My entré to the course was my reading of the first article from the Notre Dame Unit Reader. My initial interest was from the perspective of a Christian disenchanted with Sydney Anglican theology and when I read about Liberation Theology, I felt such an identification that I found myself enthusiastically writing in the margin “Oh yes!” This was particularly the case, since for me, a “dialogue partner” (a term used by the lecturer in the first Saturday lecture) for Liberation Theology has to be WASP theology. Protestant theology constantly criticises the Catholic notion of salvation by works. To a Sydney Anglican, salvation is by God’s grace alone – and in this type of salvation, the notion of an elite – God’s chosen or “elect” – is never far from tyrannising the unworthy. This had forced me to leave Anglicanism because of its constant tendency to exclude sinners - the unworthy or those not of the “elect”.
I was working at a Jewish school at the time when my crisis of conscience forced me to sever my relationship with the Anglican church my family attended each week. My Anglican brothers had assigned all Jews to hell through their Bible-based theology focussed on Christ’s statement that salvation could occur only through Him. But they had also assigned Catholics to hell, using the terminology “Christians” and “Catholics” – a binary opposition as they saw it.
My conscience told me that the Jewish fathers and mothers lovingly dropping their kids off at school, deeply concerned with community welfare, were not deserted by God. And it was a relief to read in the first article “A New Way of Encountering God” that “the human conscience” (article 1, p. 7 Unit Reader) is a valid interpreter of the Christian logos or word. I related to the Jewish community’s exclusion from the club of social elect in Sydney. I felt with them the shadow of their end of days – the Nazi Holocaust - and their determination of “Never again!”
However, the first article made me feel uncomfortable in my bourgeois aspirations. I was experiencing a career black spot – unexpectedly unemployed in my fifties – a humbling experience. But not humbling enough to prevent the desire to become again one of the “haves”. The situation in South America reminded me of my all-too-easy ability to tune out facts that I did not want to face. My troubles overshadowed those of the world’s chronically poor. The first lecture made me ashamed. I had lived a career, most of which had been dominated by my working and thriving in the wealthy independent school system teaching the children of the Sydney “haves”.
The first lecture began with story-telling about the work and assassination of Bishop Romero in San Salvador. The point of the story was to identify a political and social system existing today and ruling over very many people. The system is built on violence and structured to keep the poor poor. The lecturer asked us to consider Romero’s ACTIONS in such a system…and to imagine ours in his position. But then the ambit of this exercise in empathy was widened. We were asked to consider our ACTIONS in the here and now of our own lives living in Sydney while inadvertently propping up an international system that allows South America to dehumanise its poor and creates an 80:20 divide where 20% of the world’s population owns a full 80% of the world’s resources.
The course considers a Christian response to such inequity. The response needs to be less about sympathy and more about action as Liberation Theology demands. We need to show solidarity with the poor and oppressed in a tangible way.
Of course, inequality does not only exist in other places far away, and we cannot engage in what Dickens terms “telescopic philanthropy” (Bleak House). The second article in the Unit Reader shows a crisis in First World cities through a lack of hope in the face of massive inequality. However, crisis can be a sign-post to a solution, and as Christians we must root our theology in ACTION directed by reading THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES (p.12 Unit Reader – “Signs of a Crisis: The Politics of Violence”).
The lecture proceeded to look at the threats that beset our world. Vatican II – the Vatican Council that met in the 1960s – tried to come to terms with how theology and the Church could respond to the modern age. The “unpacking” of what was decided at this council is still occurring. Euro-centric imperialism has set up a world system, where men led by God, Gold and Glory created a world divide – be it First World/Third World; North/South; developed/undeveloped – whatever the nomenclature, a world that segments the “haves” from the “have nots”. Homo sapiens has been overtaken by homo economicus in a “user pay” system where most cannot pay.
Poverty is not an accident of physical geography; it is an economic and social construct that we have designed. But we may well become the user who pays as lack of hope for the many brings increasing violence into the world, threatening to destroy its stability; and as consumerism exceeds a sustainable ecological footprint – sustainability is just at the rate 1.9 hectares (the USA ecological footprint is exceeds 9.5 hectares). The threat is there and it is with our generation to treat the threat or to lose our world for future generations (the subject of article 3 in the Unit Reader – “A Tale of Two Farms” – an exploration of the reasons past civilisations have disappeared while some have survived). Our civilisation could face extinction – an Easter Island on a large scale.
After Tuesday 27th March - Lecture 2
At the end of this lecture, I felt compelled to congratulate the lecturer – Michael Elphick - in delivering the best lecture I had ever attended. The lecture’s structure was tight, crammed with material that compelled interest. It sparked in me discovery on discovery – discovery learning managed not by “facilitation” but just by classic instruction from a teacher who was the master of his material and passionately involved in his subject.
My personal fascination was with a consistent and credible interpretation of the first and second testaments through Liberation Theology.
The act of oppression is bad for the oppressed and bad for the oppressor (Paulo Friere – The Pedagogy of the Oppressed). We, the oppressors by virtue of our belonging to the First World, need to formulate a vision of a better world – a “better deal”. The lecturer then sought to explain how this new vision could spring from a Christian Catholic tradition. This begins with an understanding of the Old Testament as centring on the “Moses Movement”.
The story of the exodus deals not with a salvation of the Jews but with a geographical journey of the apiru (habiru is a synonymous term for this group) in the Ancient Near East. The chosen people are not so much a specific and distinct race but more a collection of nomads, slaves and dispossessed. They are a motley crew of “have nots” without citizenships – an underclass. Moses (an individual leader or a collective term for several individual leaders) takes up the cause of the apiru and over several incidences of exodus, manages a transmigration of the dispossessed to a place that is fairer and established on a principle of equity. He/they use violence against the Americans of the time – the Egyptians – to gain a socio-political cause. It is possible to see elements of The Moses Movement in the same way as “First World” countries see modern terrorists – from this perspective, the biblical plagues can be considered as poeticised redactions of acts of terrorism against the Egyptians by the military arm of the apiru. Even the parting of the Red Sea is a metaphor for a luring of the Egyptian chariots into marsh lands.
The point is that God has always championed the poor. Moses leads the poor of the Ancient Near East to a promised land based on principles of equity. For 250 years, the promised land prospers until the prophets come to remind its inhabitants of the original cause. The prophets try to reinstitute the championing of the poor as the promised (and now attained) land’s chief goal.
Jesus inherits Moses’s project. He is the last in a long line of prophets. He is in conflict with the other project originating at Mt Sinai. The Sinai project establishes the law of the promised land but its legalism can banish the understanding of conscience and set up further inequity.
Jesus reinterprets the promised land as the Kingdom of God. It is not located in geography, and once again is to be inhabited by the poor. He is the liberator of the poor everywhere but his “project” is advanced by relationships and not advanced by violence – not even violence from below or violence from within the Jesus movement.
After Saturday 21st April 2007
The theme of the day’s lecture was that Christianity’s dilemmas both now and through history centre on the tension between the Prophetic Project (beginning with Moses and the exodus – a project essentially about justice) and the Purity Project (beginning with the Commandments at Sinai – a project essentially about the necessity of keeping the Law). The dilemma is based on the clash of two linked but separate soteriologies (understandings of the way salvation can be achieved).
Jesus does not reject the Purity Project but rather relegates it to a secondary position. He does not reject it but subverts it.
After viewing a key scene from the film The Mission, a single frame is paused and analysed in terms of the dialectic established by the two rival religious points of view. The Cardinal, representative of Church establishment, battles with his conscience but ultimately wields power in the name of the Purity Project. The priest, whose body language expects defeat in the face of Church hierarchy, argues for social justice. The Purity Project lacks “pastoral nuance” (Michael Elphick’s words). The cardinal prefers a solid Church over solidarity with the oppressed for social justice. In all matters, respect for life must be the guiding principle.
The worry is that the principle of respect for life may be a human construct at the heart of an anthropomorphic universe. The universe is a violent place in terms of its physics and chemistry. Nature often shows scant respect for human life. The recent tsunami cared little for humanity. Making Man in God’s image gives humanity crucial importance. This is a case where we must hope that the Bible’s authority goes unchallenged. Nevertheless, if respect for life is a mistaken assumption, it is a necessary mistake and a mistake that we should cling to in the face of all opposition.
The lecturer, Michael Elphick, demonstrated the limitations of both the Purity and Prophetic projects when taken to extreme. The Purity project is unwilling to leave questions open. It is absolutist and intolerant in its ambition to eradicate ambiguity. The Prophetic project relegates truth to diffuse relativism, where God can become an optional extra for its community of believers. Tolerance must have a boundary. Belief must balance the claims of the law and social equity.
Populist views of the Resurrection and the Passion stories base themselves on atonement theology. Jesus as the Lamb is equated with a Temple sacrifice – the standard ritual in the Ancient Near East for the rectification of sin. In the thirteenth century, St Anselm strengthens the notion of Jesus as ransom for man’s sin. In medieval times, a wrong was righted among nobility by the spilling of blood. A serf had no power to right a wrong except through his feudal lord. The serf’s feudal lord could take up the serf’s cause and risk the spilling of his own blood through battle. Hence, in medieval times, Jesus is seen as a feudal lord championing his people’s cause and taking upon himself total responsibility for their sins. He is a noble lord who saves his serfdom with his own blood. Atonement theology is a construct and sees a vengeful God as a type of heavenly Shylock insisting on his pound of flesh and the sanctity of his contract.
St Anselm
But God is a loving God who offers many mansions in his heavenly kingdom. Atonement theology creates a petty God who demands the fulfilment of a commercial contract through a type of pagan sacrifice. The Prodigal Son story shows a welcoming God, energetic in his forgiveness of those who do not deserve forgiveness. God is “abba” – not so much “father” but a “daddy” with all the childhood associations of kindness that cling to this childish term of affection.
God does not will Jesus’ death. Rather, when God takes on human form, he falls victim to all the realities of cause and effect, happenstance, maliciousness and injustice that ravages all humanity. After Jesus’s “raid on the Temple” where he attacks the religious leaders’ authority and Church practice, he crosses a line of cause and effect that will result in his execution. The Cross is the consequence of incarnation – not of God’s predetermination. Jesus challenges the Law and thus brings upon himself the wrath of the Purity project in joint cause with the Roman Imperial project.
In Jesus’s Gethsemane moment, Jesus is a man confronted with fear. However, his fear is mastered by his commitment to the cause of social justice. If Jesus runs from arrest, he betrays his commitment to his project to remake the world of man in a way it has not yet been seen – as a place where fairness prevails and poverty is anathema. Jesus remains true to his project and the Resurrection is God’s act of faithfulness to Jesus’s act of faithfulness. The Kingdom project does not end with Jesus’s death – one understanding of the idea of resurrection – an eternality claimed for the principle of social equity and respect for life.
Jesus at Gethsemane
Ringing loud and clear over this whole day of lectures is the lecturer’s account of the evangelical American Christian who stated on American television in the wake of the Virginia college shooting, “The real tragedy is not the thirty-three dead but the fact that most of these are in Hell because they had not come to Jesus.” This is what blasphemy means – when the name of God is used to lend authority to an unjust utterance or cause. We must make sure that our theology does not bully and unjustly condemn through blind adherence to selective truth.
Saturday 12th May
Task 2: Curriculum Presentation – issue in social justice
Stephen J. Stoneham
Topic: Inter-marriage and the mixing of rites of passage
Last week I attended an Interfaith Dialogue at Notre Dame where among the speakers was the head of the Christian Palestinian Church. He spoke of a school where Jewish, Christian and Muslim children attended. He said that conquering their initial distrust, the students quickly realised that they were all “just kids”. After this realisation of their common human bond, it was impossible to stop them from exchanging contact details and calling each other. He said that through their contact at school, the children were teaching tolerance to their parents – and that this was the hope for the future: that the younger generation could undo past prejudices – a key to a solution in the Middle East.
The photograph above is my young daughter and her friend, and it represents the hope just expressed…not in Palestine but right here in an Australian backyard - a young generation unaware of any racial barrier shutting them out from one another. It is a “cute” photograph – and I suspect the hope that young friendships can cut across racial and religious barriers in the world might just be a little too “cute” to be real.
As an English teacher, I deal with a majority of texts centred on love stories and the problems that surround love.
Love is a dangerous thing for any society because it can leap over barriers. It is stronger than childhood friendships. In fact, it can eradicate childhood friendships. It is not “cute”. It is unpredictable and ungovernable because by its very hormonal urgency it counteracts prudence, commonsense and convention.
Conventions are unwritten rules that can be as strong as written laws (sometimes stronger), and members of a society flout their society’s conventions at their own peril. Convention works in the same way as the Sinai Project – the Purity Project spoken about in this course. It ensures that a society steers a single direction when its members could so readily go their own ways. A society without an agreed direction rapidly disintegrates.
When Elizabeth marries Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, their love has jumped conventional social boundaries. It is only Darcy’s wealth that protects them from society’s ire.
Gatsby will never marry Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Her voice is “made of money”. He is, after all, an upstart. No law prevents the marriage but social convention will be a more formidable barrier than any law.
In Tim Winton’s Lockie Leonard or Patrick White’s short story “Down at the Dump”, the heroes and heroines try to stray across the barrier that separates a good brick area from a suspect fibro area. Jumping the barrier will cause themselves and their families huge problems.
But when love results in an inter-marriage, that is when barriers have to fall with a force as powerful as the smashing of the Berlin Wall.
It is a Hutu marrying aTutsi that breaks a seemingly impenetrable barrier and educates two families. It is a Catholic marrying a Protestant; a Chinese marrying a Caucasian; a Jew marrying a Muslim that is the true revolution because it happens at an individual level, and the revolution creeps in a wave of cumulative individual acts of leaping boundaries.
Watching children of different races or religion playing together is one thing – but a family mixing their key rite of passage – marriage - a rite of passage leading into child bearing and replacement of homo sapiens in their own culture’s image – that is truly remarkable.
I initially wanted to do this talk on Chatswood because I thought that Chatswood was “working” as a multi-cultural society in Sydney - not because it had a lot of Asians, but because of the harmony I noticed among races and the number of inter-racial couples. I tried to photograph some such couples in the street for this presentation but realised I was being regarded with great suspicion and perhaps my activity was legally questionable.
Multi-culturalism seems a likely key to the recognition of human dignity across all races and religions. Multi-culturalism is not communities living as ghettos. Multi-culturism does not seem a very useful tool to combat prejudice if it only creates pockets of Vietnamese at Cabramatta who consolidate their ways in a foreign country and keep their conventions and prejudices in tact.
But love can jump boundaries and risk educating families in differences at an individual and first hand experiential level. The love of mixed marriages seems the key to a better world.
The Saturday 12th May lecture Concepts
The 80:20 divide operating in the world where 20% of the world’s population monopolises 80% of the world’s resources is the context for acts of terrorism – September 11, the London bombings, the Bali bombings. September 11 is an iconic episode signalling a discourse between the have-nots and the haves. If the have-nots have been the victims of imperialist-colonial violence, then their violence is a response shouting, “Enough!”
Western imperialism and its acts of violence taught Third World terrorists the language of violence. Like modern day Shylocks they shout, "the villainy you teach us, we will execute”. Mahmood Mamdani’s book Good Mulism, Bad Muslim calls violence “the mid-wife of history”. It looks at the West’s singular view of the Jewish holocaust and notes that it is not a singularity. Holocausts (genocides) have been perpetrated in Europe’s colonies as a modus operandi to suppress colonial insurgence – in Australia with great thoroughness. Admittedly, Hitler’s system was well-organised and documented but in a sense, he was bringing the final solutions of the colonial powers to act on his own Europe – in effect, creating a twentieth century colony of Europe after the Age of Imperialism.
The US military budget before the Iraqi War was $400 billion – greater than the military budgets of the rest of the world. The budget could be seen to defend the 80:20 great divide for the privileged 20% and police a status quo against increasing anger from the 80%.
“I Terror” is the face of the Western consumer in a shopping frenzy during a New Year sale. It is our own faces. By converting our wants into needs we have created a voracious appetite for the 80% of the globe’s resources, and like an addict, we experience panic at the thought that our drug – consumption – could be denied us. We will go to any lengths to consolidate our supply chain, and the size of our military budget is confirms this.
Liberation Theology liberates (saves) us from our dependence on consumption and liberates (saves) the have-nots from our theft of their resources. It saves us from sullen materialism and saves them from poverty. Liberation Theology is salvation from all those things that diminish the dignity of the human spirit.
An Anti-thought
The internal logic of the course and all I have written is strong and persuasive. But occasionally Realpolitik reminds us that in politics heads-of-state do not sit in comfortable armchairs remote from the maze of immediate crisis. They do not have an over-view of history – its causes, effects and aftermaths. They are acting on the information at their disposal making the best decisions they can for the people they represent. It is not easy to be wise. America’s military build up began before D-Day to resist Hitler and then continued through the Cold War to resist Stalin. A military strategy funded by economic titans was advisable and without choice because of the world’s duty to oppose totalitarian regimes inflicting genocide on the largest scale imaginable. Yes – the end result has been an America that is the world’s policeman and an America that is hated with the intensity of those who curse the universal policeman as “pigs”. But what was the choice in 1940 and beyond – a giving in to Stalin? The crossroads of history are existential moments and to live in good faith we need to accept the repercussions of choices that may have been the best choices at the time. One choice leads to another, and it is not so much that the original choice was wrong, it is just that we need to make the right choice now.
After Tuesday 21st May- the final lecture
The lecture dissected the American Dream. There has been much written on this - the most notable for me being R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam (Chicago Press, 1959). America saw itself as descended from those who had turned their back on a "Fallen" Europe, and recognised themselves as new Adams taking possession of a new Eden in America. They were to bring Man another chance in the eyes of God. They had bestowed on them a "manifest destiny".
Michael Elphick sought to de-construct the American Adam and the American Dream in the light of Liberation Theology.
A clip from the relatively recent television show "Young Americans" was dissected. The American Dream was seen as media propaganda...in Bill Byron's (the travel writer's) words - a "middle class elysium". The clip fixed on the iconic elements of America's self-perception: the young and the beautiful and the successful. No minority groups marred the dream. Even women were to be seen as cheerleader adjuncts to muscular youths who played the game of life. Sport was life as it should be - life with rules and they were "exceptional" (the word used by the sports coach). They were WINNERS.
The 80:20 divide is essentially a divided between losers and winners. It is important to be a winner.
The American religion of materialism has a connection with its Puritan forefathers and their Calvanism. The path from the puritanical to the material and the adulation of wealth and power goes like this:
Those who will be saved at the last are foreknown by God. God knows who they are but we do not. If God has placed saints amongst us who will be saved while most will be damned, God will be wise in his use of the saints. He will place them in positions of influence where they can bring about good. In the world of Man, influence is achieved by wealth and power. Thus, those who have wealth and power are most in a position to influence humanity for good. These men of wealth and power are the Elect. Wealth and power is a signpost pointing out the saints on Earth.
This is a neat logic...and sustains the rightness of the 20: 80 divide. The haves are saints with the power and resources to do good. How the have nots do hate them! The have nots are evil and will be damned. The logic is consistent.
"Leave It To Beaver" - the classic American family television show - presents a father in a suit going off to do business. He is America on the move. The rest of the family represent the cultivated naivity of a nation self-absorbed in its own mythologising. Beaver is the perennial small-town boy on the bike, representing self-dependence and homespun energy. He is honest and knows the world is right when at its core is a very real sense of fun.
But from another viewpoint, Beaver is a forerunner of "I-Terrorist".
The final thought of the course was a plea for an exchange of nationalism for internationalism. This is in the spirit of Christianity's "catholic" as in "universal" application.
The corporation of the world's rich and powerful have to stop hoarding and begin sharing. We, the 20 percent, have to let the 80 percent in.
Reference List
The University of Notre Dame (Broadway Campus) Unit Reader for course JS423 – Education, Service and Community Engagement (2007) printed by Kopy King, Market Street, Broadway at the directions of Michael Elphick – course lecturer.
The Mission,1986 film, written by Robert Bolt and directed by Roland Joffé.
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