I had a class recently on intercultural education within my own church. My church, admirably, wishes to become an intercultural church. The readings for the class were fantastic, mostly from a liberationist/post-colonial perspective that critiqued the history of my own church and the conflation of the North American church with western, colonial culture. This is incredibly helpful, I think, in freeing the church from its captivity and alignment to the interests of the powers that be since the so-called Constantinian shift.
There is something I notice, generally, in discussions like this. Likely due to the complicity of the church in the colonial project, there is unease (understandably) with discussing faith claims and how they relate to becoming an intercultural church. Part of it, I think, is that we have internalized the idea that “Christianity” is colonial, imperial, racist and ecologically destructive in nature. To make such faith claims is seen as also making colonial claims. The project is, then, in “civilizing” the faith away from its colonial nature. The task is to bring the text and tradition in to the 21st century and correct its claims with those of modernity or some form of post-modernity. As such, there is uneasiness when Jesus Christ is brought up as the one in whom the diversity of the church finds its commonality. The Jew from Nazareth and the parochial God of Israel aren’t big enough for the “global village,” where peoples and their local oddities must make way for the true only true universalism of rational individual choice and free markets. In our world of dislocation and globalization, to make “comprehensive” claims based on the subjective claims of a religious tradition is seen as absurd for the fact that they are not (and likely can not be) universally accepted. Unlike the “neutral” and universally applicable claims of instrumental reason, that is.
Oddly, in our own readings, we discover peoples from the global south picking up the bible and discovering–perhaps to their own surprise–their liberation. As Desmond Tutu once asked, “if you did not want us to be free, why did you give us this book?” Why is this tradition so attractive to the poor, colonized and suffering of this world as it was when Paul was colonizing the Roman Empire with the Reign of God? We haven’t pondered enough, I think, the notion that perhaps the truth is that Christianity is radical, and that we’ve seen a domesticated perversion in Christendom. In assuming that the gospel is captive to white, western instrumental reason, we engage in such an act of domestication by simply assuming this as true and trading its claims of Exodus and resurrection for variations of the Enlightenment claims of management and homogenization in the idea that we must find a common identity as global citizens or a common biology as humans in order to ensure peace. Perhaps it is not in universality that we will find peace and cooperation, but the learning to live as neighbors and friends with those who do not share our cultures or commitments. We may find, rather, in the parochialism of the particular claims of our own faith tradition the power to “love our enemies” even if they are the absolute other.
