Reweaving the mat, diversifying the menu
11:58 18/06/2024
In his afterword to Anglican Theology: Postcolonial Perspectives, (edited by James Tengatenga and Stephen Burns), Peniel Rajkumar argues that the issue isn't that large numbers of global Anglican theologians aren't speaking, it's that the Western church isn't listening.
As early as in 1974 the inspirational John S Mbiti drew our attention to the shift in the gravity of World Christianity towards new centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America and raised an important point about the theological implications of this shift. He wrote:
Theologians from the New (or younger) churches [of the South] have made their pilgrimages to the theological learning of the older churches [of the North]. We had no alternative. We have eaten theology with you; we have drunk theology with you; we have dreamed theology with you… We know you theologically. The question is. Do you know us theologically? Would you like to know us theologically?[i]
Anglican Theology: Postcolonial Perspectives, through its eclectic assemblage of essays, can be understood as offering answers for all those who might be inclined to positively respond to the question Mbiti raised almost fifty years ago—‘Would you like to know us theologically? Bearing witness to the insistently postcolonial character of Anglican theology in a context now often described in terms of ‘World Christianities’, the book in many ways eschews the classic postcolonial question of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’[ii]. Instead, what seems implicit throughout this volume is the question—Can we listen to the voices of the subalterns?—if we understand the broad term ‘subalterns’ in the context of this book as those “Anglican theologians little-known or neglected in the north and west”, to use the editors’ own words from the introduction. It is not that these theologians have not ‘spoken’. They have indeed been some of the most erudite and prophetic voices of our time. However, whether they have been accepted as representing the voice of contemporary Anglicanism is the deeper concern that foregrounds this volume. The unspoken invitation at the heart of this book is to listen—to hear both the words captured in this volume and beyond, especially paying attention to the loud silence that surrounds the acceptance of tricontinental theologians as representatives of contemporary Anglicanism.
In my opinion the book accomplishes two important things:
1) Reweaving the Theological Mat of Anglicanism
First, the book reweaves the theological mat of Anglican theology today by pulling together diverse strands of theologising from across the Anglican Communion, thereby co-creating a space which can draw us together for renewed dialogue and debates on the scope, style and substance of Anglican theology(ies) in a post-colonial world.
This reweaving of the theological mat of Anglican theology is also in some ways a cartographical exercise because it also simultaneously involves redrawing the theological map of Anglican theologies by highlighting and celebrating the polycentric nature of Anglicanism. The idea of cartography or map-making that I have in mind is not necessarily the politically expedient, imperial geo-political fabrications forcefully foisted ‘by the arbitrariness of a colonial mapmaker’s pen’,[iii] which continue to divide people and distort futures on the basis of colonial legacies. The idea of cartography that I have in mind is more akin to decolonial mapping practices of indigenous communities who offer a more dynamic rather than static mapping of the world we inhabit, providing us with new methods of relating to our worlds with a focus on relationality and the recovery of what has been erased and forgotten—all of which are quintessential to a reimagination of Anglican theological landscapes vis-à-vis the witness, words and writings of the people whom they shaped.
Through this reweaving of the theological mat and the redrawing of the theological map of Anglicanism, the various contributions in this book help us address a persistent impasse in Anglican theology. Anyone attentive to the changing dynamics of global Anglicanism will recognize that though global Anglicanism has now found home and host in the tricontinental countries (particularly Africa and Asia, without failing to remember Latin America and Oceania), this demographic shift has not necessarily led to a renewed understanding of Anglican theology. There seems to be a rather dispassionate contentment with rehearsing Eurocentric and monologic ways of conflating Anglicanism with England and Englishness. This impasse is now long recognised as ‘a deficiency that needs to be addressed’.[iv]
Overcoming this impasse—needs passionate, (im)patient, and perseverant chipping away at the grand wall of epistemic imperialism that still continues to divide Christian theologies emerging from the west and north as ‘mainstream’ and the tri-continental world as ‘contextual’. This epistemic imperialism which is predicated by the claims to universality and normativity of these ‘mainstream theologies’, stems from, and has in turn, sustained historical injustices. It has created a theological divide which has privileged the ‘objective’ over the experiential. In contexts of such epistemic imperialism the acts of reweaving the mat and redrawing the maps of our theologies can be significant steps towards creating and inhabiting a renewed Anglican theological world—which, not only recognizes, but also seeks to reverse, the presence, pervasiveness and persistence of colonialism (both in the past and the present) as not just a political but also an epistemological and theological reality.
All this focus on reweaving the mat and redrawing the map of Anglican theologies so that it corresponds more coherently to the demographic shift of global Anglicanism, should not distract us into thinking of this thrust towards the postcolonial reimagination of Anglican theologies as something dictated by numerical considerations alone. Rather the thrust here is on breaking the monologic around Anglican theologies and affirming their pluriform nature by holding together both the polycentric (multi-centred) as well as the polysemic (multi-layered) nature of global Anglicanism, which should lead us to my next point.
2) Diversifying the Menu of Anglican Theology
Spreading out the rewoven mat of Anglican theologies is also an invitation for a feast. In many ways, Anglican Theology: Postcolonial Perspectives is undoubtedly a feast, to put it in cliched terms. In several cultures, including my own, a mat also provides the ritual and communal space for common celebration, on which rural communities bring together their various gifts in the context of a community meal and collaborate in its preparation.
In line with this image of the mat and feast, the second important thing about this volume is that it calls us to diversify the menu of the feast of Anglican theology by interrupting its ongoing ‘Whiteness’. Kehinde Andrews in his book, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, reminds us that in a neo-colonial world ‘diversifying those dining on the spoils of the empire does not change the menu’. [v] This likely holds true for Anglican theology too. As I mentioned earlier, one of the important challenges that global theologies have to address today is the question of epistemic imperialism. Doing theology amidst a context identified as that of the empire is in some ways about de-mythologising the persistent ‘eurocentric normativity’ of our theological churning – which has been sustained in some ways, by the empires of our times.
In many places around the world theology continues to serve as the surrogate space for the rehabilitation of colonialism, even after the departure of colonial regimes and imperial missions. It does so by being caught in a ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’ [vi] frame of thinking, which reinstates the west as the theological world’s centre of gravity. In this theological cosmos, Christian theologies from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania are rendered as perpetual latecomers and constant learners in doing theology, because their ways of thinking and doing theology do not mimic the logic of the empire. The price of participation in this theological economy is therefore self-erasure, and coerced unlearning of diverse methods and modes of thinking about God and the world. In such contexts, the challenge that emerges from the various prophetic voices that have been featured in this volume is what the South African theologian Vuyani Vellem felicitously terms as ‘unthinking the west’,[vii] where we seek to free all forms of theologising from the stranglehold of epistemic imperialism. This task necessitates moving beyond our current failure and fatigue—both in terms of our imagination and action—to cultivate more global understandings of the Anglican theological tradition.
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Penial Rajkumar is Global Theologian with USPG and an adjunct lecturer at Ripon College Cuddesdon near Oxford, UK.
[i] John Mbiti, ‘Theological Impotence and the Universality of the Church’. In Mission Trends 3: Third World Theologies, ed. by Gerald Anderson and Thomas Stransky (New York: Paulist, 1976),16-17. This article first appeared in Lutheran World 21, no.3, 1974.
[ii] This is the title of Spivak’s essay, which appeared in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988).
[iii] Shashi Tharoor Inglorious Empire: What The British Did To India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2016), 248.
[iv] Mark Chapman, Anglican Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2012), 172.
[v] Kehinde Andrews The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (London: Penguin, 2021), xix.
[vi] Dipesh Chakrabarthy, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, new ed. 2009), 3.
[vii] Vuyani Vellem, ‘Un-thinking the West: The Spirit of Doing Black Theology of Liberation in Decolonial Times’. In HTS Teologiese Studies 73.3 (2017): 1–9 (2).
