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KINSLER'S CORNER KINSLER ARTICLES Theological Education of the People, With the People, and For the People The Hijacking of the Global Food Market
THE WAL-MART CHALLENGE _______________________________ WHY PEOPLE ARE POOR The January 1981 issue of Sojourners included a milestone article by Tom Hanks under the above title. It begins with an observation of North American churches' understanding of the causes of poverty. The major cause of poverty is widely assumed to be "imderdevelopment." Other \prominent factors are believed to be laziness..., vices such as drunkenness, and, \however subtly and discretely expressed, the supposed racial and national inferiority of certain peoples. It's a very comforting worldview and one that our \most popular politicians delight to propagate. Hanks himself, an Old Testament scholar with now some 40 years of ministry in Latin America, has examined extensively what the Bible teaches about the causes of poverty. It says precisely nothing about underdevelopment and very little about "laziness, drunkenness, and other assorted causes." On the other hand, the Bible contains "an overwhelming avalanche of texts that identify oppression as the cause of poverty." Oppression is a major category in the Bible's understanding and approach to reality. The Exodus has come to be recognized as playing a central role in the theology of the O.T., comparable to that of the cross in the N.T. And it was in the Exodus that a people God recognized as oppressed won their liberation. It is no exaggeration to say that 90 per cent of biblical history is written from the perspective of a small, weak, oppressed, poor people. Small wonder, then, that oppression and the resulting poverty form so large a bulk of the literature that recounts the struggle. The Lord makes clear that in a class struggle between oppressors and oppressed God does not remain neutral or impartial: God takes the side of the oppressed-poor and acts decisively for their liberation (Ex. 3:7-10; 6:2-5). The Bible... abundantly witnesses its awareness of antagonistic classes and the struggle of the poor against their oppressors, particularly in Exodus, the references to "enemies" in the Psalms, and in the eighth century prophets. Hanks notes the long absence of social analysis of the causes of poverty in First World biblical theology and calls for a re-reading of the Bible from the Third World. In Latin America's theological and spiritual revolution, biblical Christians often are accused of introducing class struggle into the churches. This is utterly natve and shows we have understood neither biblical social analysis nor the most elementary facts that are a daily part of Third World poverty. What are we called to do as biblical people? We need to stop justifying our privileges and start trying to discover, unmask, and denounce the mechanisms of oppression that make and keep people poor.... We need to examine radically our understanding of the Christian gospel and Jesus Christ. We must ask whether Christ is presented as liberator of the oppressed or as champion of an unjust status quo, and whether our gospel is "good news to the poor" or a rationalization for the rich. What is your own understanding of the causes of poverty—in your country and around the world? THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION Congratulations are due to the Senate of Serampore College, to its member institutions, and in particular to its Registrar, Rev. D. S. Satyaranjan, for the launching of what might be considered the most comprehensive program for diversified and decentralized formation of pastors and laity anywhere in the world. Such an undertaking, at a time of diminishing resources, must build upon solid theological and pedagogical foundations. Our task in the coming moments is to consider some critical dimensions for a vision of theological education of the people, with the people, and for the people of India. OF THE PEOPLE During the late 1970s and early 1980s it was my privilege to serve on the staff of the Programme on Theological Education of the World Council of Churches, which is how I came to know and work with your distinguished colleague, Dr. Samuel Amirtham. Our Director at that time was Rev. Aharon Sapsezian, an Armenian from Brazil. Some of you will recall that Aharon made a visit to India, to see for himself the very impressive steps being taken by your theological institutions and also to receive an honorary doctorate from your Senate. When he reported back to us what he had learned, one of the most striking points was this: He heard and saw a great deal about the academic excellence and programmatic creativity of India’s theological institutions, but at the same time he began to hear repeatedly about the theological illiteracy of its laity. That, he insisted, cannot be. It is an inherent contradiction. The effectiveness of theological education of pastors should be measured by the theological literacy and missionary effectiveness of the laity. Let me offer a more current example of this same problem from my own country, the U.S.A. The 21st Century dawned with the unveiling of a globalizing economic order that leaves half of the world’s population in poverty, 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty, with one fifth of the world, mostly North Americans and Europeans, receiving over four times as much as the other four fifths altogether. 30,000 people die of hunger every day; that’s ten times as many as died at the hands of terrorists in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. The U.S., which increasingly displays imperial intentions, has intervened in Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and allowed Israel to continue occupying Palestinian lands at terrible cost in both Palestinian and Israeli lives. With some notable exceptions, it seems as if most of church members throughout the U.S. are supportive of or indifferent to these atrocities. What is the contribution of hundreds of accredited theological institutions and tens of thousands of graduates in that country? Are not these atrocities of theological and spiritual concern? What is the value of faith and theology if they are not? These are just two examples of the urgency of theological education of the whole people of God. They illustrate why some 40 years ago we began to experiment with theological education by extension, which soon became a movement that spread from Central America across all six continents. In the early years we found ourselves generating some controversy, as TEE enthusiasts and more traditional institutions made counter claims for our respective models, but now we are increasingly seeking to combine the advantages and reduce the weaknesses of both in what some are now calling diversified theological education. Last September I attended an all Africa conference on theological education, which presented the enormous challenges of poverty, corruption, exploitation, debt, and HIV/AIDS. I discovered that at last count there were 340 TEE programs in Africa, and there is a concerted effort to connect TEE programs to residential theological schools in order to strengthen both. What might be the potential of these large networks of theological education throughout the burgeoning churches of Africa for overcoming such enormous human needs? Theological education of the people is not simply a matter of reaching out to more and more people in their various contexts. It is not just a pedagogical or technical challenge. It is a vision that is built upon an understanding that the people of God are not only the objects but also the subjects of God’s mission of human liberation and ecological salvation in the face of unprecedented challenges in today’s world. We will always need the gifts and dedication of theological specialists and their academic tools, but the primary work of theological education, I believe, is to unleash the grace and power of faith among all those who live and work among God’s people at the most basic levels of our churches and communities. My wife and I served with the Latin American Biblical Seminary in Costa Rica during our last 13 years before retirement two years ago. That institution has restructured its entire program around two principle modes of learning, in context and in residence, combined. During those years the seminary, which is international and ecumenical, gained government recognition as a theological university and added graduate level programs, but we saw the need to balance those gains with new theological options at a more basic level for leaders of Protestant, Pentecostal, and Catholic churches throughout the region. We already had a base of operations, as all of our university level students were rooted and doing much of their academic work in their local contexts, taking intensive two-month courses at our campus when they could leave their jobs and churches. In several countries they set up coordinating offices and networks for ongoing extension courses and occasional visits by our professors for intensive courses at the university level there. In recent years they and we together have been designing and preparing study materials closely related to the experiences and needs of local pastors and laypersons who do not or can not aspire to university studies. Each course focuses on concrete challenges for ministry, is constructed around a hermeneutical circle of social analysis, biblical studies, and creative action plans and possibilities, and offers the possibility of what we call an epistemological rupture in the vision and commitments of the participants. One group of courses, for example, offers new perspectives on faith and ministry from the experiences of the differently abled, working children, alcoholic persons and their families, battered women, and indigenous peoples. The program, which we call our Biblical Pastoral Institute, requires only very minimal coordination from our side, and it now reaches over 2000 people each year under local administration in response to local priorities. When the local coordinators of this program gather for training seminars at our campus, they generate real excitement among our faculty and the other students, because they bring with them an extraordinary wealth of experience and reflection, for they represent the primary frontier for the contextualization of theology, worship, and mission throughout Latin America. WITH THE PEOPLE Elites and hierarchies will never disappear altogether, at least not in this life, but we have seen a remarkable shift in our understanding of church from elites and hierarchies to basic ecclesial communities, especially in Latin America, with the growth of Pentecostal churches, and Africa, with the multiplication of “spiritual” or African instituted churches. In both of these regions and in other regions such movements have pointed to dimensions of faith and culture that the so-called historic churches need to deal with more effectively. In India and elsewhere I have heard that many members of our churches are drawn to these newer expressions of faith and worship, without necessarily leaving their more traditional churches, and that the older churches are incorporating such expressions in their own life. Of particular interest to me has been the emergence of leaders within these movements without the benefit (or limitation) of formal theological training. This has not been without problems, of course, and such leaders are increasingly seeking opportunities for formal or non-formal theological and pastoral training. From the beginning some Theological Education by Extension programs have mechanically programmed elementary biblical and pastoral material to be transmitted to local leaders, and some programs were simply overwhelmed by the enrollment of hundreds or thousands of students. Others soon discovered that grassroots leaders with little formal schooling are capable of leading their faith communities into personal, ecclesial, and social transformation, as they discover new meanings for the Gospel message in their specific contexts. It has been evident, to those who have eyes to see and hearts to share, that our fundamental task as theological educators is not so much to pass on the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” but rather to accompany our sisters and brothers and their faith communities in their struggles for liberation, dignity, and fullness of life. We know that these local leaders will probably not be replaced by professional seminary graduates in our lifetime. In any case these local leaders who emerge within the life of their faith communities are in most cases the ones most gifted and adapted for ministry in their own contexts. This understanding of theological education with people at every level and in every context is similar to another primary dimension of human and environmental well-being, which we call community development or community organizing. We all know that vast amounts of money, time, and technology have been expended around the world for rural and urban development among the poor through government, corporations, and professionals with relatively little success. So the poor remain poor, the land and rivers are exhausted and polluted, and whole communities and regions are left in despair. Non governmental organizations increasingly look to local communities to discover within themselves and their own cultural heritage ways of identifying needs and resources and solutions. Additional tools of analysis and relevant resources can and should be provided, of course, but in most situations the communities themselves must free themselves from outside impositions and dependence in order to be able to identify and resolve their own needs. When the vision and the initiative are theirs, even very limited resources can work wonders. Outsiders are unlikely to seek or find the essential local ingredients to enable genuine, human development to take place. In Guatemala we discovered a parallel model for the training of health promoters, utilizing an educational philosophy and pragmatic approach similar to our understanding of theological education with the people and similar to this understanding of community development. A missionary doctor with a clinic in a central, indigenous town began training relatively unschooled women and men from surrounding villages to identify local health needs, refer serious cases to the clinic, and treat at least 90% of the health problems using basic treatments they learned empirically by observing and listening to the missionary doctor. Similar programs were being developed in Mexico and elsewhere. It was evident that local health committees and health promoters were more likely than others to have the confidence of their own people, to treat effectively their common ailments, and to build effectively on local traditions for preventive and holistic healthcare. In fact, the World Health Organization has for many years proclaimed that primary or community-based healthcare is the only way much of the world will have its health needs met, because professional, drug and hospital oriented systems will never be widely accessible for them. Here is our challenge, as I see it, in the face of vast and urgent human, economic, and ecological needs. Could we not combine our concern for theological education with the people of God in their local communities with the concern for primary healthcare and the need for self-development in those same communities? Do not all three belong together as a spiritual whole, as a holistic understanding of our mission, of shalom? I am sure that all three initiatives are present in abundance right here in India, and I suspect that the new programs of SCEPTRE can provide the necessary framework to meet such a challenge. How to do theological education with the people requires further reflection. It is not just a matter of rephrasing or adapting academic theology, biblical studies, and ministerial formation to local cultural realities. The whole theological enterprise may require a fundamental methodological shift. As the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians declared in 1976, “We are prepared for a radical break in epistemology which makes commitment the first act of theology and engages in critical reflection on the praxis of the reality of the Third World.” In contexts such as India the starting point will not be, I suspect, philosophy or psychology, as in the West, but social analysis of oppression and domination systems. The basic problem is not unbelief but idolatry, the pursuit of and submission to systems and mechanisms of oppression. The primary interlocutors for such theology and biblical hermeneutics are not the educated nonbelievers, as they were for Schleiermacher, but the poor, the “non-persons,” the exploited, especially those who are excluded in terms of class, gender, and race or culture or caste. The challenge is not to build weighty theological constructs or intellectual apologies but to struggle for the liberation and fullness of life of all God’s people. This “option for the poor” was, of course, Jesus’ option, as he announced his mission and message as “good news for the poor” and “liberation of the oppressed.” This kind of theological education can only be carried out in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. FOR THE PEOPLE Any serious consideration of theological education must, sooner or later, reexamine its theological foundation and its missiological focus in its historical context. The 21st Century has set before all of us two great threats to life, economic globalization that is accelerating the polarization between rich and poor, between and within all our countries, and ecological destruction that may well lead to planetary death within this century if not within our lifetime. People of all faiths and ideologies are called to bring their deepest spiritual resources to our common struggle for life in the face of these threats to life in all its forms. I would like to propose that we who call ourselves Christians turn to our biblical roots and seek there an old but new framework within which to reorient our theology and theological education in our common struggle for life in today’s world. Our sacred story begins with the liberation of Hebrew slaves from the then almighty Egyptian Empire. We know that story very well, and we have given great emphasis to liberation from oppression, exploitation, exclusion, and dehumanization, but we need to work much harder on the biblical story of liberation for fullness of life, for community not competition, for inclusion not exclusion, for humanization not dehumanization. When those Hebrew slaves were delivered from Pharaoh and his army, they found themselves in the desert, soon they were hungry, they cried out against Moses, and they wanted to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. They did not know how to live in freedom! So once again God had to rescue them, but God gave them much more than the food they needed. God gave them their first lesson on how to live in freedom, and this is perhaps the most important lesson for all of us today. The manna story, which included the first presentation of the Sabbath Day, teaches us that we must all learn to take just what we need, day by day, so that all will have enough. Of course the Exodus 16 narrative reveals how difficult this simple lesson was at the beginning and has been down through history. Some will always try to take more, to hoard, and if they do they will use it to get even more, until they become rich and many become poor, even to the degree that many families, tribes, and peoples will fall into slavery. When the Hebrews ended their 40 years wandering in the wilderness and were about to cross over the River Jordan, Moses reviewed with them the Torah (Deuteronomy) so that they would be clear as to how they were to live in freedom in the Promised Land. He reminded them about the lesson of the manna in Deuteronomy 8, and he gave them specific mandates for the Sabbath Year in Deuteronomy 15. Here again the focus is economic, though we must add that it is profoundly spiritual and very pertinent to our global predicament today. So that “there will be no one in need among you,” as it says in verse 4, God’s people are to cancel debts and free slaves in the Seventh Year. This is not just one more law to be obeyed legalistically. It is a profound lesson on how to live in freedom. In ancient times as in our own debts were the major mechanism by which a few became rich and many were impoverished. In today’s global and local economy, which is a thousand times more complex, we like ancient Israel need to reject the mechanisms by which some become very rich and so many become very poor. Finally we come to Leviticus 25, the Jubilee Year, a super Sabbath when not only were debts to be cancelled and slaves freed but any land that had been mortgaged or sold out of extreme necessity would be returned to all the families of Israel, so that all would enjoy fullness of economic, social, and spiritual life with dignity. The foundation for the Sabbath Day, Sabbath Year, and Jubilee mandates is very clear. Having been delivered from slavery, God’s people must learn to live in freedom and not to fall back into oppression, exploitation, and slavery, which would be a negation of their very identity and a profanation of their faith in the God who liberates. The message of Sabbath Economics or Jubilee Spirituality has only rarely been tapped by Jews or Christians, but we are finding that it was central to Jesus’ mission and message. We can point to the first temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4, when Jesus responds to the tempter with these words: “One does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This is a direct quote from Deuteronomy 8, which refers back to the lesson of the manna in Exodus 16, which teaches not that bread is unimportant but that it is essential that all have bread. That is the word that comes from the mouth of God! It is well known that Luke begins the story of Jesus’ ministry, in Chapter 4, with Jesus’ reference to the Jubilee, “the year of the Lord’s favor,” at the Nazareth synagogue, and he responds to John the Baptist, in Luke 7, with a similar recitation of the coming of God’s Reign as Jubilee. We see parallels in Jesus’ parables, in the beatitudes, in his solidarity with the poor, the sick, and the possessed, and in his confrontations with the rich and powerful. He challenged the rich young ruler to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, and then he explained to the disciples that they already had 100 times more because they had shared all that they had in the new Jubilee community. He summarized the Sabbath-Jubilee mandates in the prayer he taught them. “Give us [all of us] this day our daily bread [day by day]” clearly echoes the manna story and the Sabbath Day; “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” reminds us of the mandates for the Sabbath Year; and the final petition is directed, today more than ever, to the temptation of consumerism, wealth accumulation, and conspicuous consumption, which drive the global economy, which is causing so much human and ecological suffering and death. Jesus was, of course, the theological educator par excellence, but we have not been very good students. He taught and demonstrated from the beginning of his ministry that God’s Reign was breaking in as “good news to the poor . . . release to captives . . .sight to the blind . . . liberation of the oppressed.” This is what it means “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) When the early believers were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, they began to practice Jubilee. There were many signs and wonders, but perhaps the greatest was that they “had all things in common,” they shared table fellowship “day by day,” “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions,” and “there was not a needy person among them.” (Acts 2:43-45, 4:32-35, cp. Deuteronomy 15:4) The Apostle Paul challenged the communities of believers in Europe and Asia Minor to contribute to the needs of the poor in Judea, citing the manna story, so that none should have too much and none too little (2 Corinthians 8:15). He even sent former slave Onesimus back to his former owner Philemon, not as a better slave, as some would say, but as a brother and as a full member of that faith community, as co-heir of his household. The task before us today, as theological students and educators, is to follow Jesus, to pursue life for all God’s people and all God’s creatures, to practice Jubilee, through the power of God’s Spirit. This task is not to be taken lightly, for, as several economists have shown, global corporations now rule the world, and they are backed up by the one super power to benefit their interests. Yet we have also witnessed in these last few months the emergence of another super power, the peoples of the earth who are demanding justice and peace. And this movement draws strength from the world’s great and small religions, whose potential is immeasurable. It is perhaps in India, where more dialogue has taken place between the major religions over many years, that theological education will find ways to lead us all to greater maturity and faithfulness in our common struggle for life, i.e., for all the people of God. The Senate Centre for Extension and Pastoral Theological Research comes into being at this historic moment and at this strategic place for such a task, the task of theological education of the people, with the people, and for the people. May God fill you with abundant grace and wisdom for your special calling. To comment about this paper and see what others have said, Click here.
© Copyright, F. Ross Kinsler, July, 2003. All r
Gary Kush, TEENET Website Director Megan Norgate, TEE College of South Africa
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