Is God Christian?

Christian Identity in Public Theology: An Asian Contribution

D. Perman Niles

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506430263
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506430270
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Is God Christian? Christian Identity in Public Theology: An Asian Contribution is a sequel to Niles‘s previous book, The Lotus and the Sun: Asian Theological Engagement with Plurality and Power, and continues the narrative of the social biography of Asian theology. It enters the theological efforts of the author‘s generation as a collective enterprise to survey methods that in the arena of public theology confront and reject the assertion that God is Christian or there is a Christian god among other gods. The focus is on the issues and questions that affect the people and societies of Asia. The theology envisaged here is not the kind that will confine itself within the Christian community but one that will have an import for the actors in public life. Asian Public Theology will be one that will be inherently interreligious in nature. Accordingly, the theological methods explored in this book are not concerned narrowly with problems in Christian theology, but rather with challenges posed for Christian theology in the wider arena of social and political life in Asia.

4

Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Addressing Colonial Entanglements

Postcolonial biblical criticism questions the assumption that the Bible and translations of it are innocent of political, especially colonial, intentions; and raises queries along three different but related fronts. The first has to do with how the various powerful empires of the time—Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece (Macedonia), and Rome, which succeeded each other—impacted on the writing and shaping of texts. The second is to identify the residue of interpretation that the colonial enterprise has left on the continued reception and use of the Bible. Specific to this matter is the reifying of expressions of Christian triumphalism as an offshoot of colonialism that are embedded in translations of the Bible. The third is to see how the Bible could speak to a plurality of voices so that it could be relevant today in the search for alternatives of hope in the social and political arena. These queries are not just peculiar to postcolonial biblical criticism. Perspectives I have used in the previous chapters on counter-colonial approaches reflect responses to these queries. What postcolonial biblical criticism does is to bring these perspectives together in a more focused way.

This chapter will address in the main the second and third queries; and will be in three parts. The first part sketches the way in which postcolonial biblical criticism deals with colonial entanglements in Christian Scripture especially in its myriad translations from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It argues that the Bible is essentially literature and needs to be treated as such. It transposes into biblical criticism Edward Said’s dictum that literature does not simply reflect reality but shapes our perception of reality. The second part exposes some of the prominent ways in which patriarchy, which is allied to colonialism but not necessarily coterminous with it, suppresses the minority voices of women in Christian Scripture and tradition; and shows how these submerged voices could be heard in their own right. The third part is an example of how a particular text of Scripture—in this case John 14:6—which is traditionally used to argue for the exclusive claims of Christianity, could be interpreted in a multi-religious context so that it could speak to a plurality of voices.

Though they engage themselves in a postcolonial task, not all the writers I cite in this chapter identify themselves technically as belonging to the guild of postcolonialists.

I. Postcolonial Criticism
and Biblical Interpretation

R.S. Sugirtharajah, who has done the most to delineate the function of postcolonial biblical criticism says, “What postcolonial biblical criticism does is to focus on the whole issue of expansion, domination, and imperialism as dominant forces in defining both the biblical narratives and biblical interpretation.”^[1] He explains:

Postcolonialism is essentially a style of enquiry. . . . It instigates and creates possibilities, and provides a platform for the widest possible convergence of critical forces, of multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural voices, to assert their denied rights and rattle the centre. . . . As postcolonialism is not a theory in the strict sense of the term, but a collection of critical voices, an apt description would be to term it criticism. Criticism is not an exact science, but an undertaking of social and political commitment which should not be reduced to or solidified into a dogma. It is always oppositional.^[2]

Sugirtharajah’s brief introduction to the main purpose of the third chapter of his book succinctly describes the major intention of this discipline: “The overbearing thrust of this chapter is that postcolonial biblical criticism as such does not render meanings or answers but provides the ground rules for arriving at potential meanings.”^[3] In pursuit of this task, he applies insights from Said directly to a study of Christian Scripture as literature without getting enmeshed in general postcolonial discussions.

He does three things: First, he tracks the use of the Bible in the colonial enterprise and exposes colonial intentions both in the Bible and in interpretations of it. Second, he points to dissident voices in the third-world that proffered alternative readings, which challenged traditional western and indigenous interpretations that either reinforced or were impervious to the colonial strains in the Bible. Third, he suggests possible alternative methods for reading the Bible. It is not possible in a brief chapter to cover the whole gamut of his extensive writings. I will concentrate mainly on what he has to say on the use of the Bible, especially the King James Version, in the colonial enterprise, and how this version has impacted on the ways in which the Bible is received and interpreted today.

The Bible and Western Colonialism

As Sugirtharajah rightly observes, before 1500 CE in Asia the Bible was a religious text alongside other religious texts. In large measure it was found in liturgical expressions and in iconic depictions.^[4] The form of Christianity that flourished in spates at that time was mostly Nestorian, which had no political or military backing from any central western authority. It depended much on the disposition of Asian rulers for its acceptance and periodic survival. Matters changed after CE 1500 with the incursion of Portuguese Jesuit missions followed by Spanish and British missions, which had the blessing if not the overt backing of imperial authorities to introduce and maintain some form of Christendom or Christian dominion.^[5]

Initially, the Bible as such did not enter the fray of the colonial enterprise. There were two main reasons for this. One was that the Bible was considered far too sacred a book to be entrusted to ordinary folk. While Hebrew, Greek and Latin (the Vulgate) were considered the appropriate languages for the Bible, translations into vernacular languages were deemed unseemly. Typical of this attitude was the opinion of a British prelate in the time of Henry VIII whom Sugirtharajah quotes, “The Bible is old; truth is old; God is old; and so is Latin, whereas English is new-fangled.”^[6] Even after Tyndale’s translation was printed in 1525, there was a paucity of Bibles in English.

Implicit in not making the Bible available more widely was a second reason, which was more explicit in the Catholic assertion that translation is not sufficient maybe even dangerous without correct interpretation. Only the Pope and his bishops were authorised to do that. Consequently, the pastoral application of selected biblical texts in liturgies, catechisms and homilies were considered to be more important than the inherent authority of the texts themselves. More often than not biblical texts were used to reflect the doctrinal positions of the Church. The Council of Trent (1545–1563), which met largely to counter the Protestant Reformation, established the Latin Vulgate as the only authentic version of the Bible and forbade any translation contesting the Protestant fad of reading the Bible in vernacular languages. Sugirtharajah says in summary:

The dominant perception was that, for the laity to grow in spirituality and personal holiness, direct access to the Bible was not necessary. The role of the laity was simply to listen to the Word expounded for them by the clergy. Thus the Bible was subjected to a rigorous control. The Council also insisted that the written tradition received by the Church must be held in equal reverence to the Holy Writ. The Bible was thus made an adjunct and a complement to Church tradition and teaching.^[7]

Sugirtharajah contends that the real breakthrough in the Bible being freely available in vernacular languages was the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society, whose sole aim was to encourage a wider dispersion of the Bible. It was a Protestant effort. He quotes from George Browne’s history of the society (1859):

The Society is founded on the principle of reverence for the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing a revelation from God to men—a heavenly message addressed to all, and of supreme importance to every one of the human family. . . . Hence the Society aims to make these Holy Writings known in every nation and in every tongue, and, as far as may be, to render them the actual possession of every individual on the face of the whole earth.^[8]

The society should be congratulated for breaking the nexus between a designated authority, claiming sole responsibility for interpreting the Bible, and the common reader. While conceding this point, one must also recognise the fact that despite its claim to be theologically neutral, since its work was pan-denominational, the aim of the society was patently political. It was to make the Bible available in translation to serve as an antidote to the idolatrous beliefs and practices of the “Natives”, thereby disparaging their religion and culture, and as a way of inculcating the noble precepts and attitudes embedded in the Bible that made of Britain a great nation free of political upheavals. Consequently, this conviction found expression not only in the phenomenal growth of the society’s auxiliaries both in Britain and abroad, but also in the thousands of languages into which the society tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• Cross-Textual Hermeneutics: A Counter-Colonial Approach
• Cross-Textual Reading: Demonstrating A Method
• Postcolonial Hermeneutics: Confronting Colonialism
• Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Addressing Colonial Entanglements
• Subaltern Hermeneutics: Counter Theological Approaches
• The Exploration Continues: Some Concluding Remarks
• Index of Names and Places