After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-Colonial Theologies

By Vitor Westhelle

In this important contribution to post-colonial theological studies, the argument is made that religious practices and teachings imposed on colonized peoples are transmuted in the process of colonization. The very theological discourse that is foisted on the colonized people becomes for them, a liberating possibility through a process of theological transformation from within. This is offered as an explanation of the mechanisms which have brought about the emergence of the current post-colonial consciousness. However, what is distinctive and unique about this treatment is that it pursues these questions with two basic assumptions. The first is that the religious expressions of colonized people bear the outward marks of the hegemonic theological discourse imposed on them, but change its content through a process called "transfiguration." The second is that the crises of Western Christianity since the Reformation and the Conquest of the Americas enunciates the very process through which post-colonial religious hybridity is made possible.

This book unfolds in three parts. The first (the "pre-text") deals with the colonial practice of the missionary enterprise using Latin America as a case study. The second (the "text") presents the crisis of Western modernity as interpreted by insiders and outsiders of the modern project. The third (the "con-text") analyses some discursive post-colonial practices that are theologically grounded even when used in discourses that are not religious.

Some of the questions that this project engages are: Is there a post-colonial understanding of sin and evil? How can we understand eschatology in post-colonial terms? What does it mean to be the church in a post-colonial framework? For those interested in the intersection of theology and post-colonial studies, this book will be important reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781621890454

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Gratitude is as much the memory of the heart as remembrance is a foretaste of things to come. Innumerable friendships and numerous places over time have made this book possible. And so I would like to acknowledge and thank those who travelled alongside in this book-weaving journey of mine, and, please, do not be offended if I have warped your generosity. As in the weaving of a tapestry, in and out went the warps and woofs, some making beautiful patterns while others not so elegant. But this tapestry of a book would not become a reality if not for the threads and colors that the people and places I was blessed to be touched by graciously provided me to weave with. If it were not what I gleaned from the many sources, experiences, and stories that my memory fails to recall, this book would not come about. To those near and far, thanks for your support, help, and guidance. If all could be mentioned in these pages, little would be left of my own pretext for (or pretense of) writing. Yet I need to name a few. Philip Hefner, Roberto Zwetsch, Rolf Schünemann, Luís Henrique Dreher, Sérgio Sauer, Darci Frigo, Walter Altmann, Olavo Ninow, Martha Stortz, David Rhoads, Reinhard Hütter, James Cochrane, Viggo Mortensen, Ulrich Duchrow, Mark Thomsen, José David Rodriguez, Jaci Maraschin, Guillermo Hansen, Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Monica Melanchthon, Philip Mathai, George Zachariah, and Edla Eggert have been prominently present in the penning of many a page in this book. To others, named and unnamed (for who can detect their errors Ps 19:12), and all of you, my thanks for visiting these pages of my writ.

I owe a great deal to the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. The institutional and collegial support I received deserves more than a passing mention. The President and Dean, my colleagues and students (and among them quite a few international students), have not only been with me many a stormy weather, but most often they guided me to calmer seas where I could work with fresh insights and, hopefully, care. Inadequate as it may seem, I offer my sincere thanks.

To the Escola Superior de Teologia, my alma mater, and where I spent some years of teaching, and which provided the basic stock for these thoughts of mine, my immense indebtedness.

It has been a privilege to work with my publishers, Wipf and Stock. Dr. Charlie Collier has been an efficient and understanding reader of my text and language in preparing it for publication. His editorial support and engaging reading exceeds the expectations a writer has. Joy (Dr. Mary Philip), my assistant and friend, has joyously trekked with me through this terrain of words beyond any expectation, editing and grooming the text, while helping me, with unique dexterity, navigate through the entire publishing process.

Christiane, Carlos, Janelle, André, Felipe, Aninha, and Gabi (and whoever comes along to join this unintended migrant and hybrid family), you were a source of joy in the midst of all these toils of my own creation.

In memory of my professor and friend, Hermann Brandt, who for almost four decades was a source of encouragement and inspiration in my journey as a theologian, I dedicate this volume. Fond memories of our sojourning will continue to guide and abide by me.

Introduction: The Emergence of a Discourse on a Practice

[N]ew heresies no longer arise, now that the Church recruits itself out of its own resources; and the influence of alien faiths on the frontier and the mission-field of the Church must be reckoned at zero so far as regards the formation of doctrine, though there may long remain in the piety of the new converts a great deal which has crept in from religious affections of former times.

These are the self-assured words of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the great Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, from his opus magnum, Glaubenslehre. If this is not an amazing display of colonial monoculturalism, then what is? The church and Christianity was it! There was nothing beyond it. Heresies were a thing of the past. No more Arius or Sabellius to contend with! For Schleiermacher, this was a certainty. If the rest of the world and all the other faiths cannot make a difference for Christianity, it is quite logical to assume that Christianity has isolated itself in a confined sectarian and esoteric position. Or it understood itself to be the religious conqueror of the world, which was the case. Interestingly, the very word hairesis, in Greek, also means to conquer, to plunder, and to colonize. Hence for a heretic there cannot be any other. It is straight logic that is at work here. For the colonizer, the colonized cannot be a colonizer; therefore he or she cannot be a heretic. A supreme or hegemonic heresy will not allow other heresies to challenge its dominance.

After heresy entails at least two of the meanings of the preposition. One is leaving heresy behind—the heresy that colonized and plundered. The other is to go after the heresy in the literal sense. It is going in pursuit of that heresy that the great Protestant theologian claimed no longer exists and seeing it surge from behind what Fanon called the white mask.

The history of Western colonialism for the last half of a millennium has not only been enmeshed in the missionary efforts of the church, but, most importantly, this entanglement has happened in tandem with crises in Western Christianity. The conquest of the Americas, the colonial incursions in Asia and later in sub-Saharan Africa, came in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, which coincided with ominous events that would catapult Europe to the center of world history. Modern colonialism was thus born, and with it came the expansion of Christianity that had been by and large confined to Europe, cornered by the Byzantine Empire which was invigorated by a robust Islamic faith. For centuries to come, Europe became the center of dissemination not only for its religion, but also its science, political options, and economic models.

How was one to interpret the resurrected Christ’s great commission given directly to the apostles in their encounter with the Asian and American civilizations? On one end were the great Incas, Mayas, Aztecs, and the Indus Valley civilization, and on the other, the command from Christ. They should have gone to the whole world preaching the gospel and baptizing the believers. In Roman Catholic theology this was solved by saying that the people newly encountered were given the prevenient faith waiting for the successors of the apostles, or that they had actually been evangelized, but their faith has been, through time and neglect, tainted.

Protestants—having rejected the prevenient grace and the strict interpretation of the apostolic succession—found themselves in a more difficult position. Initially, during the Protestant Orthodoxy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they adopted a literal interpretation assuming, with few exceptions, that the commission was an entitlement to the good-natured primo donnos of Christianity—that is, the original apostles only, regardless if they fulfilled it or not. It was in late seventeenth century, with the emergence of Pietism, that the great commission was revisited as pertaining to all followers of Christ. Slowly thereafter missionary work was undertaken. This work among Protestants was at its peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet it takes place amidst the devastating impact of the European Enlightenment in the Christian establishment, Protestant and Catholic alike.

However, the great Western colonial project, with its religious underpinnings, came under attack from within. It was like a dam slowly being perforated from the inside. Schleiermacher’s statement ironically places in the mission-field the assurance that the church recruits itself from its own resources in the immediate aftermath of the depletion of these very resources by the corrosive impact of the Enlightenment. The German theologian was writing with confidence when, in fact, Christianity was in crisis regarding its own assets.

This misguided confidence produced effects that, though unforeseen by the Western colonial world, were just waiting to bloom like the dandelions that could no longer be weeded out. So, if on the one hand there was the brimming confidence that Christianity was the absolute religion, on the other there were unknown and unheard voices asking questions about its totality. In other words, this conviction that heresies are no longer possible, asserted abroad by missionary zeal, instead of reproducing the European- and later U.S.-based Christian teachings and practices allowed for indigenous and hybrid expressions of the Christian faith. This hybridity attested and lamented by missionaries is an early expression of postcoloniality, even before postcolonial theory began to articulate itself as a distinct and self-aware body of discourse.

The transmutation of religious practices and teachings explains and illuminates the fundamental mechanisms for the emergence of the post-colonial consciousness. Before its surfacing in the seminal works of the likes of Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, or Amilcar Cabral, it was already incipiently expressed in the religious assimilation and inculturation of the Western religious symbolic system into the native cultures. Postcolonial discourse and practice come in the wake of the awareness of the impact of colonial discourse and practices along with their effects. And in these effects theological and religious issues are inextricably enmeshed.

However this can be only properly explained by having a close look at the crisis of Western modernity. In it one finds, as if through a mirror image, or as a negative of a film, what postcolonialism will develop into as a positive image. The particular events that mark the crises of Western Christianity are an indication of fissures at the surface of religious symbolism. These crises, with some exceptions, were not exported as such with the colonial enterprise, yet they can be read as ciphers to indicate the corrosion of hegemony. When Copernicus dislodged the earth and Luther the Roman See from the center of the cosmological and religious systems, the missionary expansion of Christianity was finding its own relativity in the encounter with other Weltanschaungen and religions. When the Enlightenment and Darwinism challenged the epistemological grounds of some Christian claims, world Christianity was meeting peoples with more ancient genealogies nimble in incorporating the Christian story into their own narratives. The institutional ties of foreign missionaries with their home churches kept up, and often still do, many formal appearances of the imported religion (hymnody, liturgy, rituals, ecclesial polity, etc.). Tactics of dissimulation helped to hide and protect a hybrid process of metabolism that was taking place since the inception of the religious system accompanying colonization.

To understand postcolonial voices the West must comprehend the emergence of Western hegemony as it surged in the sixteenth century. It must cope with its own crisis that was announced by the Reformation of the sixteenth century, came to fruition with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and reached its climax in the twentieth century—the century that witnessed the awakening of the consciousness of subaltern people.

Western hegemony was consolidated in the concomitance of a series of events of late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Some of the events that catapulted the West to the center of knowledge and power are well known. One was the invention of the Guttenberg press, which made possible the creation of the immutable mobile, the precise reproduction of information and its fast dissemination. Another was Copernicus’s scientific revolution, which de-centered the earth making the motion around the sun the basic motif—the heliotrope—for the Western understanding of history and the triumph of the idea of progress. The end of the fifteenth century witnessed the conquest of the Americas by Columbus, which created the possibility of using discovery as an intransitive verb, in the apt expression of Tzvetan Todorov. This was followed, a couple of decades later, by the first circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan, which inaugurated the era of globalization making it possible to move always ahead without the need to ever look back or to be responsible. This period also saw the inception of modern financial capitalism, represented by the Fugger family’s pecuniary empire dislodging the seat of power as a natural entitlement of the nobility. Last, but not least, came the Protestant Reformation spearheaded by Luther, for whom, when it came to worldly affairs, an individual/person is free, bound only by his/her consciousness and the use of reason.

It is difficult to see how all these events coalesced into a single phenomenon, shaping into what is generally known as the West. Its definition is elusive, yet with the surfacing of its own crisis the core of the identity of the Western world received recognizable contours. This happened with the Enlightenment in its political, scientific, and cultural dimensions. The foundations for this coalescing of a nucleus that defines the West vis-à-vis its other had been laid out already a century earlier by René Descartes. In the Meditations Descartes establishes the connection between thinking and being as that which can be shared with others and then corroborated. Ernst Troeltsch, early in the twentieth century, summarized these achievements into three basic principles: analogy (the similar knows the similar), criticism (that which cannot be corroborated cannot be accepted as true), and correlation (any historical event needs to be recognized by its rippling effects in history). These principles underlie the internal critique of the West referred to as logocentrism. In logocentrism, the logic of a valid postulate establishes a régime of truth and excludes that which does not cohere with the grid that norms an accepted perception of reality. However the very principles that launched the unprecedented Western development simultaneously sowed the seeds of its own predicament.

Postcolonialism issues a similar criticism, but instead of decoding the logos from inside it does it from the outside as the other of Western logocentrism. Or better, while Marxism, existentialism, surrealism, deconstructionism and so forth move from the same to the other in search for the erased and subjugated knowledges, postcolonial discourse and practice is an incision from outside in.

The Western world has imposed its logic globally, and over time this imposition has been described by different terms: conquest, colonialism, and imperialism. These categories generally describe distinct historical phases of Western domination and planetary leadership. While they overlap and can be contemporaneous, the first phase, conquest, describes a process of colonization through armed and often violent means. Colonialism as such describes domination primarily by direct political domination and control. And imperialism is the process of control of the subaltern through mainly economic ascendancy. Each finds its corresponding responses in the practices of resistance, independence, and liberation, respectively. In all of those historical phases, cultural imposition and religious elements play a constant role. Colonialism and postcolonialism are general descriptions of contemporary ways in which the two sets of categories are respectively referred to, while the discussion about the proper use of nomenclature is at the very core of the problem we are dealing with.

The nomenclature adopted and used in postcolonial studies is variegated and often confusing. Hegel could have been right when he said that definition of concepts can come only at the end. The problem, however, is that he believed that eventually The Book would come to a close. But as we will see, such is not the case. Writing goes on. For this reason some preliminary description of the terminology, or a working definition of the terms, could prevent playing tango with a subject matter already fraught with intricacies. The term colonialism refers to both a historical period (which in modern history starts at the turn of the sixteenth century) and also to a mentality, a disposition of the hegemonic party toward the subalterns. However, postcolonialism (or postcoloniality) refers only to the awakening of the consciousness of the subalterns as to their condition and the naming of its colonial causes. Post-colonialism, in its hyphenated form, is used specifically to designate a historical period marked by the beginning of political independence of colonial nations. Other concepts that are being used will be elucidated in the pages ahead.

A story from yonder and long before the age of globalization is pertinent here, because globalization is about non-accountability. In the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, a fellow was boasting about a record long jump in a competition he was part of overseas. The response he got from the islanders became a proverbial Latin expression: hic Rhodus, hic salta—here is Rhodes, here you will jump. The inhabitants of the island wanted accountability, wanted responsibility as to the claim being made.

What is insidious and pervasive about non-accountability is the fact that the others, to whom one owes a response, become faceless and are excluded from the conversation. They are no longer taken into account, are kept outside of the frame. In other words, non-accountability permeates exclusion and invisibility. The other becomes what Kafka in The Trial called a non-person, an expression Gustavo Gutiérrez applied to describe the excluded ones in Third World societies, people that live in what he called the underside of history. These people are invisible, in the sense also described by Ralph Ellison in The Invisible Man, or Manuel Scorza in Garabombo, the Invisible. It is a social and economic invisibility and forms not only the prerequisites but also the characteristic traits of unaccountability. How many times do we encounter invisible people? How many times does one just pass by someone asking for a quarter to spare, or offering a recent issue of Street Wise? How often do we just move on without responding, without being responsible? These are lesser side effects of globalization, or the micro-phenomena of globalization. But the big irony is that since the era of modern globalization began in the sixteenth century (in late antiquity it was called oikoumenē, ecumenism!), the more the globe was crossed and circled through all means of traveling, be they physical or virtual through the World Wide Web, the more places, indeed entire countries, are rendered invisible. Where in the world is New Guinea? Where is Guinea Bissau? Where is Guyana? In this random selection it is often the case that we miss the different continents where these millions of people live, while we are able to find Web sites that we might be searching for anywhere in the world.

If non-responsibility is one of the basic features of globalization, invisibility is the other. However invisibility, as it is used in the works of literature I have mentioned, works as a metaphor. It is not that these people are translucent or that they can be seen through, but that their individual existence is so dispensable that one does not want to see them, to be responsible toward them. And how does it happen that someone becomes not worthy of a response? How is it that an individual (which means that which cannot be further divided) becomes so insignificant that its value, its worth, becomes negligible? Anyone who has had experience with people from outside their circumscribed culture and context knows how peculiar to Western societies its notion of individuality is. Such understanding of individuality, as the West has developed it, is ironically the very reason for the phenomenon of invisibility.

Postcolonialism

The emergence of a postcolonial consciousness and praxis, particularly after World War II, began to show that the heliotrope and the rendition of the world’s eschatological consummation in historical terms was not enough to account for God’s presence in the world, even in the midst of a deep sense of absence. In the attempt to address this shortcoming in the eschatological discourse, liberation theologies developed what can be called a latitudinal eschatological perspective. This latitudinal approach lays emphasis not only on the chronological movement but also on the topological awareness that places and locales play an important role in the understanding of history and eschatology. Such latitudinal emphasis has to do as much with geography as with history, as much with places as with eras, as much with location as with epochs, as much with contexts as with ages. What we are observing under the auspices of postcolonialism is precisely the emergence of voices and faces that before were caricatured, imposed, construed, and invented.

Such an indicator of a postcolonial consciousness, however, is only a cipher that announces a departure, a departure from a condition not articulated until then. What postcolonialism does, on the one hand, is shift, or dislocate, the gaze away from the Eurocentric colonial project; on the other hand, it entertains different socio-communitarian paradigms, other forms of knowledge, arts, morality—as well as an eschatology often in a guise, articulating itself in places that have been colonized and are still being globalized. This postcolonial perspective is then the announcement of a departure from a particular way of seeing the world that thought of itself as the universal telos of all history, the end of history. So, what sort of an exit is it that is being announced? It is the departure from Western modernity as the gravitational center of the world that since about 1500 C.E. has been symbolized by four names that indicate