Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World

By Mark G. Brett

How can Scripture address the crucial justice issues of our time? In this book Mark Brett offers a careful reading of biblical texts that speak to such pressing public issues as the legacies of colonialism, the demands of asylum seekers, the challenges of climate change, and the shaping of redemptive economies.

Brett argues that the Hebrew Bible can be read as a series of reflections on political trauma and healing — the long saga of successive ancient empires violently asserting their sovereignty over Israel and of the Israelites forced to live out new pathways toward restoration. Brett retrieves the prophetic voice of Scripture and applies it to our contemporary world, addressing current justice issues in a relevant, constructive, compelling manner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467444644

Book preview

Political

Trauma

and

Healing

Biblical Ethics for

a Postcolonial World

Mark G. Brett

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

© 2016 Mark G. Brett

All rights reserved

Published 2016

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brett, Mark G., author.

Title: Political trauma and healing: biblical ethics for a postcolonial world / Mark G. Brett.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016003797 | ISBN 9780802873071 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN 9781467445115 (ePub)

eISBN 9781467444644 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and politics —Biblical teaching. | Christian ethics—Biblical teaching. | Australia—Politics and government—21st century. | Postcolonial theology.

Classification: LCC BR115.P7 B687 2016 | DDC 241/.962—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003797

www.eerdmans.com

For the Paulson family,

especially wapirra, who led the way.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Ethics of Conversation

1. Limits and Possibilities of Secular Theology

2. Justice and Postcolonial Challenges

3. Authors, Imaginaries, and the

Ethics of Interpretation

Inner-Biblical Conversations

4. Unfolding the National Imaginary

5. Sovereignty in the Priestly Tradition

6. Isaiah, Holiness, and Justice

7. Alternatives to the National Tradition in Job

Engaging the Present

8. Reconciliation and National Sovereignties

9. Undocumented Immigrants, Asylum Seekers, and Human Rights

10. Justice for the Earth

11. Economics and Redemption

Bibliography

Index

Scripture Index

Acknowledgments

My first debt of gratitude is to Julia Rhyder, who suggested that my publications over the past twenty-five years could be grouped into three areas: philosophical hermeneutics, inner-­biblical dialogue, and public theology. She suggested that I write a book in three sections, demonstrating the connections between these areas, while nevertheless acknowledging that they are separable areas within the hermeneutical enterprise.

Michael Thomson at Eerdmans suggested that this three-­dimensional project could be broadly characterized as postcolonial, and I am grateful to him for bringing this project to fruition as an Eerdmans publication.

Portions of chapters 4, 6, 7, and 9 have appeared in earlier publications:

Reading as a Canaanite: Paradoxes in Joshua, in Interested Readers: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David J. A. Clines, ed. Jim K. Aitken, Jeremy M. S. Clines, and Christl M. Maier (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 231-46. Reprinted by permission.

Imperial Imagination in Isaiah 56–66, in Isaiah and Imperial Context: The Book of Isaiah in Times of Empire, ed. Andrew Abernethy, Mark G. Brett, Tim Meadowcroft, and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 170-85. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. www.wipfandstock.com

‘Speak to the Earth, and She will instruct You’ (Job 12.8): An Intersection of Ecological and Indigenous Hermeneutics, in Where the Wild Ox Roams: Biblical Essays in Honour of Norman C. Habel, ed. A. Cadwallader (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2013), 1-19.

Forced Migrations, Asylum Seekers and Human Rights, Colloquium 45/2 (2013): 121-36.

I am grateful to the publishers for the opportunity to present substantially revised versions of these essays in the present monograph.

Introduction

The motivation for this book arises from personal engagement with the legacies of political trauma in Australia, but the scope of the discussion necessarily extends well beyond this local context. During the years 2005–2008, I worked with a representative body of traditional Aboriginal owners who negotiated a new policy framework for Indigenous land claims in Victoria — a framework subsequently translated into legislation as the Traditional Owner Settlement Act (2010). The negotiations were in some respects unparalleled in Australian history in so far as the state government of the day did not simply impose a new regime for land claims according to their own legislative lights, or attempt to litigate a new round of cases in the federal court. Part of the acknowledgment of past wrongs included awareness that any new initiatives for reconciliation had to be negotiated with the people who were most affected by the outcomes. The underlying concept of justice at work in this process had more to do with the restoration of relationships than with retributive or distributive justice.

There was also a great irony in these negotiations: the secular notion of restorative justice on which they relied can be traced back to the same religious tradition that had overwhelmed Indigenous sovereignty in the first place — not just in Australia, but also in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The colonial doctrines of discovery were already secularized by the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they can hardly be understood without reference to their religious roots. Both the notion of discovery and the more recent reconciliation movements grew out of the same Christian tradition.

In reflecting on this complex history, I came to realize that the Australian experience was simply one of many contemporary histories in which social trauma was addressed by an ethic of political reconciliation, which in turn derived from classical religious traditions. As Daniel Philpott has recently argued, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic leaders have all at various times participated in practices of reconciliation and have explained their motivations in relation to their own scriptural sanctions.¹ I will argue in the present work that the Hebrew Bible itself (whether understood as the Jewish scriptures or the Christian Old Testament) can also be read as a series of reflections on political trauma and healing. In this respect, Philpott’s account of political reconciliation can be further developed by closer examination of scriptural roots.

As the succession of ancient empires violently asserted their own forms of sovereignty over ancient Israel, the Israelite leadership discovered reasons why such evils had come to pass, and what restoration or redemption might yet be possible in the divine imagination. In each case, these empires left their marks in the making of Scripture — Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome — and in each case, new pathways toward healing were lived out as history unfolded.

The fact that this same Scripture could later be read in ways that sanctioned the foundation of Christian empires (and subsequently the massive expansion of European colonies in the Americas and the Asia-­Pacific regions), demonstrates the need for critical hermeneutics. The term is overly technical, but the issues at stake are immensely practical. I am referring here to the careful and detailed interpretation of what the biblical texts probably meant in the past, as well as the significance that these texts may yield for those who regard them as in some sense relevant for today. The relevance of biblical literature will be most obvious for faith communities who regard them as canonical, but the history of the Bible’s influence extends well beyond narrowly religious traditions. Social reformers like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, drew out the significance of biblical motifs in renegotiating the competing norms and interests that would shape public life in the United States from the 1960s to the present.

The Ethics of Conversation

The civil rights movements in the USA, Australia, and South Africa all illustrate the same kind of irony observed at the outset of our discussion: the religious tradition that was woven into the colonial racism in all these countries was the very same tradition that joined cause, for example, with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and the Christian Aboriginal leader in Australia, Douglas Nicholls, to address the traumas of the past. These cases demonstrate the validity of Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that a living tradition is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.² The catalogue of complaints that can be brought against colonial Christianity is so impressive one might wonder why it is still the majority religion of many countries in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania.³ But precisely this catalogue of trauma affirms the necessity for interpreters to be clear about their hermeneutical philosophy. Ideological and self-­serving traditions of interpretation call for detailed critique.

MacIntyre, among many others, has drawn attention to the fact that the postmodern condition is partly constituted by the fraying and fragmentation of most normative traditions, along with often hybridized and conflicted contacts with alternative approaches to ethics. The various norms at issue in public debate have become detached, in some significant ways, from the cultural and religious backgrounds that lend them meaning. Symptomatic of this shift is the fact that cultural studies today are more likely to speak of social imaginaries than of traditions, in part because the very idea of a tradition has become problematic. Not only are commentators less willing to presume the coherence of any particular tradition, they are also less willing to assume that classical authors consciously understood the underlying cultural assumptions of their own text, or the ways in which a single tradition can engage with competing concepts and diverse genres of communication.

It is perhaps no accident that a good number of the intellectuals who have been rereading the Bible in recent public philosophy have been atheists. It appears more acceptable now to treat the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity at a safe distance. When it comes to the politics of academia in the West, the endurance of religious convictions is very often perceived as a failure of reason, or a culpable self-­indulgence.⁴ Under these conditions, it is important to appreciate that a religious tradition can itself be seen as a series of debates, and that the life of a tradition exhibits particular kinds of argumentative reasoning. While some versions of secularity imagine that public order is best served by eliminating religious debates or symbolism from public ethics, this is not how secularity was first invented in the West, and it is not how secularity is most often conceived in non-­Western contexts.⁵

In presenting the view that biblical ideas might yet have a role in the public sphere, I will consider in Chapter One a recent proposal for post-­secular discourse which has been advanced by one of the leading philosophers of democracy in Europe, Jürgen Habermas. In reviewing Habermas’s work, we begin with the observation that his influential account of discourse ethics was developed in response to the violence perpetrated by National Socialism in Germany. His procedural account of how every voice in a public debate should be given its due — and how the negotiation of public norms necessarily gives priority to universalizable principles over particular traditions — is conceived as a contribution to the formation of just institutions, capable of protecting the human rights of all citizens. Along with the acknowledgment of past wrongs, reparations, and so on, the establishing of just institutions should be seen as an integral part of the ethics of political reconciliation following political trauma.⁶ It therefore becomes necessary for our project to examine Habermas’s recent proposals for understanding how religious voices might participate in public institutions.⁷

I will argue that Habermas’s approach appears inadequate when it comes to the historic injustices suffered by Indigenous people, and this is an inadequacy that cannot be ignored in the public life of settler colonial states like the USA, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa / New Zealand. Chapter Two will provide a brief history of the various concepts of justice at work in the history of colonialism, illustrating the need for restorative justice in postcolonial societies as they move towards the healing of past traumas. The pursuit of restorative justice and reconciliation requires, it will be argued, a critique of Habermas on the one hand, and of colonial Christianity on the other hand.

In dialogue with recent biblical and theological scholarship, I will outline a critique of the colonial prejudices that lie deeply embedded in the history of Western Christianity. I will argue that the church needs to develop not just a more adequate postcolonial theology, but in addition, to develop a repertoire of postcolonial practices.⁸ Prominent among these are the Christian practices of self-­emptying (or kenosis),⁹ including the relinquishment of aspirations for political control. We will therefore need to explore the paradoxical combination of kenosis and political participation, which I will support through fresh engagements with the scriptures.

To foreshadow the argument at this point, I will suggest that the Christian church’s form of social life is not to be characterized by the procedural justice and standards of neutrality required within the institutions of a state, such as those prescribed by Habermas’s ethics of public discourse. Rather, the church is called to embody the integration of justice and love (agape) in ever-­expanding networks of relationship across national and cultural traditions, caring for those in need whether they are inside or outside the Christian community.¹⁰ This understanding of the church maintains a healthy separation from the state, yet goes to the heart of public sociality by giving attention especially to the most vulnerable, a priority that was established already by the Law and Prophets within Scripture.

Chapter Three outlines the approach to biblical interpretation that is required in order to sustain the overall argument. The methodological discussion here engages in particular with the work of Kevin Vanhoozer, an influential theologian who has made a distinguished contribution to Christian hermeneutics. In spite of the subtleties of Vanhoozer’s position, he ultimately reduces the complexities of inner-­biblical debate to a unified metanarrative of divine self-­revelation. His approach not only underestimates the diversity of human discourses in the biblical traditions, but it also makes the Bible less accessible to public scrutiny — a significant problem for those exploring the public dimensions of theology. In order to read Scripture as a series of socially embodied arguments, rather than as a single metanarrative, one must engage with the different paradigms of theology and ethics that are expressed through the complex range of scriptural books, literary sources and redactions. Through a number of case studies in Part Two of this volume, I will show how a critical appreciation of the social imaginaries at work within inner-­biblical conversation can provide some structure for contemporary reflection — at least among the many faith communities who continue to recognize these scriptures as in some sense foundational for their life before God.¹¹

To be clear, this argument does not propose that the Scripture can thereby become an authoritative and universal foundation for politics, as perhaps was the case in the days of Christendom. It is well known that the left wing churches of the Christian Reformation (e.g., the Anabaptists and Mennonites) quite consistently advocated a separation of church and state, explicitly opposing the medieval powers of an established church, and implicitly endorsing the secular trends of modernity. This is the tradition that informs today’s communitarian theology that maintains a rigorous division of church and state, often configuring the churches as resident aliens within a hostile dominant culture. The New Testament documents, written as they were under generally oppressive conditions within colonies of the Roman Empire, naturally provide support for this approach by strengthening the resolve of the church as a network of worshipping communities but weakening the expectation of its influence in public life. There is no straight line from the New Testament to democratic participation.

The Hebrew Bible can make a substantial contribution to rethinking some of these political issues, and it is the older Scripture that features at some decisive points in the formation of modern democratic social contract theories.¹² We find more complex models of political engagement in the Hebrew Bible, not least because it reflects periods of Israelite political sovereignty as well as the traumas of imperial subjugation and diaspora. There is a broader range of political models to draw on. While most of Jewish history has embodied diaspora models of social life, Christendom made use of the very imperialism that biblical theology repeatedly resisted. In part because the idiom of this resistance to empires was often borrowed from imperial language and ideas, when the Bible took its place in Christendom in later centuries, it could also easily be turned into a source of sanctions for medieval and colonial political power. Any use of the Bible today needs to reflect critically on this legacy.

In his important work The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Willie James Jennings presents a searing critique of Western colonial theology. In one of his detailed case studies, Jennings analyzes the theological vision of José de Acosta Porres, an influential Spanish Jesuit who first arrived in Peru in 1572. Acosta’s story illustrates a much broader history of Christian failures to interrogate the justice of colonial expansions, although it is particularly revealing as an early example of the necessary adjustments to the Catholic intellectual paradigm in his day. Acosta’s theology was formed precisely by the philosophical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas that Alasdair MacIntyre has lately attempted to revive. As the Spanish colonial horizons expanded to incorporate Peru, the Indian world was reduced, indeed eventually into reserves called precisely reducciones. But in some respects, these geographical transformations affected both the colonized and colonizer. Acosta acknowledges, I will confess here that I laughed and jeered at Aristotle’s meteorological theories and his philosophy, seeing that in the very place where, according to his rules, everything must be burning and on fire, I and all my companions were cold.¹³

Acosta’s laugh, in Jennings’s account of this dissonance, points to an epistemological crisis that was only resolved by sacrificing the details of classical geography and reasserting the universality of the doctrine of creation: if God created the whole earth, it was reasoned, the local details of creation in particular places are of lesser significance, but with a little theological pruning the realities of life at the equator could be rendered intelligible inside the world of colonial tradition. Acosta was, for example, able to correct St Augustine’s claim that people could not exist in the Antipodes, moving about upside down; although Augustine’s motives were taken from the innermost parts of sacred theology and inferred from Holy Writ, yet experience in the New World provoked new and different interpretations.¹⁴ But it was precisely Spanish experience in the New World that provoked new interpretations, not the experience of Indigenous peoples.

Native peoples were configured on the basis of their skin color, rather than their attachments to place, an administrative strategy loaded with economic and epistemological advantages. Indigenous knowledges could not be trusted, within the horizon of Acosta’s theology, because the Indians belonged to the blind nations of the world whose only hope was to be illuminated by the light of the Most High God. In taking this view of the Indians, Jennings argues that the Spanish adopted one of the most common hermeneutical strategies of colonial Christianity, namely, to read as an Israelite.¹⁵ The illumination provided by the Christian gospel absorbs the revelation of Israel’s God, thereby rendering the Spanish — in the world of their own making — the New Israel in the New World. The possibility of reading as Gentiles was lost, as Israel was superseded by an ideology of whiteness and racial superiority, with tragic consequences for all concerned. Retrospectively we must also note that Acosta’s invocation of the Most High God — or El Elyon in Hebrew — would today strike a historian of ancient Israel as heavily ironic: El Elyon was the name of an Indigenous Creator God in Canaanite religion (cf. Genesis 14:18–22).¹⁶

In The Christian Imagination, Jennings argues that racist and colonial assumptions will continue to infect the life of the Christian churches to the extent that we resist this call to read the Scripture, and to read the world, as Gentiles. Colonialist interpretation of the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21–18, for example, tends to assume that we are standing with Jesus looking down on the woman in her desperation, when in fact we, the Gentiles, are the woman and "we are to be counted among the goyim." An inversion of reading perspective is indeed commonly adopted in postcolonial biblical criticism, although this mode of reading is perhaps yet to have significant impact in the discipline of systematic theology.¹⁷ More importantly, we will need to take up Jennings’s challenge not so much in reading the New Testament, where the place of the Gentiles is in many respects assured, but rather, in the Hebrew Bible, where reading as Gentiles often presents a more complex set of hermeneutical issues. A major difficulty with Jennings’s argument, it seems to me, is that it tends to push a biblical metanarrative of imperialism into the hands of Israel, setting the radical challenge for a post-­racial Christianity over against the assumed ethnocentrism of ancient Israelite identity.¹⁸ In rereading the Hebrew Bible as Gentiles, however, the diversity of Scripture must first be appreciated: the relationship between Israel and her foreigners is repeatedly contested between the major streams of biblical tradition.

Inner-­biblical Conversation

One of the most ethnocentric of biblical traditions is no doubt to be found in the book of Deuteronomy, and perhaps paradoxically for some readers, this tradition also articulates a clear welcome for strangers.¹⁹ This puzzle is readily understood when we appreciate that the core of Deuteronomy’s law code comes not from the beginnings of Israel’s story (as the metanarrative of exodus, law-­making and conquest suggests) but from the seventh century 

BCE

. In Chapter Four, we will see how this theology arose after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians, and even borrows from the treaty discourse imposed by Assyrian monarchs on their vassals. The national imagination expounded in Deuteronomy could accommodate the strangers or refugees who arrived in the southern kingdom of Judah on condition that they expressed an exclusive loyalty to Yhwh. The Deuteronomistic theology found in the subsequent narratives of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, can therefore be understood as a response to the trauma of imperial invasions — when the northern kingdom was overwhelmed by Assyria, subsequently when the Assyrians also invaded Judah at the end of the eighth century, and then a century later, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. History has taught us that nationalism is one of the most common responses to military threat.²⁰ But it is not the only possible response.

Chapter Five describes how the Priestly tradition unfolded after the fall of Judah and later under the imperial rule of the Persian Empire. This tradition provides a new vision for religious life even when the kind of political sovereignty given prominence in Deuteronomistic literature had been relinquished.²¹ The Priestly tradition adopted distinctive perspectives that were grounded more in the theology of creation and in a multinational covenant with Abraham, rather than the national traditions of Judah. One could perhaps interpret these developments as a forced separation of religion and state, but this separation is nonetheless illuminating for theology after Christendom. The Priestly paradigm may well be fruitful, I will argue, for a postcolonial theology that both renounces political sovereignty yet advocates for minority voices in the public domain.

In the Priestly tradition we find, for example, an attempt to establish the legal equity of native citizens and immigrants (notably in Exod. 12:49 and Lev. 24:22), and this attempt can still serve as a provocation for hearing the legitimate claims of strangers within our own contexts. Deuteronomy earlier provided a quite different perspective on the strangers or immigrants who arrived in Judah during the reign of Davidic kings, and this difference between Deuteronomic and Priestly texts needs to be understood before we start to evaluate the implications of this material for our own contemporary challenges — such as those discussed in Chapter Nine of this volume, Undocumented Immigrants, Asylum Seekers, and Human Rights.

In the context of Babylonian and Persian rule, the Priestly and prophetic traditions engage with "the goyim in both positive and negative ways, and we will need to examine some of the possible reasons for this ambivalence. In Chapter Six, I will argue that key elements of the Priestly imagination re­appear in the later portions of Isaiah, illustrating how this non-­national social imaginary includes multiple traditions and genres of literature. Similarly, in Chapter Seven, the discussion of the book of Job shows how ethical concerns for the widow, orphan and stranger" are founded in a very different way in non-­covenantal theology, yet Job converges on the same ethical concern for the most marginalized in society. By investigating these various perspectives on social marginalization in Israel’s Law, Prophets, and Writings, it becomes possible to appreciate the complexities and convergences of Israel’s social ethics, without pressing the Bible into the mold of a single metanarrative.

The case studies in Part Two of this volume also illustrate the scope of critical deliberation in pre-­modern times. On this issue again we part company with Habermas, who has tended to view metaphysics as incompatible with political argument. Far from being something written in stone, with no capacity for fresh social imagination, the Hebrew Bible presents a conversation about God and the world that is capable of embracing a diversity of perspectives on political ethics. This is not the kind of deliberation that Habermas and other secular critics expect to find in religious traditions. Indeed, in the book of Job, we find an exemplary foreigner who is well able to argue his ethics before God without needing to draw on the laws of Israel. This model of revelation draws more from experience and nature than from law and priesthood, but it endures as part of Israel’s Scripture nonetheless.

Engaging the Present

Having established a hermeneutical framework that is, first, sensitized to the legacies of colonialism, and second, attuned to the variety of perspectives embodied in the biblical imaginaries, it becomes possible to consider how a contemporary engagement with the Bible might influence the church’s engagement with public issues. Any fusion of past and present horizons must of course bring some of the decisive changes wrought by modernity into view. If we can still find inspiration in biblical literature, it will not be because ancient social imaginaries can be grafted directly on to current socio-­economic arrangements; any arguments arising from religious tradition will necessarily work by way of analogy. Accordingly, it is necessary to mention briefly at this point some of the most salient features of modern social imaginaries that will impact on the public issues discussed in Part Three of this volume.

In many respects, modernity is rooted in the attacks of the Protestant Reformation on the power of Priestly hierarchies and privileged vocations. In his major work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has provided a subtle account of this disenchantment, but to highlight just one aspect of his narrative, it is important to see that the Protestant belief in the priesthood of all believers sanctified ordinary life and promoted an egalitarian impulse that was to become characteristic of Western politics. The egalitarian principle was politically enacted firstly in resistance to the medieval hierarchies legitimated by Roman Catholicism, and it was subsequently secularized into the horizontal solidarities that we find in modern nationalisms. Accordingly, our secular nationalisms generally lack the religious foundations of the ancient and medieval worlds, which provided metaphysical sanctions to monarchs and Priestly jurisdictions. The legal systems of modern nation states are overtly human constructions, rather than derived from sacred origins. Metaphysical foundations were slowly replaced by democracies in which sovereignty was transferred from monarchs to the people (although initially not to women, and in settler colonial socie­ties, not to Indigenous peoples), and the nation state accordingly required no firmer foundation than its constitutional arrangements and the institutions of public debate.

In several chapters of this book, however, we will need to acknowledge the fact that the nationalisms fomented in the settler colonial states of the Anglo world (notably the USA, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa / New Zealand) did not wholly succeed in overwriting the enchanted worlds of Indigenous people. In particular, Chapter Eight investigates the question of how reading the Hebrew Bible might contribute to Christian practices of reconciliation with the First Nations, including engagement with Indigenous knowledges. If one needs a provocation from Scripture at this point, then we might perhaps find it in the wisdom of the Gentile Job, and particularly in his conviction that creation might provide its own kind of instruction or torah:

But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you;

the birds of the air, and they will tell you.

Or speak to the earth, and she will teach you;

and the fish of the sea will explain to you. (Job 12:7-8)²²

This perspective on nature’s torah has some clear analogies with the social worlds of Indigenous peoples, where, in contrast with the anthropocentric tendencies of modern politics, traditional knowledge and kinship are embedded within local webs of non-­human life. Through an investigation of this analogy, and a more comprehensive consideration of creation theology in the Hebrew Bible, it becomes possible to approach contemporary questions about the environment and climate change from the fresh point of view of postcolonial biblical theology.²³ I will argue that a renewed dialogue with Indigenous peoples can in fact be connected with all four of the public issues discussed in Part Three: reconciliation, migration, ecology, and economic policy.

In pursuing these issues, and in raising questions as to what postcolonial redemption might look like, it is no longer possible to take a purely anti-­colonial stance. One of the distinctive features of current postcolonial theory is that it recognizes the hybridity of settler societies today and does not seek an impossible restoration of native origins, or to impose a return to preindustrial economies.²⁴ This kind of realism does not imply a resignation about the past, but rather, a resolute commitment to the ongoing negotiation of complex identities and ecologies in forging social transformation. Far from the relativist and fragmented postmodernism that provides no motivation for substantive conversation in public, a postcolonial redemption would seek to restore what Jennings has called the space of communion:

The space of communion is always ready to appear where the people of God reach down to join the land and reach out to join those around them,