Caribbean Theology - Day 3
A view of houses in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (Courtesy of Ivan Ariel Canizal)
Editor's Note: The following article is a reproduction of one of the keynote speeches delivered during the Summer Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It has been lightly edited for ease of reading.
The Caribbean is much more than sun, sand, beaches, and palm trees. It is a mosaic of languages, races, ideologies, cultural heritages, economic organizations, and religious backgrounds. It is a heterogeneous place with a pluralistic society predominantly shaped by its African heritage. The territories that form the Caribbean emerged from different and competing colonial powers: Spain, France, Holland, England, and Denmark. Its population represents a group of forced migrants that had to adopt new identities. Like a phoenix Caribbean people emerge, in the middle of a society that speaks English, French, Dutch, Papiamento or French Creole languages, to reflect critically on their life through the lens of their faith. This variety is evident also in its religious plurality: Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Bahá’s, and Rastafarians (considered a Caribbean theology of liberation) live with Christian believers known as Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Moravians, Baptists, Evangelicals, or Pentecostals.
Historical Overview
The Caribbean was marked by the violent hunger for wealth, power, and dominion of the 15th-century European colonial enterprise. Colonialization led to the disappearance of the indigenous peoples and the exploitation of African slaves kidnapped from their homeland. The history of the Caribbean is one of colonialism, racism, militarism, exploitation, genocide, imperialism, deculturization, and neocolonialism. Economically, the region has experienced persistent, structured and endemic poverty.
More relevant than anything else is the fact that the Church, being part of this process of dehumanization, sanctioned this enterprise. The invasion of the Caribbean arrived together with the theological argument that God had given these territories to European powers and every single indigenous habitant had to be converted to Christianity. In hand with the extermination of indigenous people and the dehumanization of African slaves came the missionary movement, the making of Christians, and the planting of churches. The conquered population was denigrated in the name of God.
Features of a Caribbean Theology
Some Caribbean theologians identify this current as the “theology of imposition,” which means that the Caribbean understanding of faith, liturgy, creeds, and beliefs do not represent their real and everyday life, their hopes and struggles. In the same vein, William Watty identifies the major theological current in the Caribbean as the theology of imposition followed by a theology of imitation. The Caribbean inherited a notion of a European God and western theology, liturgy, forms of ministry, architecture, ethos, and church government. The theologian Robert Moore conceives the task of a Caribbean theology to be a “theology of exploration” in order to reflect critically about the Caribbean reality in the light of Christian faith.
The Caribbean people have suffered the pervasive consequences of colonialist and neocolonialist enterprises. In addition, they have struggled with problems of dependence, racism, and exploitation. It is in this context of colonialism that we can talk about the features of a Caribbean theology of emancipation.
It is a contextual theology. Likeother Christians around the world, Caribbean people have been seeking new ways of articulating their faith: a response made in the Caribbean context, by Caribbean people, and for Caribbean people. Idris Hamid and Kortright Davis call it a decolonizing theology. It is a theology that seeks to allow the oppressed and marginalized to express how they experience God both today and over the years. It looks for the transformation of the unjust structures of society. It is multidisciplinary in the sense that it uses disciplines such as social sciences and history to interpret reality.
Sources
The sources of this contextual theology are real-life stories, testimonies as well as autobiographies. During the colonial epoch, the Bible was used in the Caribbean to support the status quo. It was an ideological instrument to sanction the cultural values of the colonial powers. A Caribbean emancipatory theology affirms the Bible as a source for reflection and praxis for liberation. In the Caribbean the Bible is re-read with a hope for the emergence of a new and more just world order. Renewed emphasis on the place of Bible study has been observed, along with new ways of rereading the Scripture, mainly within the ambit of narrative exegesis. This “calypso” exegesis, suggested by George Mulrain, has as its subjects: the poor, power, the kingdom, glory, peace, and development. Concomitantly with the Bible, the history of the people of the Caribbean, the writings of Caribbean sociologists and economists, as well as the history of the Church in the region are sources for this emancipatory theology.
Method
The foundations of this contextual theology are also genuine Caribbean sociocultural and historical ones. Its methodology departs from the Caribbean reality. As a liberation theology, it reflects on praxis and its concerns are concrete realities. This includes an intensive participation in the life of people, specifically their sufferings. This method requires a radical assessment of the needs of the Caribbean constituency: interpreting the meaning of the Gospel in the Caribbean context. Thus the inclusion of Caribbean folk wisdom, songs, myth, dance, movements, domestic customs, music, and cultural history is a must.
Davis identifies at least six major manifestations of Caribbean crisis experiences that inform Caribbean Theology: persistent poverty, migration, cultural alienation, dependence, fragmentation, and drug trafficking and narcotics abuse.
The historical reality of these experiences provokes a theological reflection that aims to give answers to the questions raised by the present challenges. Most Caribbean theologians agree that the major concerns are decolonization, integration, education, and development.
Tasks and Challenges
Adolfo Hams asserts that the theological task in the Caribbean demands the recognition that the independence of some Caribbean nations and the abolition of slavery did not mean total decolonization. The Caribbean has not achieved a total decolonization in other dimensions of their life, namely personally, collectively, politically, or psychologically. This is the first step in the affirmation of the full humanity of the Caribbean people, who have been created in God’s image.
The challenge of identity works dialectically in each Caribbean country independently and in the unique region of communities as a whole. There is a common vision of a united Caribbean and the emergence of a Caribbean identity in all areas of life. To gain a better quality of life for all Caribbean people is one of the tasks of development in the zone. In the words of Kathy McAfee, development must be ecologically, psychologically, economically, and socially sustainable. She recognizes that this development must rescue Caribbean culture and identity and empower the region’s poor majority, hence building the basis for a more genuine democracy.
The aim of a Caribbean theology is to help Caribbean people understand their situation in order to change it through a process of reflection and action. To reach this goal, academia and the Church must intentionally point out the history of the Caribbean and its culture through the lens of sociology, politics, and economics to give relevance to popular readings of the Bible as well to popular religiosity, native churches, contextual theology and inculturation.
Some Theological Themes
In Caribbean theology, the word “emancipation” is used for liberation, evoking the history of slavery lived by the region. In this context “sin” is defined as racism, classism, self-contempt, lack of responsibility, exploitation, and sexism. To include the experience of women in the theological agenda is part of the creative approach that would contribute to the transformation of persons and structures. Women are struggling to envision the values of integrity, inclusion, collaboration, and mutuality that promote the just interdependence of women and men andseek a holistic liberation which is at the core of the Gospel’s demands.
Caribbean theology asserts that the north Atlantic world does not have a monopoly on Christianity. God must not remain a stranger in the Caribbean. God lives in the midst of the Caribbean reality and must be interpreted in Caribbean categories. God is the Supreme Being who is free and wants everyone to be free as well. Every human being was created in God’s image and called to live in a world of justice and freedom.
In terms of a Caribbean Christology, Caribbean theologians insist on a recontextualization of the person of Christ. Christ must reflect the Caribbean reality. A rupture with the traditional Christology, which only sees the Caribbean as a land of mission, is necessary. The people of the Caribbean region recognize the praxis of Jesus Christ as one of justice in the social, politic, and economic arena. The Caribbean is the geographic space where the Gospel can be lived. Here, Jesus Christ is the Son called from Egypt, Africa, as well as the great ancestor.
Affirming their African heritage, featured by a spiritual worldview, people of the region understand the Holy Spirit as the One who moves over their chaos, sufferings, and struggles, to recreate, to nourish, and to empower them in the making of a more just order.
As Kortright Davis affirms, God’s emancipatory work in the Caribbean is “still comin’.” The beauty of the Caribbean will be fully appreciated by the whole world when the fruits of justice become a concrete reality of peace.
