CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES
Ranly, Ernest W.
AII i i CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES ERNEST W. RANLY The movement is beginning to take some definite form There is a ripple upon the waters of systematic theology which may be only the...
...The former contains beautiful dogmatic formulas about the missionary character of the Church, but its practical suggestions are quite traditional, almost institutional...
...In Japan, perhaps, the ceremonial tea service could well serve as the setting for the Eucharist...
...One asks of a culture why, not in view of some functional explanation, but merely to understand the interpretation that the bearers of the culture themselves understand as the meaning of the event...
...Commonweal: 719...
...E.g., a wink as a gesture has a meaning very different from the neural-muscular-biological description of what makes an eye twitch...
...The model of the central nervous system again is instructive...
...A human becomes human only through the humanizing medium of his/her own culture...
...I FATHER ERNEST W. RANLY, formerly a professor of philosophy at St...
...Geertz states substantially the social theory of Berger...
...More than ever today, aspects of modernization--industrialization, technology, a unified world marketwhas touched and is changing all but the most isolated cultural groups...
...It proposes to take the whole unified complex cultural understanding of the new civiIization seriously and work out quite literally a "new" Christian theology from within this cultural setting...
...So also various funeral practices (such as burying food with the deceased) may have very different meanings in different cultural contexts...
...Today the movement of constructing local theologies is beginning to take some definite form, with a sense of its own inner discipline and direction...
...Berger's extreme example is that of cannibalism...
...Perhaps the very recent semiotic analysis of culture can best supply the principle of identity and identification for such a study of culture...
...The attempt to limit one culture for study is parallel to the metaphysical study of being which lies somehow between the unchangeable and permanent Being of Parmenides and the world of flux and change of Heraclitus...
...To build up a genuine local living Christian community one must do more than construct theoretically a local theology...
...It is like catching Whiteheadian Being in process, which is, nonetheless, no less authentically and ontologically being...
...To paraphrase Geertz, we should not look for Christ "behind," "under," or "beyond" his culture, but Christ is to be discovered "in" his culture...
...only then will the sense of grace, redemption and the need of a Savior make sense to the people in that culture...
...Christ is not one avatar among innumerable many as in the Hindu pantheon...
...values in the indigenous religions...
...This would be an example of how Christ must be discovered and built up among an indigenous cultural group...
...First is the task of discovery...
...We have seen that both Berger and Geertz define this cultural world of meaning as absolutely primary...
...Gregory Baum (following what he calls "the Blondelian shift") has proposed in Man Becoming that individually we have all experienced these verities as realities in our personal life...
...The very study of an isolated group of aborigines no longer leaves the group isolated...
...This is a very difficult position for the Western mind, which, from the Greeks onward through the Enlightenment and recent science, has always thought it knew Man--natural, universal, and constant...
...the act of Christian Faith and practice is to make all this explicit and formal...
...all other people are non-humans, just as the Greeks referred to all non-Greeks as barbarians...
...It has forever been touched by people and cultures outside of it...
...In contrast to the scholastic principle of finality, the inner meaning of a culture is first in reality and last in intention...
...The anthropological theory of functionalism searches for the pragmatic, functional reason behind cultural traditions and practices...
...Does a culture honor warriors, saints, technicians, hunters, poets, the rich as their major heroes...
...Among the Aymara in southern Peru there is a long tradition of community reconciliation...
...Structuralism as proposed by Claude I_~viStrauss and his followers, for all its fascination for some, is so general and universal in its claims that it does not seem to lend itself well to the constructing of local theologies...
...Using the physical example of the central nervous system as its model, the semiotic approach to culture states that every culture has a deeply embedded, highly complex, but tightly unified sense of meaning (an elaborate communication Commonweal: 717 system) within which the people of that culture live...
...That is to say that neither the subjects within the culture nor those who study the culture can easily formulate or articulate this inner meaning...
...The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to NonChristian Religions has three very short paragraphs on "other religions," outside of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam...
...The body of Christian truth has always been accepted as "catholic," that is to say that Christianity itself transcends any and all cultures...
...It will do its ethnographical studies carefully, but always asking to know not only what happens on the surface of a society, but also always asking to know what is its inner, deeper meaning...
...He is to look for and approve what is good and true in that culture...
...It states: The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions...
...Is it primarily an external ritual uncleanness...
...Many missionaries, however well trained in a native language, found it difficult to comprehend the deeper thought and value patterns in a culture and a religiosity very different from their own...
...It is a little too early to test the waters...
...So also in a culture...
...A good place to start, perhaps, is with some sociological-anthropological principles enunciated by Peter Berger in his intriguing (if somewhat controversial) book, Pyramids o/ Sacrifice (Anchor, 1976...
...At best, it is in the tradition of cultural anthropology, recently buttressed by the philosophical disciplines of linguistic analysis (semiotics) and phenomenology...
...The constructing of local theologies is not a tried and tested experiment yet...
...The formation of Catholic Action ceils and the early groups of Comurddades Cristianas de Base tended to be elitist...
...Berger's principle of cognitive respect...
...And in this spirit, theologians and cultural anthropologists have been encouraged in the task of creating local theologies...
...Geertz accepts Gilbert Ryle's analysis of a "thick description" of a cultural event...
...And the same wink may have many different meanings in different contexts...
...Human groups live together in shared worlds in which people are conscious of reality in terms of specific cognitive structures that give cohesion and meaning to the ongoing flux of their experiences...
...behind," "under," or "beyond" his customs, but that man, uncapitalized, is to be looked for "in" his customs "in" his culture...
...There was a cultural gap which was primarily religious...
...Although Greek, Russian, and Western European Christianity has dominated the history of the Christian Era, and, at times, each tradition has failed miserably in its attitude of being "catholic," yet, in principle, the Christian Church, with its good news of salvation in Jesus, has always heeded the mission of Jesus to go preach to all nations...
...Even if the isolated group totally rejects all future contacts, in its very rejection, it is already changed...
...It is something very different from traditional courses in missiology...
...The documents of Vatican II on "Missions" and on "Non-Christians" really do not touch upon the present enterprise of constructing local theologies...
...Surely many societies do not find evil in polygamy, concubinage and in many other practices Western Christendom has traditionally classified as immoral...
...When Liberation Theology, with strong documentation from Medellin, began to insist that the Church be on the side of the poor, of the oppressed, of the marginated, and the powerless peoples of the world, these groups of elitist Christians discovered that they, too, for all their social and economic concerns for the poor, could not really identify with the masses...
...Many cultures (e.g., the eskimo) use the word man (human) to refer only to the members of their own culture-race...
...Therefore, all known cultures are complex mixtures of a vast number of factors, often beyond the recall of people in that culture and of scholars studying the culture...
...Berger insists: "Moral judgments apart, every human world must be deemed, in principle, as being equal to every other human world in its access to reality...
...All cultures meet and clash and react within the larger territorial space of the earth's surface and in yet a larger human cultural world...
...One can only look for the meanings concretely embodied in the various individual customs, traditions, myths, rites, bits of language, and, very slowly--experientially, if not empirically--follow the entangled lines of this complex, nervous system of messages and try to decipher the deeper meanings at the very center...
...Often the indigenous religion and culture were considered diabolical and strong efforts were made to destroy them...
...It is here that we see that historically, existentially, there is no pure abstract Christianity...
...Unfortunately, the English language does not easily distinguish between Christianity, as the pure body of doctrine, and Christendom, the actual historical realization of these truths...
...This is a far cry from condemning non-Christian religions as diabolical and in need of total uprooting and destruction...
...Yet perhaps one can speak of a "spirit" of Vatican II that has prepared Catholic leaders in Africa, in the Orient, and in the South Pacific to accept more openly the inherent religious (Christian...
...The constructing of a local Christian theology from within the actu.al living meaningful word of an indigenous culture will have many positive, constructive elements to work with if the first two steps (discovery and approval) have been done well...
...Thus, a Christian missionary is to enter into the new culture, read, listen and study its "messages"mits in~er meaningmand discover within the culture how God, sin, grace, Christ, redemption and kingdom are already present (in germ) within that culture...
...The semiotics of culture, without rejecting any of these approaches, seeks to discover an inner web of meaning which unites the diverse, multiple set of rites, customs, myths and beliefs...
...The fear of a shallow syncretism in which pagan beliefs survive in disguised forms forced most missionaries into keeping all doctrinal formulas and all rites and ceremonies either in Latin itself or in such frozen statements that at least the missionaries themselves felt comfortably orthodox...
...Armed with the semiotics of culture, a Christian missiology will approach a new culture respectfully and cautiously...
...Along with the discovery of some sense of God, sin, grace, Christ, redemption and kingdom in a particular culture, there is the second task of support and encouragement...
...Nor can all moral judgments be set aside in some kind of crass relativism...
...This is something much bigger than and different from Liberation Theology, with its economic and political roots in Latin America...
...As a concrete model or schema for constructing a local theology perhaps six basic symbols of the Christian creed can be used as a vehicle or skeleton: God, sin, grace, Christ, redemption and kingdom...
...Its rationale is being developed...
...It seems valuable to describe this movement, to understand its rationale and to assess its objectives...
...There is an inner interlocking unified center of meaning, giving balance and stability to all the myths, rites, and customs...
...This is not to deny the tremendous differences between the "world" of a political economist, an oriental guru, an atomic physicist, a Peruvian peasant-pastor in the highlands of the Andes, and a Thomas Aquinas reworking Christian theology into Aristotelian categories...
...The movement deserves a hearing, careful support, and, above all, sharp criticism...
...Christian missionaries have always found it necessary not only to learn the local language and customs of a people, but also to make some kind of cultural translation of the Christian Gospel into a local Catechism...
...What Baum proposes for 11 November 1977:718 the individual (in a Western Christian setting) is suggested here for each and every separate cultural group...
...Joseph's College in lndicma, is presently doing pastoral work in the Central Andes of Peru...
...It is ironical that the more the human family becomes united by a common worldwide technology and economy into a single Global Village, the more we hear about the need to respect and promote a diversity and plurality of cultures, ethnic values and local communities...
...To avoid shallow accommodation, public rites and liturgies may take on rather radical different forms...
...An example of a local theology fairly well known in the United States--with its supporters and opponents--is Black Theology...
...The Christian missionary, as we have seen from the documents of Vatican II, does not come on primarily as an exorcist driving out the Devil in a pagan culture...
...Berger speaks of a "postulate of the equality of all empirically available worlds of consciousness...
...She looks with sincere respect upon those ways of conduct and of life, those rules and teachings w h i c h . . , often reflect a ray of That Truth which enlightens all men . . . . The Church, therefore, has this exhortation for her sons: prudently and lovingly, through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions and in witness of Christian faith and life, acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual and moral 11 November 1977:716 good found among these men, as well as the values in their society and culture...
...The Word became incarnate thoroughly in Christ and thoroughly in the Semitic-Hebraic culture of the time...
...To construct a local theology is so much more than translating the Christian message in a new language or accommodating Christianity to a new culture, say by presenting the Holy Family in an Oriental dress and in an Oriental setting...
...As recently as the 1960s the presupposition of the Grand Misi6n in many parts of South America was that the people are pagan and that evangelization and Christianization must begin anew...
...Eventually, humanly and pragmatically, one catches a particular culture at a particular moment and attempts to define and describe it in its very center as far as that is possible...
...AII i i CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES ERNEST W. RANLY The movement is beginning to take some definite form There is a ripple upon the waters of systematic theology which may be only the passing of a light breeze, but which may well be a sign of some deep, strong currents, a genuine movement of the Spirit...
...they professed a "pure" Biblical Christianity and rather looked down upon the popular religiosity of the masses as being below them and in need of reform...
...The task is fourfold...
...Is it unjust economic and social structures (as Liberation Theology is wont to say...
...That is to say, the mere introduction of African drums and dance in the Roman liturgy may be nothing more than a form of accommodation...
...Each rite has its own meaning which relates more or less directly to the central meaning of the culture as a whole...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 JOHN FANDEL POWDERED SKY on the path, robin's crushed eggshell, flecks diminutive as forgetme-nots a little further back...
...The elitist groups could not identify with, nor even appreciate the popular religiosity of the common people...
...slowly, a literature is being organized...
...As a matter of fact, the native people often disguised their original beliefs and the new Christianity became little more than a veneer...
...That is to say, how do these people perceive evil (along the lines of Paul Ricoeur's study The Symbolism ol Evil...
...As Victor Frankl describes logotherapy as a personal, psychological search for meaning in one's life, the semiotics of culture seeks for a cultural, global sense of meaning in every particular civilization...
...But this is not a simplistic physical anthropology or simply a codification of ethnographical studies...
...its objective is to allow the Kingdom of God to be realized on earth with all the beauty of the diversity of the human family...
...Berger calls this attitude one of "cognitive respect," that "every consciousness is immediate to reality," but that there is no hierarchical ordering according to some a priori principles by which one cultural world is higher or better than another...
...But as Clifford Geertz has pointed out (The Interpretation o] Cultures, Basic Books) we should not look for Man with a capital "M...
...According to this approach, then, an inner, coherent sense of meaning is the unifying principle of a partitular culture, the very identity and genius of that culture...
...The approach proposed here is very different...
...The movement often goes by the name of Constructing Local Theologies...
...The fourth task is the positive building up of the Kingdom within the cultural group...
...To believe in the Incarnation in the sense of Blondel and Baum is to believe that the Word of God is incarnate (and redeeming) within all the cultures of the world...
...But the task of critique and refinement must be done with great prudence and skill ~to bring this local Christian community in line with the larger Christian tradition and within the larger "catholic" Christian community...
...There is bad and good syncretism...
...Man needs and finds meaning for himself only in an organized system of significant symbols given to him by the unified cultural tradition in which he is born and reared...
...To enter into a cross-cultural experience, one does not state a priori the main inner meaning of the new culture...
...It is like trying to account for Easter eggs within the Christian celebration of the Resurrection...
...In the authentic setting of the people's own traditional mode of realizing reconciliation among themselves, they will become aware that the very Son of God is present among them in word and action forgiving them their sins and effecting healing and grace within their community...
...Empirical ethnographical data never discover such a perfectly closed cultural world...
...Ethnographical studies may give valuable data concerning marriage relationships, magical practices, rites of passage, funeral practices and so on...
...This, then, leads to the third task: that of critique and refinement...
...Perhaps the social ideal of every civilization comes dose to embodying this ideal meaning...
...Other Disciplines As philosophy has traditionally played the handmaiden to theology in the formulation of Western-highly Hellenized--forms of theology, so today the academic disciplines of anthropology and sociology serve as ancillary disciplines to the constructing of local theologies...
...There is only Greek Christianity, Western European Christianity, Italian Catholicism, Irish Catholicism, the Catholicism of Latin America...
...The constructing of a local theology begins at this point...
...For example, at the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago under the program of Cross Cultural Studies, Robert Schreiter has been teaching a course on Constructing Local Theologies and has been directing his students-many of them with long years of experience in other cultures--to draw up a local theology from within a very distinctive cultural setting...
...In Christian doctrine the Incarnation of Christ and His Redemption is universal in effect, but absolutely unique and singular in cause...
...But cognitive respect and the postulate of equality will foster the mental attitude that all mental-cultural worlds are equal in their access to reality...
...Such an enclosed cultural world is the only human world for its own members...
...If, as we have seen, the whole human world is given in one's cultural setting, then a preaching of Christianity which remains external to that cultural world must remain superficial, and the resulting Christianity will be only a thin veneer...
...This tradition, then, may become the setting for the Sacrament of Reconciliation...
...Syncretism has always been a dirty word in missiology, but in this context the best theory and strategy (adopted by Robert Schreiter in his course at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago) is to admit openly that some form of syncretism has always happened and is always necessary...
...For example, what role does sin play in the imagination, the literature, the rites, the realities of this particular culture...
...But neither does it supply the foundation or building blocks in the construction of local theologies...
...All the different nerves carry messages back and forth to work for an inner integration and stabilization of the total organism...
...The present state of popular Catholicism throughout much of Latin America is a result of this kind of missionizing...
...Bad syncretism occurs when Christian teachers (either consciously or unconsciously) try to pretend it does not exist...
...But let the discovery of the sense of sin proceed without prejudice or prejudgment...
...Yet the danger is that pure ideal types of culture may be manufactured in the minds of theorists...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 23
