I was honoured to participate
in this year’s CWM’s (Council for World Mission) DARE Global Forum held in
Taiwan last June 19-21. I didn't quite understand the raison d'etre
of CWM-DARE before the event but after having participated in the
conference, I've begun to grasp its rationale and crucial importance. I'm
really thankful for having been given this wonderful opportunity to participate
in this forum and especially to learn from the insightful reflections of so
many of my colleagues who attended the event.
Here is the report published at the CWM website.This article describes succinctly what happened at the said
meeting:
Dare to engage radically and
envision creatively a just world
Discernment and radical
engagement are at the heart of the mission that makes CWM what it is. Attentive
to the signs of the time and in response to imperial powers and powerholders
that exploit, divide, despoil and threaten the world, CWM’s DARE program is a
voice of counter-imperial consciousness.
This year’s DARE Global Forum
was held from 20-21 June in Taiwan, a location we chose in solidarity with the
Taiwanese people and especially with our member church Presbyterian Church in
Taiwan (PCT) for their continuous struggle for democracy. During the opening
service at Lo-Tong Presbyterian Church, CWM General Secretary delivered the
keynote address and launched “Scripture and Resistance” – the second
book in the “Theology in the Age of Empire” series.
The DARE Forum was a platform
where theological and biblical scholars, activists and interested peoples
engaged creatively to critique mainline scholarships, confidently rooted their
views upon on the ground struggles and concerns and shared their radical
engagements with global readership.
At the gathering, each
presenter presented an academic paper, attended and engaged with the
presentations by other participants of their stream, and submitted the revised
paper for publication. There were six streams – earth, class, race, gender,
occupation, and artificial intelligence (AI) – this year, and presenters were
encouraged to discern and engage radically, creatively and justly.
Here are my most salient takeaways from the event:
Taiwan’s Plight as the Context for our Reflections
I was really
struck at the plight and marginalized international status of Taiwan. Taiwanese
pastor-scholar Rev. Omi Wilang’s talk on his indigenous culture was
particularly significant. There he emphasized the status of Taiwan as an
international orphan which refers to its state of international isolation because
of mainland China's continuing efforts to literally coerce the international
community to recognize the "one China policy" by which only mainland
China is legitimately recognized as the “real” China and Taiwan as an illegitimate
entity.
I ruefully
reflected though that, recalling what I learned in younger days, when the Nationalists
led by Chiang Kai-Shek fled the mainland and established their base in Taiwan
in 1949, it was Taiwan that was trying to convince the world that it was the
legitimate China and not the Communist-led government that had taken over the
mainland. Fast-forward 70 or so years later when China has become the gigantic
and impossible-to-ignore military and economic powerhouse that it is today, the
tables have been completely turned and Taiwan is at the mercy of the Chinese
empire.
Resisting Empire
I ended the
conference thoroughly struck at and convinced once again that <reflecting
critically-doing scholarship-theologizing or even just engaging in the very
basic activity of thinking about life> in the context of empire (and
postcolonial and decolonial critique) is a serious and most urgent task. Why? For
the simple reason that imperial ways (known by many alternative names such as the
basic human "lust for power and/or domination") have tried and
largely succeeded to rule humanity itself and our world from the very beginning
of history in countless forms. Imperialism is practically built into many
of the structures in which we find ourselves. This time in Taiwan, however, I
was made more acutely aware of empire's destructive effects because they
threaten now more than ever the very existence of our earth-home through an
impending ecological disaster.
My Own Modest Part in the Forum
There were several
streams to reflect critically on the themes of empire, resistance and critical
engagement at the conference: Land, Race, Gender, Occupation, and Artificial
Intelligence. For my very modest part, I presented the significance of Paul's
religious experience for the concept of artificial intelligence. I basically suggested
that to retrieve the origins of how we imagine Artificial Intelligence as a “super
intelligence” (as expressed particularly in some science fiction movies), it may be worth looking more closely at what happened to Paul as
a consequence of his religious experience and how he envisioned everyone and
everything as “One in Christ” (Gal. 3:27-28). I didn’t have the time and space to
reflect more on the implications of this for the theme of empire and power but
I intend to touch on that aspect as well in my final paper. My proposal was
originally prepared for the 'Race' stream but it seemed to have been well
received by my AI group.
Why Postcolonial Thought? (Revisited)
At last year's SBL
meeting in Denver, CO, I attended a session of the Theological Interpretation
of Scripture unit in which the topic was, broadly speaking, postcolonial
efforts to interpret the Bible theologically. During the Q&A session,
someone asked this fundamental question: "What is it even necessary
to do this postcolonial theological interpretation of scripture?"
That question
still keeps ringing in my ears after all these months and it was brought to the
fore and answered in many ways in Taiwan. It is just incredible that there is
still a substantial number (even of scholars, particularly, Roman Catholic
theologian-colleagues of mine) who have not thought about or are not yet
convinced why a postcolonial critique of theology and religious studies is even
necessary.
To
this question, I can only offer once again what I already stated in my 2012
book How Immigrant Christians … Interpret Their Religion (56).
What is the value of a postcolonial framework? Edward Said has, in my
opinion, expressed most eloquently the need for a critical academic sense
vis-à-vis the problem of imperialism when he states, “we are at a point in our
work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our
studies.”(Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p. 6). He
further remarks that, “whether or not to look at the connections between
cultural texts and imperialism is therefore to take a position in fact taken
– either to study the connections in order to criticize it and think of
alternatives for it, or not to study it in order to let it stand, unexamined
and, presumably, unchanged” (ibid., 68).
The implications of Said’s remarks are staggering. If we ignore imperial
ideology in our critical studies, we are in reality actively contributing to
its continuing unjust oppression of people. In short, we cannot remain neutral
on such a key issue. There is a major ethical issue at stake here. Ignoring
imperialist elements in our fields of study places a large interrogative
against the integrity of all our endeavors. If we further reflect on the fact
that many of us who are engaged in the Christian theological field have a
confessional interest in Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed as the Christ and that
his most pressing concern seems to have been the ushering in of the reign of
God’s justice in the world to the detriment of this world’s unjust empires, the
issue of integrity becomes all the more urgent.
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