Abstract
The book is fourth in a series of five (so far) entitled ‘Theology in the Age of Empire’, all edited by Jione Havea. ‘Empire’, the Zimbabwean scholar Masiiwa Ragies Gunda explains, is ‘an institution that is all encompassing and that seeks to control the totality of human life to serve its own interests’ (p. 51). All 14 authors ‘write out of the realities and hopes of subjects who are trapped in situations of vulnerability’, and they do so resiliently -- i.e. ‘in order that vulnerability does not have the final word’ (p. 1). The strength of the collection is the sheer geographical and cultural diversity of the authors, their lived proximity to the suffering of indigenous peoples, and their determination to reclaim traditions of theology to understand and to transform their predicaments.
The editor is from Tonga. A white Australian pastor shows how white Australian masculinity is exposed by the masculinity of Jesus. The Brazilian Nienke Pruiksma demonstrates how local proposals for achieving Bem Viver (the ‘good life’) contrast with the Christianity of the missionaries. The story of Eve and the serpent is itself told via a comparison with a Samoan story at a Fagogo (a storytelling event), allowing the author to conclude that ‘Eve is not the culprit; she is the master [sic] of her fate, the mother of all humanity’ (p. 86). The narrative of the rape of Dinah (Gen. 34) is used to ‘foster solidarity’ (p. 92) with victims of rape in India and among Rohingya Muslim women and girls, and to make a frightening connection between the seizure of land (colonialism) and the seizure of women’s bodies (p. 97). Wanda Deifelt's description of patriarchy links violence against women with ‘destruction of the natural environment, subjugation of peoples and nations, dominion through class and caste systems’ (p. 117). Dwight Hopkins reframes the three temptations of Jesus as the three temptations of empire – ownership of natural resources, autocratic government, and the use of technology (flying angels!) (p. 131).
The academic empire is particularly critiqued. Two educators from KwaZulu-Natal, Sarojini Nadar and Sarasvathie Reddy, expose the commonalities between ‘[d]evelopment as a discourse’ and ‘colonial discourse’ (p. 192), urging instead the development of ‘embodied epistemologies’ and ‘bodies of queer knowledge’ (which do not impose colonial categories on the experiences of colonized peoples). Zambian gay Christians, they say, are not assisted in their struggles by North American gender theory (p. 195). Jenny Te Paa Daniel (New Zealand) confronts, from the inside, the ‘acute level of hypocrisy and professional malaise in much of the leadership of traditional seminary-based theological education’ (p. 201). She asks whether theological educators like her have ‘the requisite attitude of daring to imagine a completely radical new way of being the theology we speak of and teach’ (p. 210).
Readers like this reviewer, enormously assisted by unspoken white, male privilege, will feel positively uncomfortable by these fresh and accusatory outbursts of theology. Citizens of colonizing countries have hardly begun to recognize the harm their countries have done and the extent of reparation and repentance that is yet required.