Cultural Afterlives of Jesus: Jesus in Global Perspective 3

By Gregory C. Jenks and Val Webb

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social just and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context.
This third volume focuses on the diverse afterlives of Jesus within contemporary culture and the arts. Moving beyond the explicitly religious afterlives traced in the first two volumes, this set of essay traces selected afterlives of Jesus within Indigenous cultures around the Pacific, as well as in the arts and in the contested fields of gender and sexuality. The contributors include religion scholars from diverse cultural contexts, as well as faith practitioners reflecting on Jesus within their own particular context. While the essays are all grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language that is accessible to interested nonspecialists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666752519

Val Webb

Val Webb is an Australian who holds a graduate degree in science and a Ph.D. in theology. She has taught in universities in the United States and Australia and has written eleven books including Like Catching Water in a Net: human attempts to describe the Divine, which won the religion category of Best Books USA Award in 2007. She now lives in Mudgee, Australia. (www.valwebb.com.au)

Book preview

Introduction

Val Webb

This third volume of Afterlives: Jesus in Global Perspective explores images of Jesus in diverse contemporary contexts, including indigenous communities, the arts, LGBTQIA experiences and women’s perspectives. This diversity of approach is also demonstrated within similar contexts, depending on whether the traditional Christian story of Jesus has been reimagined for the new context, or rejected as toxic for that context. Theologies of liberation play a crucial part in many of the chapters since prioritizing the realities of a context and then examining what might be liberating for that context has given permission to challenge the patriarchal colonizing of the context by Western Christian doctrine and culture.

The first half of this volume explores afterlives of Jesus in various indigenous and non-Western contexts into which Christianity was introduced: Australian First Nations, Maori, Pacific Islands, and Asian. The first two chapters reflect a diversity of approach within the particular context of Indigenous Australians, giving different interpretations and value to terms such as Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nations, spirituality, and Aboriginality. While both authors are leaders in Christian communities, Wiradjuri man Glenn Loughrey (Jesus through Indigenous Australian Eyes) reverses what he calls the usual practice of viewing Aboriginality through a Christian lens. Rather than the Bible as his point of reference, he explores Aboriginal ways of seeing and only then, from that perspective, does he consider whether the man Jesus exhibited qualities that might be useful for understanding Aboriginal selves and responsibilities. Loughrey rejects Aboriginal theologies that claim the Christian God and Holy Spirit as part of Aboriginal culture before colonization, seeing this as evidence of a need by Aboriginal Christians for another’s religion to make them whole. Aboriginals did not need Jesus; they already had a highly developed way of seeing. Loughrey says, [Jesus] is welcome to share in our wisdom and, we hope, we are welcome to share in his, but they are to remain what they are, two different worldviews relevant to two different traditions.¹

In contrast, Anne Pattel-Gray of the Bidjara/Kari Kari people in Queensland (Jesus and Australia First Nations Identity and Context) approaches Jesus through a Christian lens but uses the methodology of liberation theology to strip away all Western and colonial trappings, imagery and placement on biblical narratives and the identity of Jesus² to find a Jesus that First Nations people can imitate. She identifies both the biblical Creator and Jesus—the Word of John’s Gospel that became flesh—as present in Australia before the missionaries came. Jesus the Christ, the liberating one through his violent death, affirms First Nations people and gives them resilience to survive the violence that both colonialism and church inflected of them. The empowering Spirit of the Bible was also already inherent in their ways of life—what Pattel-Gray calls Aboriginal spirituality, and what Loughrey challenges, saying Aboriginal people are spiritual simply by nature of being Aboriginal.

Peter Catt (Jesus of Kings Cross) describes being both disturbed and inspired as a young volunteer at a crisis center in Kings Cross, Sydney, when a homeless person caught his gaze as if looking into my soul . . . something inside me recognized him and I found myself saying that he was Jesus.³ This experience dispelled Catt’s previous image of the risen Christ in heaven, challenging him instead to see the hidden Jesus in our midst, not asking for charity but calling us to do more than offering him a bowl of soup and wishing him well.⁴ Without attempts to actively transform unjust structures, charitable works become part of the problem. Catt sees Christianity’s substitutionary-atonement explanation as having spiritualized Jesus’ victim role on the cross as a solution to a cosmic battle between good and evil and the problem of sin. For liberation theology, on the other hand, the cross represents an unjust murder, a symbol of what we do to one another every day, and choices we face before oppressive and destructive systems. The Jesus of Kings Cross and liberation theology call us to reassess the mission of the church and its inheritance of the theology of charity, to look at systems and not just their manifestations, to ask why people are poor and what keeps them poor, and to not simply put Band-Aids on wounds created by poverty.

Continuing the themes of indigenous contexts and liberation theology, Maori woman Jenny Te Paa Daniel (Radicalizing Jesus: An Indigenous Maori Anglican Woman’s Story) tells of growing up in both village tribal traditions and the church with its gentle Jesus, an image she abandoned in adulthood when she encountered the liberating Jesus who stood against injustice and insisted on the unconditional inclusion of all. This radical Jesus inspired her to move into theological studies and eventually into academia, teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand’s⁵ preeminent Anglican theological college, St John’s College in Auckland, where she worked to bring change. For her, the radical Jesus of Nazareth . . . is utterly crucial to addressing the ongoing struggles of Maori for justice in the contemporary circumstance.⁶

Seforosa Carroll (Jesus through Pacific Eyes) discusses responses by various Pacific theologians to a 1976 challenge by then governor-general of Papua New Guinea, Sir John Guise, to reveal to us the Pacific Christ, free of the Western garb and theology in which he came, having been separated from his historical roots and Jewish culture. Pacific Christians needed to determine what God’s message meant for Pacific peoples and how to effectively communicate this message. Carroll examines various local metaphors being used in different contexts to develop Pacific theologies and Christologies, metaphors that are regional but also have universal relevance. For Carroll, this is more than simply appropriating or substituting Pacific symbols for a Jewish Jesus: it is an attempt to understand the work and revelation of Christ more deeply in their particular contexts.

In a similar way, Joseph N. Goh (Asian Faces of Jesus) introduces some Asian theologians in the Philippines, Malaysia, Korea, Hong Kong, India, and Sri Lanka who are navigating understandings of Jesus that can continue to hold relevance for Asian realities. The pursuit of an authentic Christ is an exercise in futility, Goh says, as Jesus is himself already variously interpreted in the Bible in order to cohere with, and fulfil, the needs of various faith communities.⁷ The many Asian faces of Jesus recognize how the personhood and teachings of Jesus have gained traction and inspired people in Asia, both as a divine figure to whom they can relate and a model of sociocultural transformation.⁸ Resisting the myth of common Asian values, Goh showcases three Asian faces of Jesus: the God-Peer, the Co-Journeyer, and the Empowering Liberator at the Margins, and the Reimagination of Non-Christian Spiritual Personages—all images that focus on facets of Jesus’ humanity, thus encapsulating more practical and pastoral theological tones.

Rod Pattenden (A Postcolonial Jesus: The Art of Emmanuel Garibay) continues the theme of European cultural conquest and colonization that disrupted indigenous communities across the world, showing how imaging Jesus in art has both reinforced colonial structures of power and prestige but also has been a site for resistance and liberation. Emmanuel Garibay, born in rural Philippines as the son of a Methodist pastor, started to paint in university, producing murals and protest works for an activist movement against the Marcos regime. Garibay studied theology, espousing liberation theology’s theology of struggle for the poor and marginalized, which he used in his paintings. He depicted ordinary people at work, giving them dignity and respect while at the same time shifting the social power. The religious dignitaries were parodied, while the Christ figure was portrayed as a common person working with the poor, nail holes the only hint.

Continuing the theme of Jesus in art, Jonathan Sargeant (Jesus in Comedic Film) looks at how Jesus is portrayed with comic intent in cinema and TV, asking what such portrayals say theologically and otherwise. Sargeant makes the important point that anything said about God is a metaphor arising from a particular context, and that comedic portrayals of Jesus as metaphors can enrich and challenge our thinking, renewing theological tradition and restoring life to stale, much-mined metaphors.⁹ Sargeant examines a number of TV and film productions and finds common approaches, including irreverence, but generally this irreverence is aimed not at Jesus, but at Jesus-inspired institutions and traditions. The Jesus character is often the one who transgresses church rules to provoke outrage. Such humor-based portrayals do not diminish Jesus but positively open up a liminal space between dogma and unknowing, where those new to intentional spirituality can explore and engage safely.¹⁰

Today we recognize intersectionality, overlapping and interdependent systems of disadvantage, whether founded in race, class or gender, that impact a given individual or group. Hugo Córdova Quero (Sexing Jesus: Controversies around Christological Erotic Corporealities in Latin America) writes as a queer believer growing up in Latin America where both Roman Catholic and evangelical churches attach sinfulness to anything related to sexuality, corporeality, or desire. Biblical characters—God, Jesus, disciples, the church—have been depicted as entirely nonsexual under notions of purity and holiness. Jesus has been said to display agape but never the erotic eros, even though eroticism is part of being human and cisheterosexual sex is only one expression of this. The author takes Jesus out of this cisheteropatriarchal closet by first investigating the heritage of religion and sexuality in Latin America from Spanish and Portuguese colonial power, then queering Jesus through queer theologies that acknowledge his corporeality and sexuality. This deconstructs the power structures that colonize theology and faith practice, bringing Jesus closer to the experience of queer believers—a local/contextual approach.

Marian Free (Jesus through Women’s Eyes) briefly outlines the history of women’s marginalization and demonization in Christianity and church, then describes how many women have, in their unique ways and contexts, negotiated these barriers to believe that they are equal before God and that God calls them and acts through them.¹¹ She examines the lives of four quite different women—Teresa of Ávila, Elizabeth Fry, Evelyn Underhill, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza—as examples of this. Teresa of Ávila as a religious felt called to reform the cloister; Quaker Elizabeth Fry, a wife and mother, believed that women had more to offer than being in charge of households, and that the skills learned there could be extended to prisons, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses. Evelyn Underhill was not a reformer or at odds with her church but had a significant influence through her prolific and authoritative writings about spirituality while still maintaining the family home. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s sense of vocation enabled her amazing career as a biblical scholar and author, as she forged a path in academia when women were not welcome, and when others threatened to confine her to the role of wife and support person. She was the first woman to study the full course of theology, write a licentiate, and begin a doctorate in Würzberg—places reserved for men becoming priests. Her reimagining of the world of Jesus through her hermeneutic of suspicion is legendary.

Janice McRandal (Saying No to Jesus: Feminist Theology and the Christian Liberal Fantasy) also examines the consequences for women of patriarchal biblical texts and theology, but she rejects any attempts to refashion Jesus as somehow removed from or above this context—what she calls neoliberal upgrades of an oppressive Christianity. As unfortunate as it may seem to many, she writes, the New Testament is a text born out of patriarchy. Jesus lived within a patriarchal society. The Christian faith is patriarchal in both its origins and its operations throughout history. And we cannot exegete our way out of that . . . Creating a straightforwardly feminist or antipatriarchal Jesus inevitably supports the most violent aspects of Christian thinking, whether it is authoritarianism in hermeneutics, anti-Judaism, or the denial of women’s painful experiences.¹² McRandal examines three influential critiques of this from feminist, womanist, and queer approaches to theology, bringing these critiques to bear on contemporary theological moves to put Jesus on the right side of history.

All of us inevitably have our own afterlives of Jesus, which may have evolved over a lifetime or remained the same. These three volumes, and particularly this third volume, demonstrate both the diversity and particularity of such afterlives emerging from so many different contexts. They allow us to reflect on who Jesus was and is for us, and who Jesus might yet become.

1

. See Chapter

1

(page

21

), below.

2

. See Chapter

2

(page

22

), below.

3

. See Chapter

3

(page

38

), below.

4

. See Chapter

3

(page

39

), below.

5

. Aotearoa is simply the modern Maori term for the whole country, and an alternative to the name New Zealand. It is increasingly common to use the double name, so that both the Indigenous and the European traditions are given equal respect.

6

. See Chapter

4

(page

65

, below).

7

. See Chapter

6

(page

83

), below.

8

. See Chapter

6

(page

84

), below.

9

. See Chapter

8

(page

118

), below.

10

. See Chapter

8

(page

130

), below.

11

. See Chapter

10

(page

149

), below.

12

. See Chapter

11

(page

175

), below.

1

Jesus through Indigenous Australian Eyes

Glenn Loughrey

My proposition in this chapter is to reverse the normative practice of critiquing Aboriginality (what you name spirituality) through a Christian lens and instead critique Jesus through an indigenous lens. We will find that Jesus can be seen positively by doing so, but not as an icon of conversion and replacement, but rather as an ordinary tribal man, woman and child—useful to our understanding of ourselves within our natural environment.

I will assert that Jesus could be understood as an indigenous elder empowered by the tradition and language of his father’s and mother’s country.¹³ He was a tribal man committed to the custodial ethic of responsibility and reciprocity. Jesus lives between the two trees of his life in such a way that he reconciles the sins of the past, works towards wholeness in the now, and provides the wisdom for a resurrected life for all.

This assertion is not about a divine man interested in individual sins, but one interested in wholeness and harmony for all his kin, all who share his world on country. In this way, he is not unlike every Aboriginal person whose vocation is to live out their Aboriginality in this way.

To support my position, I will unpack each of the elements included in the previous two paragraphs. This will allow me to highlight an Aboriginal way of seeing Jesus without the need to jettison Aboriginality as the core of my belief. It is important to note that as I am looking from an Aboriginal point of view, I will not engage in using Christian scripture to support my work. Christian readers are asked to look and see where there is any evidence in your texts to support my suggestions.

Ngiyanggarang

¹⁴
(Introduction)

Aboriginals don’t need Jesus. There. I have said it.

For some this will be a challenging and confronting idea. Colonial Christianity has always sought to convert people to Jesus as the one true way to salvation and the Divine. It is integral to the colonial (or five-hundred-year) project—to get all the world to adhere to a specific economic and governance model while ensuring all were enculturated with White religion.

This enculturation resulted in Aboriginal people seeing their cultural landscape through Christian eyes, appropriating our way of seeing to support the colonial culture entrenched in the Jesus cult. We heard and continue to hear Aboriginal people referring to God and Jesus always being here, and that we are to be thankful that White people came to make it possible for us to see it. This dislocation of our foundational way of seeing leads to dysfunction and shame that we are not enough without another’s religion to make us whole.

Genocide is not just the destruction of populations of people but is the destruction of a way of being and seeing embedded in the body and psyche of individuals and communities. Aboriginal or indigenous populations around the world were decimated by violence, disease, and separation from country and community: In this way indigenous people were intentionally disempowered. Dislocation from culture and country was vital to rendering them pliable to a new power, colonialism, at work in the world.

Jesus is not part of our culture. He was not here before colonization, and nor were the Holy Spirit and God. This is vital to understand. Ideas such as these come from people embedded in the Christian worldview because they were not allowed to be anything else. In trying to make sense of the destruction of what they either knew or had heard about, people took on—often with gusto—the worldview of the colonizers. In doing so they found ways to appropriate the Christian Godhead into their own worldview.

While there are similarities between the worldviews, even places where core ideas cross over and blend, the essence of each is distinctly different. One is a theophysical understanding of a divine figure both outside and within the material world; the other is geophysical and concerned with unity and harmony within the material domain.

It follows that there is no such thing as Aboriginal theology. Aboriginal theology is an attempt to appropriate our way of seeing in order to neutralize the colonial underpinnings of organized religion. It can be described as an Aboriginal liberation process, but instead of liberating us from the strictures of formal theology, it embeds us further in a foreign or replacement world. It is not liberating to reimagine scripture with a brown skin. What you end up with is akin to chocolate-coated vanilla ice cream: Aboriginal-looking on the outside, colonial on the inside.

We have no need to appropriate Jesus. We have a highly sophisticated and developed way of seeing, which has evolved over between sixty-five thousand and 125 thousand years, ensuring that we live in harmony with our kin.15 It is the need of the five-hundred-year project to dismantle all opposing worldviews and to replace them with a compliant, system-focused set of practices and beliefs at all levels of society. It is the need of the White core to ensure that those who do not embrace this way of being are consigned to or remain on the margins. In Australia, the most recent example of this was the Northern Territory Emergency Response.¹⁶

Jesus entered our world through the invasion and the action of those who ran the missions to which we were sent, where we were not allowed to practice our way of being, to speak our songs, or to sing up the spirits. All attempts to indigenize Jesus are simply neocolonialism, colonialism in different clothes.

Jesus is a replacement for what we had, what was genuinely ours and of this place—our Aboriginality—often misrepresented as Aboriginal spirituality, a category that is not part of our way of seeing. Referring to Aboriginality, the embedded way of seeing, as spirituality is an attempt to label and explain the unexplainable and mysterious so that it aligns with what we imagine we know or have experienced. It is an attempt to domesticate difference and disinherit its authenticity and reality for those for whom it gives meaning to life.

It is not a separate category. It is us.

Minya-wa-nyila?¹⁷
(What is aboriginality?)

You are spiritual because of your identity as an Aboriginal. You’re Aboriginal because you have no choice but to be. It is born in you. You’re spiritual because Aboriginality is your DNA. It comes with you into this world and remains with you until you leave, regardless of what you do with it. What you actually do with it will impact you and your community’s life.

To ignore it and assimilate into the dominant culture disempowers your real self and leaves you living in no-man’s land, a false self, disconnected from the source of your life. Why? Because while you may ignore it, since it is embedded in you, it does not ignore you, and you will be confronted by its presence in your everyday existence.

Being Aboriginal is a way of seeing. It is how you see yourself, the world, others, and the universe, and it guides you, teaches you, and ensures you act out respect and hospitality to all. You view the world through the lens of your own indigeneity as a means of making sense of what is foreign and otherworldly to the world you know.

Aboriginal identity changes the way you see the world. You are deeply connected to the country as your databank or sacred text of knowledge. You are informed by your relationships to others and live with a communal—not an individual—focus, identifying with the kinship matrix, language groupings, ceremony, and law. They come not as individual elements overseen by different groups, such as is the case in Western society. They are indelibly entwined and come as one unique package: you.

You stand both at the center and at the margins of society, viewing