to Abraham by God: "Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?"’ (Gen. 18:13). The sages commented that God, for the sake of peace in the family and for Abraham not to be offended, altered the words of Sarah. "Great is peace, seeing that for its sake even God modified the truth."⁹

By the examples above taken from the Jewish reading of the Old Testament regarding ethical considerations towards peace and reconciliation, it is evident that there are learnings from the encounter with people of other religious traditions. In this way interfaith dialogue is a fundamental part of our Christian service within community. It is a possibility of reflecting together, learning from each other and of growing together for the sake of our community. To enter into dialogue requires an opening of the mind and heart to others. It is in a culture of dialogue that we are enabled to build the new communities that the world requires.

Notes:

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 12.

2. Thomas Merton. The Way of Chuang Tze (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 59.

3. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 54b.

4. Jonathan Swift, Thought on Various Subjects; from Miscellanies, 1711.

5. Fernand Braudel. Ecrits sur l’historie. Ed. Flammarion, Paris, p. 59.

6. Pirke Avoth 5,12.

7. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 61a.

8. Avot DeRabbi Nathan 12 in Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Shemot (Exodus) (Jerusalem: The World Zionist Organization, Dept. For Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, 1978). pp. 438-39;

9. Yevamot 65b to Gen. 18:12-13 and Talmud Yerushalmi, Peah I.

(M. M. Thomas was the former Moderator of the World Council of Churches.)

I have known Dr. K.C. Abraham for many years. He belongs to a group of Christian thinkers and activists who have risen to ecumenical leadership through the Youth Movement of the Central Kerala Diocese of the Church of South India. We were colleagues on the staff of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society before he was called to be the Presbyter of St. Mark’s Cathedral congregation in Bangalore. He was, for a period, Director of the Ecumenical Christian Center, Whitefield, before he was called to be Professor of Ethics at the United Theological College, Bangalore, and now he is holding the eminent position of director of the foremost institute for higher theological education in Southern Asia. As Chairman of the Association of Third World Theologians he has ventured into the new fields of theological-ethical thought and has shown tremendous creativity in promoting the theology of liberation in the context of the struggles of the peoples of the non-Western world. He is at his best when communicating his ideas whether in the class room or before the congregation or the public. The fact that he and his wife had to take care of a handicapped daughter has molded their character in a quality of tender love in all their relationships which I have always found to be marvelous. I have a special reason for gratefulness to him since he was perhaps the first person who thought of taking a doctorate based on my writings on social ethics from which I learned what my ethical methodology was. I take this opportunity of his completing sixty years to wish him many more years of creative and meaningful life and work.

I feel honored by being asked to contribute a paper for the Volume being produced in his honor on this occasion. Ethics of pluralism is a topic in which he is deeply interested. Since the time given is short, I thought I would contribute a paper which I presented at a seminar at the Centre for Christian Studies on Culture of the University of Kerala which has not been published elsewhere on that topic. It is addressing the situation of religious and ideological pluralism in India.

Pluralism is different from mere traditional plurality which was a coexistence of communities largely isolated from each other. Vice-President K. R. Narayanan, in his recent speech at the Indian Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi, spoke of Indian society even now as a ‘coexistence society’ rather than a single society;" he defined coexistence society as "many groups, castes and religions living together but interacting among each other only at the margin". He added that "what we have achieved through years of social reforms and economic changes is that the degree of this marginal interaction has been progressively enhanced" (Address by K.R. Narayanan, ISS 1994). Secular ideologies which have brought a new sense of selfhood to all communities and the rights of that selfhood for full participation in the centers of power which determine the meaning-content and goals of life in society is also a basic factor in this pluralism with parity. As religion has been constitutive of the self-identity of several traditional communities in India, the situation may be spoken of as a pluralism of religions and secular ideologies. The only path available today is, either the domination of the majority religion or secular ideology as the established framework of the state suppressing the rights of others using state coercion or open democratic secularism in which a consensus is sought regarding the values and directions of the common life of society and the state policy related to that common life, through peaceful but active dialogue among religions and ideologies. My topic deals with some lines in which the transition from coexistence to democratic secular existence in a single society may be constructively pursued.

This open secularism should not be interpreted as the common acceptance of any one common secular or religious faith. That will be a denial of plurality. The common unity should be sought at the level of Values of secular living and not at the level of Ultimate Truth. The traditional understanding of separation between Vyavaharika versus Paramarthika levels of truth is important. But the separation of the two levels should not be considered in any total sense. People’s faiths (truth affirmations) have their implications for the values for secular living to which they commit themselves. Faith and culture, faith and morality are different but closely related. But it is possible to hold to different faiths and support a move towards a more or less consensus about cultural and moral values through rational dialogue among faiths, and reinforce that consensus from different faith-standpoints. What does this mean in practice?

Democratic secularism should not be interpreted as a common denial of belief in a transcendent religious ultimate, as when scientific rationalism or Marxism is made the state ideology. That would be making a secularist ideology the established "religion" of the common life. It would only make for a religious vacuum in the life of the people leading to the rise of religious fundamentalism and communalism to fill the vacuum. Of course it is one thing for individuals and groups having faith in a philosophy of secularism that denies the transcendent ultimate, but it is a another to make it the established faith of the whole society or state. Indeed, one may even argue that atheists are necessary in any religiously oriented society to correct corruptions and criticize superstitions in religion; they play the prophetic role when prophets who attack false religion in the name of authentic religion are not available.

Similarly no one religious faith or religious conception of the ultimate reality or even any one doctrine about the relation between religions should be made integral to open secularism. The idea that equality of religions is integral to secularism is a characteristic of the mystic approach to reality that denies any ultimate reality to nama and rupa of religions. This approach is different from that of the Semitic religions which is based on the self-revelation of the ultimate in history in unique particular nama and rupa. Here again, there will be peoples affirming the mystic or revelatory approach to reality, but any one approach cannot be made basic to democratic secularism, though there is no harm in discussing the relative merits of each in relation to the ethic of common living. No doubt equal respect for persons holding different faiths in sincerity and equal respect and serious consideration for whatever faith held by any person in sincerity are essential to democracy. But this should not be confused with religious belief in the equality of religions. Freedom to "profess, practice and propagate" religion makes sense as a fundamental right of persons only on the basis of the recognition of this difference. The right of religious propagation given by medieval theocratic religious states was only for truth recognized as true by the established religion and state. It was different from the present democratic freedom of persons to pursue truth as dictated by one’s reason and conscience and to propagate the truth to which one decides to commit him/her-self. Even in States which had the ideology of communism as established truth, as formerly in Russia and China, it was only the truth in its established sense that was originally given the right to freedom of propagation; it was a purely medieval theocratic idea in its reverse secularist form.

The crucial question is whether a plurality of religious and secular faiths, each of which had developed its own traditional culture, that is, philosophy, morality, ideology and legal system of corporate life, can, through inter-faith rational discourse, create at least the basic framework of a common culture or common direction and scheme of values for peoples to build together a new dwelling, like the national community. That is, will the faith-communities while keeping their separate identities be prepared in the present historical situation of pluralism, to interact with each other bringing their respective religious and/or ideological insights on the conception of the human so as to build something of a consensus of cultural and moral values on which to build a single larger secular community. While their distinctive cultural traditions will have to be renewed, can they do it and feel that their traditions have found fulfillment through that renewal? I submit that we can.

Let me spell out two very clear ideas about the nature and destiny of humanness. First, all religions and ideologies post love as the ultimate moral law of human perfection and, a community of love with its harmony is the final goal of human and cosmic relationships. Second, nevertheless all religions and ideologies do have a sense that humankind, as they are today, is in some kind of self-alienation which makes the fulfillment of that perfect law impossible and corruption of power inevitable. Therefore while keeping love as the essence of humanness and, therefore, the criterion and goal of all human endeavor, human society today has to eschew utopianism and organize itself as power-structures based on a sense of the moral law of structural justice and utilize even the coercive legal sanctions of the state to preserve social peace and protect the weaker sections of society in a balance of order, freedom and justice. That is to say, all realistic social morality requires keeping the relation between power, law and love in tension, till the sources of human self-alienation are overcome and loving relation which has spontaneity as its character is possible.

Thus in biblical thought, there are two divine covenants with humanity operating in the face of evil created by human self-alienation from God -- one, the covenant of redemptive grace with Abraham which ends in the Messianic Kingdom of Love and the other, the covenant with Noah of protective law of reverence for life and later with Moses of the Ten Commandments for the preservation of rough justice in society. In Christianity, Jesus’ Sermon of the Mount expresses the character of the ethic of perfect love characteristic of the community appropriating the reconciling Grace of God in Jesus and this is to be consummated in the Kingdom of God to come. Since this unconditioned love is impossible of practice in a world where unredeemed sinfulness must be considered the general characteristic, common civil society and its individual members as well as institutions like the family, the economic order, nationality and the state necessary for the preservation of humanity are to be ordered according to the moral law inherent in their nature. Such laws are ordained by God in their creation and not destroyed by sin and therefore called Law of Nature understandable by reason in the Catholic tradition. In the Protestant tradition sin has perverted the moral law of creation more radically and, therefore, takes a more pragmatic approach to the laws needed in different historical situations for the preservation of civil society, its individual members and its basic institutions. But the idea of two distinct and interrelated levels of morality, the ultimate ethic of love and the relative ethic of law, are clearly laid down in the Christian system of ethics.

The two levels of morality is found in Marxist ideology. Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity interpreted theology as only a form of anthropology and explained the human belief in the God of Love as an affirmation of love as the essence of being human which is denied in human existence. Marx and Engels accepted this interpretation but strongly criticized Feuerbach for assuming that this essence can be realized in human existence by moral willing of it. Engels says: "But love, -- with Feuerbach love is everywhere and at all times the wonder-working god who should help to surmount all difficulties of practical life -- and that in a society which is split into classes with diametrically opposite interests. At this point the last relic of its revolutionary character disappears from his philosophy, leaving only the old cant: love one another; fall into each other’s arms regardless of distinctions of sex or estate -- a universal orgy of reconciliation" (quoted by Bastian Wielenga, Introduction to Marxism, p.353). Love is not realizable until the social alienation of human beings in a class society is overcome and classless society emerges, for which, of course, the ethics of power-politics of class-struggle with its denials of love is to be followed. In fact Marx would say that just as selfishness is natural in a class society they need not be interpreted in moral terms. Both are natural necessities of social conditions, one of social alienation and the other of its being overcome. It looks that only they do not even interpenetrate now; they come one after the other in history. It is this that Fidel Castro and the Che Guevara have questioned, "let me tell you, at the risk of looking ridiculous, that a true revolutionary is led by great feelings of love" (ibid., p. 354).

Hinduism also has this two-tier morality of perfect love and relative law. It speaks primarily, not of love but of unitive vision as the final goal of human life. But, as Vivekananda has maintained, the two are ethically the same; only the Hindu system of ethics uses, not the personalist but the more philosophical language. He says, "There is no limit to this getting out of selfishness. All the great systems of ethos preach absolute selflessness. Supposing this absolute unselfishness can be reached by a man, what becomes of him? He is no more the little Mr./So-and-so; he has acquired infinite expansion. . . . .The personalist when he hears this idea philosophically put, gets frightened. At the same time, if he preaches morality, he after all teaches the very same idea himself" (Works, vol. I, p. 107). While striving for this end, the natural goals (the secular purusharthas -- artha, kama, and dharma -- pursuit of wealth, happiness and duties of one’s social station) of civil society are organized according to the laws of sadharana dharma of ahimsa, varnasrama dharma of four social vocations and the asrama stages of individual life. Of course the dharmic laws of civil society got absolutized when separated completely from the final goal of unitive vision, and as a result their historical situational character was lost until neo-Hinduism took up the cause of social reform. That is another matter. The point is that the perfect ethics of nishkama for the self-realized and the relative ethics of artha, kama and dharma of the world of plurality, were both posited in traditional and modern ethical systems of Hinduism.

India’s Socialist Secularism worked out within the ethos of traditional Hinduism, pursues this two-tier absolute-relative system of ethics. For instance, Asoka Mehta writing on democratic socialism said that a thoroughgoing moral relativism would bring about chaos or tyranny. So while recognizing that there are historically conditioned morality like feudal morality, bourgeois morality and proletarian morality, there must be an absolute moral criterion to evaluate all moralities. Elsewhere he said, "There undoubtedly are aspects of ethics that are relative but men’s deeper responses are to the absolute ethic, that nostalgia of man’s deepest ultimate triumph over all limitations". The absolute is the "achievement of self-harmony and acceptance of the rights and reality of other persons," that is, harmony is self-realization in a community of interpersonal love. For him it is the final fruit of all efforts and the end of all quests. It provides the "touchstone to judge and improve the historically conditioned morality. To deny validity to absolute ethics is to rob the ship at sea of its compass (Report -- The Congress Socialist Party, 1950). Ram Manohar Lohia interpreted the relative-historical and perfect-eternal dimensions of his socialist ethics by relating Marxism to Hindu spirituality. He wrote. "Every moment is no doubt a passing link in the great flux, but is also an eternity in itself’, and added, "The method of dialectical materialism informed by spirituality may unravel the movement of history; the method of spirituality informed by dialectical materialism may raise the edifice of being" (Marx, Gandhi and Socialism, p. 373-4).

Islam, with its central emphasis on the unity of God and God’s moral sovereignty of the world, sees the universe as "teleological, growth-oriented and destined to evolve towards perfection" in which the unity of all humanity will be realized. God has "created the potential for it through divine hidaya and revealed the values which would ensure growth." God called human beings to be vice-regent of God and entrusted him/her with the burden of responsibility for the future of the universe. But human beings have betrayed the trust through shirk, that is, by associating creatures with God. The Qur’an declares, "Verily I proposed to the heavens and the earth and the mountains to receive the trust (amanah), but they refused the burden and feared to receive it. Man alone undertook to bear it, but has proved unjust, senseless." It is in this situation of human alienation from the path of perfection that the laws of social living which took the form of shariat were ordained to call human beings to God and to their vocation of witness to divine justice and mercy. Here too, there seems to have an ethic of perfection and an ethic of the alienated situation (Asghar Ali Engineer, Islam and its Relevance to Our Age, 1984).

A.A. Fyzee in his Modern Approach to Islam (Bombay, 1993) says that the shariat is analogue of the Torah of the Jews and the Dharma among the Hindus. One could add that they are analogues to the Christian ethic of law of nature, to the liberal ethic of individual freedom and to the Marxist law of class struggle. They are all ethics of empirical historical situations alienated from the essence of humanity, in one sense witnessing to, and in another sense waiting in hope for the realization of, the ethic of love. And one could further add Engineer’s comment about shariat to all of them. He says, "Law is empirical and vision is transcendental. The balance between the two is lost if either is de-emphasized." Once the ethic of law is totally separated from the relation to the transcendent or the futurist vision of perfection, it loses dynamism and becomes static and gets absolutized and made irrelevant to new historical situations. When that happens, there is absolute conflict between them or they join hands in defending ethics of reaction against all new conceptions of justice in law as shariat and natural law did in the recent Cairo World Conference on Population.

My thesis is that the many visions of perfection are more or less the same or at least analogical, and therefore if each faith keeps its ethics of law dynamic within the framework of, and in tension with, its own transcendent vision of perfection, the different religious and secular faiths can have a fruitful dialogue at depth on the nature of human alienation which makes love impossible and for updating our various approaches to personal and public law with greater realism with insights from each other. This will help to make our different ethics of law expressive of our historical responsibility of building a common civil society for adherents of all faiths.

Recently at a meeting in Kozhencherry (Kerala), E.M.S. Nampoodiripad advocated cooperation between religious believers and Marxists at the action-level for the good of humanity, without interfering at the level of each other’s beliefs or basic ethics. Personally I think the cooperation in action requires some conversations on each other’s anthropology for the sake of arriving at a measure of consensus on an adequate common approach to what constitutes the good of humanity in the present situation and to the nature of the ethic of struggle and action needed to realize it. This remains true for cooperation between religions and between religions and secular faiths. For a situation of ethical pluralism, that is the only way in which a more or less common mind on empirical ethics relevant to the contemporary situation can emerge. Only then can law become an instrument of humanizing the technological culture of the global village and of meeting the demands of social liberation of the dalits, the tribals and the women whether in our separate communities of faith or at large in the country.

This volume, collectively produced by friends and students of Rev. Dr. K. C. Abraham, is to do him honor and express our deep gratitude for his leadership and contribution to both theological and social thinking in India and abroad. Kuruvilla C. Abraham, popularly known as K. C. Abraham (and KC to his friends) is an eminent theologian and one of the most talented ecumenical leaders and teachers that India has given to the world. Starting his ecumenical journey as the Youth Movement Secretary of the Church of South India, KC provided a new perspective to the Christian youth and challenged them to encounter the gospel in its totality. As a presbyter of the church in later years, KC reiterated the need for the total witness of gospel, and invited the church members and his fellow clergy to experience the liberative dimension of faith. During his time as a researcher at the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, KC initiated new avenues of research exploring the space where ideology and faith intersect to activate a process of social change. This research found an embodiment in the action programme of the St. Marks Cathedral in Bangalore when KC joined them as their presbyter. The Cathedral attempted to rediscover the meaning and practice of mission by identifying themselves with the poor and the marginalized in the city. KC’s involvement with the Ecumenical Christian Centre was considered to be unique because of a shift in orientation that he initiated at the Centre. Instead of being limited in its programme being only a conference centre, ECC was transformed into being a centre for learning and action for the various people’s movements. This shift in orientation can be attributed to the theological approach that KC has pursued throughout his illustrious career.

Though his leadership and contribution to the ecumenical and theological worlds are both unique and varied, he is most revered as a gifted theological teacher and writer. While guaranteeing an impeccable academic foundation and excellence for the doctoral degree programme of the Senate of Serampore, KC provided a genuine leadership to introduce an interdisciplinary approach to theological studies. The SATHRI doctorate is unique among those of the many theological institutions around the globe, because of its interdisciplinary approach incorporated in their research methodology.

Many of the contributors to this volume are members of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians. Their participation is an expression of gratitude to its president who raised the association into becoming a formidable force to contend with in the contemporary theological world.

His wife, Dr. Molly Abraham, a trained medical practitioner, excelled herself in the field of social action. Her initiatives to provide care for the differently-abled children in Bangalore corresponds to the theological challenges that the Abrahams have taken up throughout their research and teaching careers.

KC’s wholistic approach to the Gospel is a reflection of his understanding of theology. Therefore, any attempt to identify KC with one area of discourse will be limiting. Nevertheless, one may find four major areas of debates to which KC has offered new depth of meanings: 1) Re-definition of mission, 2) Theological and ethical articulation of ecological concerns, 3) Faith response to caste and, communalism, and 4) Ethics and economics with special attention to the question of poverty and development. All these debates reveal a deep concern for the freedom and liberation of the poor and the marginalized and are thus commonly referred to under the rubric of liberation theology. His passion for justice knows no bounds.

An ethical critique of globalization and the emerging global economic forces have received special attention in KC’s recent writings. He has observed that the marginalization of women, racial/ethnic/minorities, Dalits, the poor, children, elderly and the sick, in short the majority of the people the world over, has escalated with the spread of the forces of globalization. There are basically two crises that we face at the present time: 1) A crisis of meaning, and 2) a crisis of faith.

Crisis of Meaning

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel in one of his monumental treatises on the Sabbath argues that in a technological culture people expend time to occupy things in space. The Creation narrative, however, explicitly points out that time is holy. Holiness of time was introduced as a principle of equality. Nobody could make boundaries and own holy time. Time provides equal participation and equal enrichment. Marginalization has no scope in the concept of time. The Sabbath, according to the narratives, is the celebration of holy time and hence is a demand to practice equality. "You, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident shall observe Sabbath." Those differences are not pleasing to God. Therefore, the created world is advised to transcend these differences to celebrate the holiness of time and thereby participating in the holiness of God. The celebration of equality is what time has to offer.

Contrary to the concept of time, the concept of space denotes inequality. Those who claim ownership of space marginalize others. When a specified space is identified as holy, those who have the ability to maintain a control over that space alienate others from experiencing holiness. The practice of purity and pollution as a conceptual framework to maintain caste divisions finds its rationale in identifying space (and things) as holy. Those who are deprived of access to such space and things are destined to lead a life of exclusion. The operational principles for the marginalization of women from society and religion also find its justification within the concept of holy space. When the concept of time demands and guarantees equality, holiness in space justifies inequality.

Globalization is a culture of space, where we exchange or transfer time for things that could occupy space. What counts as valuable in society under the ethos of globalization are only things that could occupy space, that is, commodities and money.

Globalization of the present type is fundamentally a market process where the primacy of space is accepted. Market survives because of its ability to convert all realities into commodifiable things. Therefore, in a market society, people, land, knowledge, faith, religion, our abilities for creating pleasure and other faculties are transformed into things that occupy space. Moreover, things in space are measured on a value’s scale of money. The value of everything, including that of a person, is counted in terms of money. What we have determines what we are. Having determines the being. If we have nothing, we are nothing. Value and reality itself have been monetized.

This means that those realities which refuse to assume or submit themselves to be valued in monetary terms as commodities have no place in society. This could be considered to be one of the major ethical crises of globalization. Meaning is determined by the measure of commodities and money and that amounts to a total loss of meaning to life. The concept of freedom, equality, compassion, heteronomy and other rich meaning systems have lost their legitimacy and spiritual strength within the prevailing market principle. People who are lower on the economic and social valuation have become redundant. They are considered as being expendable in the global economic process.

Crisis of Faith

The concept and practice of space also manifests a deep crisis in our faith. Within the commodity culture those realities that refuse to assume the form of things, forfeit their value. Only things that occupy space have any value. This means that the reality of God has to appear from within the form of things to make its presence known. Turning God into an idol is one of the demands of commoditization. The value and power of divinity are measured according to the measurable categories at the present time. The measurable could be the number of people who are healed or the amount of material blessings that are bestowed upon, and so on. The measurable is that of space and not of time. And only that which is measurable has value and acceptance.

As Fr. Kappen has prophetically reminded us the cultural expression of the market process is the. worship of an "ungod". An ungod who will be often invoked for material blessings, for the legitimation of hegemonic power. hierarchical structures and exploitative economic, social and religious relationships. This ungod will not be disturbed when death and injustice prevail as the order of the time. This ungod is a re-creation of the god of Pharaoh. The Exodus narratives observed that the god of Pharaoh provided legitimacy to a flourishing economy of their times. They have more numbers to quote than the emerging global economy of the present time. The growth in their treasure cities, Pithom and Rameses, was faster than that of New York and they sought priority of space over time. Therefore, exploitation and slavery was found to be acceptable for the sacred.

The God of Moses, on the other hand, was a critique of that perverted form of the sacred. Moses rejected the god which was part of a system of space and provided justification for slavery. Moses instead offered a new language of divinity after negating the existing concepts of the sacred. To Moses, the god of Pharaoh was a god of space. This newness of language led the slaves to the realization of freedom and liberation.

This is the function of theology in our times for which KC has given leadership. Like the priests in Pharaoh’s courts, traditional theology had assumed the burden of re-defining the god concept in order to satisfy material wants and self interests, the wants of body and the greed for power and wealth. KC reminds us that to be spiritual is to profess the God of life, God of justice and the God of righteousness. This is a celebration of the holy time and the principles of equality and community. This celebration is a new politics of our time. This is the politics of meaning through which we attempt to embody the face of God in the face of the people around the globe. Life of the other, particularly the marginalized will assume priority in our decisions.

We submit this volume in honour of our friend and teacher, Dr. K.C. Abraham, with the hope that the debate in this volume will lead to the strengthening of our search for a newness in language. Recalling the practical recommendation of John Cobb for an ecologically sensitive praxis, one may argue that there are at least three steps towards identifying a newness in faith language.

(1) The recognition that something is wrong in history. The Human Development Report of 1998 observed that well over a billion people are deprived of basic consumption needs. Of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, nearly three-fifths lack basic sanitation. Almost a third have no access to clean water. Worldwide, two billion people are anæmic, including 55 million in industrialized countries. The report does not shy away from exposing the reasons for this colossal depravity. "When 20% of the rich accounts for 86% of total private consumption expenditure, the poorest 20% a minuscule 1.3%. Marginalization of the majority from the resources of this created world is sign of a deep crisis in the body politic of our society" It is also important to accept that most of the present problems, poverty, ecological destruction, gender and caste marginalization and other issues are interrelated.

(2) The second act is to create a consciousness, that the present form of crisis has evolved from human actions and is not divinely ordained. The marginalization of people and nature is due to our insistence on worshipping a deformed god presented by a deformed society. Since these are human creations, people have the responsibility to correct it or change it. The engagement to practice the social condition of our time is therefore a theological priority.

(3) And thirdly, theological discourses need to create a sense of hope. a hope that there is a new history ahead of us, and is possible. To hold the present as eternal is anti-divine. Humanity is not simply trapped in the present stage of perversion but has a future. That is the promise of God.

The rediscovery and articulation of the holiness of time by rejecting the claims of holiness bound in space is the challenge and task of our times.