Introduction
While visiting Bolivia in July 2015, Pope Francis offered a direct apology for the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the oppression of Latin America during the colonial period.1 In his speech, Francis noted that Latin American church leaders in the past had acknowledged that “grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God.” He went further, saying, “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”2 Francis’s public apology for the church’s historical sin of colonial complicity was not the first one offered by the Catholic Church. When Pope John Paul II visited the Dominican Republic in 1992, he had already apologized to the continent’s Indigenous people for the “pain and suffering” caused during the five hundred years of the church’s presence in the Americas.3 John Paul II’s apology, however, was not as specific as Francis’s. Although Francis’s public apology for the Catholic Church’s grave sins might be considered an important historical step toward the reconciliation between the descendants of the former colonizers and the colonized, he stopped short of providing specific solutions to some of the critical social-structural problems of our world that have radically disrupted many people’s lives (especially those of the poor and the disenfranchised) as well as Mother Earth. He said, “Don’t expect a recipe from this pope. . . . Neither the pope nor the church has a monopoly on the interpretation of social reality or the proposal of solutions to contemporary issues. I dare say no recipe exists.”4 Although Francis’s down-to-earth yet worrisome confession that the church has no detailed prescription could be considered as the church’s truthful acknowledgment, it has left many people who were victimized by the historical legacies of Western colonialism with no remedy to their ongoing social suffering and historical trauma.
Sincere and earnest as it may be, the church’s gesture of apology cannot substitute for its long-overdue work of reckoning—the reckoning with its historical sin of colonial complicity. The church’s truthful and resolute reckoning is particularly important for twenty-first-century political theology, whose main responsibility is to promote justice in this world. We should note that although the term reckoning has to do with mathematics and accounting, its biblical use refers to God, who reckons based on human faith, as we can see in the case of Abraham (Gen 15:6, “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”). The church’s reckoning with its historical sin means that it must bring itself before God to be reckoned by God’s righteousness. The church’s communal effort to reckon with its own sin, however, is not merely for judgment and condemnation. It is for redemption. The church’s work of reckoning with its own historical sin flows from Jesus’s proclamation in Matthew 4:17: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” If one truly repents, she, then, no longer stays on the previous course; instead, she changes course toward a new direction. Likewise, if the church would truthfully repent from its own sin, it cannot but bring about fundamental change both to its theology and in its liturgy, mission, and structure.
What does it mean specifically for the Western church to reckon with its historical sin of colonial complicity? How might the church respond to this call? The church’s work of reckoning must begin with uncovering and telling the stories of a countless number of people who were victimized by the structural injustice and systemic violence of European colonialism, including those who live with its legacy today. The church must listen to the voices of these victimized people while intently remembering their sufferings. This should be then followed by the communal act of mourning, which should be necessarily accompanied by a deep and surgical introspection into the core of the church’s ecclesial structure, history, theology, liturgy, and beliefs. The works of the church’s critical introspection and analysis ought to entail a transformative practice that will reshape its mission and vision. No single church or leader can carry out the work of reckoning alone. It should certainly take the whole church and its entire leadership to get this great task completed. In this chapter, I attempt to lay the groundwork for the church’s reckoning with its historical sin of colonial complicity by examining the historical, ecclesial, and theological backdrop against which the church, unfortunately, emerged as an accomplice to European colonialism.
The Church and the Historical Sin of Colonial Complicity
The need for the church’s historical reckoning with the sin of colonial complicity in the twenty-first century follows from the lack of its theological reckoning during the twentieth century. Instead of prioritizing the historical reckoning with European colonialism and the church’s complicitous entanglement with it, major twentieth-century Western theologians, like Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, began their theological reflections with the questions that animated nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism.5 Until new theological voices emerged from former colonies—such as Latin America (liberation theology), North America (Black theology), and Asia (Asian liberation theologies)—beginning in the 1960s, the long legacy of European colonialism was seldom taken up by Western theologians and ecclesial leaders as a central issue in political theology. Meanwhile, Carl Schmitt’s 1922 text, Political Theology, effectively prevented European colonial states from reckoning with their colonial sins and crimes. Such secularized theological concepts as “state sovereignty” became completely exempted from any moral and critical scrutiny.
Some may ask, Is not European colonialism a matter of the past? Was it not over in the previous century? Why invoke the ghosts of the past when we have already moved into a different historical situation? Such questions are groundless. Querying the legitimacy of the church’s reckoning with its historical sin is like questioning the legitimacy of American society’s historical reckoning with slavery. The church’s reckoning is necessary for us to fulfill any task of political theology in the postcolonial twenty-first century.
The Western church’s reckoning work should be differentiated from that done by the churches of the former colonies under the broader banner of liberation theology. For instance, Latin American theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo, and Jon Sobrino, have made a significant impact on the global church and society by popularizing the phrase preferential option for the poor. Liberation theology has been further diversified in other parts of the world and has given rise to Black theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, Dalit theology, minjung theology, Palestinian liberation theology, queer theology, and others. But we must differentiate between liberation theology’s engagements with the legacy of colonialism and the type of historical reckoning demanded of the Western church today. While the reckoning work by the churches of the former colonies is for the people colonialism victimized and traumatized, the reckoning work required today of the Western church is its repentance of its role as a colonial victimizer and traumatizer. These two types of reckoning, however, are not separated from each other. The reckoning work by the churches of the former colonies also calls for a corresponding response on the part of the Western church.
There are two reasons we must reckon with the Western church’s historical sin of colonial complicity. First, there is an undeniable historical linkage between the European church of the colonial period and the Western church today. The contemporary Western church did not come into being out of nowhere; it evolved out of the previous colonial context with a unique historical, theological, and ecclesial legacy formed by the colonial European church’s experiences and beliefs, which were transmitted to the next generation in the form of the church’s historical consciousness. Without a critical and rigorous reckoning with the colonial European church’s historical sin, the Western church today may never overcome its colonial-historical consciousness that has already shaped its theological formation, ecclesial culture, and missional goals. As we will see in the following chapter, one of the problematic aspects of the Western church’s inherited colonial-historical consciousness is its inability to face such issues as structural injustice, systemic violence, and social suffering.
Second, the dominant structural injustices of our world today—such as systemic racism, the neoliberal economy, and environmental destruction—can be genealogically traced to the structural injustice and systemic violence of European colonialism. The transatlantic slave trade, the enormous accumulation of capitalist wealth, and the global exploitation of natural resources were all part of European colonialism, and we are still struggling with its toxic legacies. Since the goal of political theology is to promote justice and peace in this world, without directly confronting the historical legacies of colonial injustice, violence, and suffering, it is nearly impossible for us to do any form of political theology today.
What did the Protestant churches and the Catholic Church do during the colonial period? What is the nature of the relationship between religion and imperialism during that time? We need to define the conceptual difference between imperialism and colonialism. According to Edward W. Said, imperialism is “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.”6 Regarding himself as an anti-imperialist, Said holds that Christianity was essential to European imperialism. In a lecture delivered in Ireland in 1988, he said, “At the heart of European culture during the many decades of imperial expansion lay what could be called an undeterred and unrelenting Eurocentrism. This accumulated experiences, territories, peoples, histories; it studied them, classified them, verified them; but above all, it subordinated them to the culture and indeed the very idea of white Christian Europe.”7 In his 1978 Orientalism, Said also claims that during the colonial period, the European church served the “interests” of European colonialism, which he identifies as “the expansion of Europe.”8 According to him, the main apparatuses for tending these interests were various mission organizations from Europe—from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698) to the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804).
Said’s postcolonial critique of the European church is echoed by theologians such as Willie James Jennings. In his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Jennings argues that “it would be a mistake to see the church and its ecclesiastics as entering the secular workings of the state in the New World, or to posit ecclesial presence as a second stage in the temporal ordering of the New World.” Jennings emphasizes that the European church was from the beginning a partner in the state effort to colonize the New World: “No, the church entered with the conquistadors, establishing camp in and with the conquering camps of the Spanish. The ordering of Indian worlds was born of Christian formation itself. Though the church may not have been in control, it was also not marginal.”9 For Jennings, Western Christianity has never reckoned with its historical sin in any substantive manner. He thus writes, “Sadly, Christianity and its theologians live in conceptual worlds that have not in any substantive way reckoned with the ramifications of colonialism for Christian identity or the identity of theology.”10
The postcolonial critique of the complicitous relationship between Christianity and European imperialism is best illustrated by the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, which provided the religious, political, and legal justification for Europe’s imperial expansion and subsequent colonization of the non-European world. Its origins go back to the 1430s, during which time the Spanish and Portuguese colonized the Canary Islands. In 1436, convinced by Portuguese demand, Pope Eugenius IV issued a papal bull granting Portugal exclusive control of the islands to “civilize and convert the Canary Islanders to the ‘one true religion.’”11 The “civilization cause” was later widely adopted by colonizing countries to justify their colonial expansion. As Portugal expanded its explorations farther down the west coast of Africa, it then convinced Pope Nicholas to issue another bull in 1455 to justify its seizure of the land. Soon after, Spain also sought papal approval for its ...
