by Teotonio R. de Souza, S.J.
LOCAL CHURCHES :
Some Historical-Theological Reflections in the Asian Context
The Problem
The concept of "local church" is fundamental for any meaningful discussion of, or for plans for, the implementation of "Basic Christian Communities". The "local church" understood in the sense of some administrative unit of the Church at some level of Church structure is not what makes the "local church" an important issue in the Church today. Seeking parallels in the early history of Church expansion in the form of the churches the Apostles left behind (1) can help us to understand the tensions of locality and catholicity experienced by the followers of Christ from the time Christianity evolved as an expanding social organization.
The expansion of the Church over space and time eventually came to mean that the expansion of communities accompanied the political, economic, social and cultural domination of one society by another. This process was accompanied, as could be expected, by divisive and secessionist tendencies at the level of diakonia within local communities, and at the level of koinonia between communities.
As illustrations of intra-societal conflicts, we have the case of Ananias, who was reluctant to share his goods [Acts 5:1-11], and the necessity of the creation of the ministry of "deacons" when Hebrews and Hellenists had a conflict over the distribution of alms [Acts 6:1-6].
The "heresies" of the early centuries and thereafter illustrate the inter-societal trend of cultural domination in the Roman empire and should be analyzed along these lines, rather than treated as purely doctrinal conflicts. As long as the communities were few and small, personal apostolic admonitions (as seen from the Pauline and Johannine epistles) seem to have succeeded in maintaining the balance between locality and universality without serious damage to koinonia, but as larger political-cultural boundaries were being crossed and apostolic authority was taking dominant political-cultural forms, diversity of ecclesiologies was not an easy alternative to heresies and schisms.
With the emergence of what is called the European World-Economic System (2) and the global expansion of Christianity, it became even more difficult to maintain this balance. In the new colonial set-up, Europe became the "centre" and the "pole of religious expansion", while the colonies became the "periphery", where consensus operated in structures of dependence and domination. In this bipolar context, the catholicity of the Church was linked with the metropolitan church and its western association with the Roman church. Ideological cultural hegemony was located there, and the churches in the "periphery" were only missionary appendages to the church at the "centre". Since Vatican II, it appears that we have been witnessing a change in the approach of the dominant Roman Catholic Church towards the churches of the Third World, the non-Catholic churches, and the other religions. Is this a new self-understanding, or only a tactical theological concession to the post-colonial world situation?
1.Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (London : Geoffrey Chapman, 1984).
2.Wallerstein, I., The Models World-System, 2 vols. (Florida, U. S. A., Academic Press Inc., 1974-80)
The Approach
Much has been written in recent years on the issue of the local Church (with variations in terminology) and the most that I could claim to do in this paper is to focus on some points that perhaps have not been sufficiently stressed and which could help us understand the problems of localizing the church, which is essential for its true catholicity. Without a good grasp of such issues, serious experiment with "small faith communities" could prove frustrating. As may be expected, our approach will be predominantly historical, but with an awareness of, and sensitivity to, the theological implications for churches in the Third World. The church of Hong Kong is likely to enter into this category.
It is not possible in the space available to enter into factual details of the origin and evolution of the individual local churches in Asia. However, the colonial atmosphere in which they grew has shaped their growth and evolution. The Portuguese and Spanish expansion determined to a large extent the pattern of evolution of the local churches all over Asia, including regions that came under control of other European powers in the course of later centuries. The recipient cultures need also to be taken seriously into consideration to understand the nature of the local churches in Asia. My concluding section will pay special attention to this.
The Church in History : Witnessing to the Gospel?
In the guidelines issued for drawing up the FABC / TAC document on THE LOCAL CHURCH, it was stated that the "being of the Church" is not separable from its "mission". This would imply that the nature of the Church can be best understood only against the background of its past and its doings in the past, without of course negating potentialities for the filture. The scriptural "mission" to all nations and till the end of time does not by itself and without reference to the historical growth of the Church help us to understand how that "mission" was actuated. Furthermore, new challenges to "mission" cannot be understood except in the historical conjuncture that has evolved from both the distant and the more recent past.
The beginning of the Church is traced back scripturally to Pentecost Day, when the outpouring of the Spirit found people from all over the world speaking their own tongues and all understanding each other－a reversal of the Biblical Babel. Although this phenomenon may help to explain some constitutive elements of the Church, particularly the central role of the Holy Spirit, it does not help to understand the actual process by which Christianity expanded into new regions with different cultures. Rather, the Pentecost narrative idealizes the issue. Practically at no stage of the history of the expanding Church have its individuality and universality been so easily manifested as in the Pentecost narrative! There is little likelihood that people today will accept a theology of "mission" that would overstress the idealism of the scriptures without explaining why that idealism has taken less ideal forms in the course of the past twenty centuries.
The gradual self-understanding of the Church is itself a part of its historical nature, as when Jesus said: "when the Spirit comes ... he will lead you into all the truth" (Jn 16:12-12). In time, and assisted by the Holy Spirit, the Church has realized that she has too often been a victim of her own self-justifying rhetoric. In seeking unity, the Church sometimes fell into a cult of uniformity, of a monolithic Church, which aspired to a single universal language (Latin), a single theological system (Neo-Scholasticism), a single system of worship (the Roman Rite), and a single system of government (the Code of Canon Law). The Church also sought catholicity in universal expansion and in an irrational quest for bigness. The notion of mission was corrupted by the imperialistic effort to bring as many as possible into the fold, and by the adoption of the maxim "Outside the Church no salvation". The "barbarians" of the empires were substituted by "pagans". This trend is turning with the more recent self-understanding, but it does not seem to lead as yet to the understanding of the unity of mutual charity leading to a universality of communion of friends. (3)
3.Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Hong Kong, 1985).
Catholicity : Communion or Domination?
In Western histories of the Church and other theological writings, one commonly reads about the distinction between Latin and Greek Churches, designated as Western and Eastern Churches. I have not come across any serious questioning of this terminology. The term "Eastern" can only tenuously be justified for the Church of Constantinople on the basis of the influence it exercised over the East as a result of the inherited Hellenistic cultural influence in some border areas of the Persian empire, but it was still very much a Greek European church in the eastern part of the Roman empire. The so-called "Churches of Asia" were mostly the churches in Asia Minor, the European Turkey of today. The influence of the Greek Church over Russia was still restricted to the East of Europe.
Moreover, it was the "caesaro-papism" of the Byzantine Church that created problems for the survival of local churches in the Sassanid Persian empire and led to the break-away of the East-Syrian (Chaldean) Church, which kept links with Christianity in the real Asia that was hardly known to Europe. This separation took place before the end of the 5th century.
Hence, the conflicts between the Latin and Greek Churches were very much East-West conflicts within Europe and may be seen as distant heralds of the nationalisms that would emerge following the peak of the Latin hegemony in the Christendom of the Middle Ages. However, there is no denying the fact that the geographical-cultural proximity of the Byzantine Church to the East showed in it some eastern cultural traces that differed somewhat from the Latin concerns. However, the deeper cause of the tension and eventual schism was the cultural predominance that Byzantine Europe enjoyed over the western half as a result of the shift of the capital. The socio-economic and cultural insufficiency of Western Europe and its new political developments enabled the papacy in Rome to exercise leadership and rally the feelings of the western half by drawing upon the Petrine and Roman imperial tradition to compensate for its losses.
In this conflict, the strength of the Byzantine church, namely the presence of the emperor, became also its weakness. It had to share its authority with the emperor, while the papacy in the West could present a unified command and the allegiance of its more rural subjects. Also the prosperity and pomp of the court and its munificence to the Patriarch and hierarchy could hardly provide sufficient experience of threat even in the midst of growing demands of the Roman church for supremacy. Besides, while the emperor could trust himself to control the dissatisfaction of his Byzantine subjects in and around the capital, logistics required that he should be more generous to the demands of the subjects that he had left behind and in the more distant part of the empire.
This may partly explain the nature of imperial interventions and the position taken by the emperor in ecclesiastical conflicts. These socio-politico-cultural contradictions of Western-Eastern European societies can explain to some extent the problems of individuality and catholicity, which saw further deepening when the whole of Europe was reduced to the "periphery" by the Arab-Turkish "centre". In the new situation of encircled Europe, the "crisis of feudalism" * put the religiosity of the local churches of Europe to a severe test.
The "truce of God" could provide only a limited respite, and it was the leadership of the papacy that provided a catholic solution by calling upon the mutually feuding Christian princes and nobles to engage their energies in crusades, which could provide the required Lebensraum. The crusades also offered opportunity to Rome to establish Latin patriarchates in Constantinople, Jerusalem and Antioch and thereby encroach upon the traditional eastern patriarchates.
The Iberian expansion in the 15th century was largely motivated by a continued internal crisis provoked by a population explosion and food shortages. The papal intervention provided a catholic solution to the two Iberian Christian powers that suspected each other's gains in the new enterprise. The catholicity of the intervention was curiously expressed by dividing the globe for the peaceful pursuit of colonization and evangelization by the two contending Catholic powers. The "Roman complex", developed over the centuries of European history with its internal West-East (Oriental Schism) and North-South (Reformation) divides, seems to have been a long preparatio evangelica for a real "missionary" phase. Attempts were made to restore its scriptural meanings to the term "mission", but that could not justify denying the historical origin of its usage and the historical connotations it has assumed in the course of the colonial and imperial phases of European expansion.
Mission : Deculturation before Inculturation?
The people in the Third World can learn from Scripture the nature of an ideal Church, but their own Churches were given birth by "mother Churches" that sent missionaries to them. I am not referring to the Syrian Church in South India, which was an exception. The European missionaries were sponsored by colonial governments or were at least protected by their power and shared their prestige. Thus, for instance, Franciscan and Dominican missionaries accompanied the Portuguese and Spanish royal fleets right from the beginning. When the Society of Jesus was just founded and King John III of Portugal came to hear of its Counter-Reformation zeal, he thought of it as best suited for the colonial designs of the Portuguese. He was not wrong in his expectations. There is abundant documentary evidence to show how the missionaries, particularly the Jesuits in India and the Dominicans in the Philippines, justified the colonial enterprise and defended it against native opposition and resistance. Their early writings express convictions that Portugal and Spain were created by God for the express purpose of spreading the Roman Catholic faith around the world. Rizal may have been exaggerating a little when he wrote in his Noli me Tangere: "The Government itself sees nothing, hears nothing and decides nothing except what the parish priest or the head of a religious Order makes it see, hear and decide".(5)
In Portuguese India the situation was not different. The great missionary of the Indies, St. Francis Xavier, was convinced that it was hard to establish Christianity among the orientals (Negroes) and harder to preserve it, except in coastal regions where the Portuguese control and Portuguese gunboats held sway.(6)
Even when the natives were admitted to the ranks of lower clergy, the white Religious Orders kept control of the "frontier" where the loyalty of the native clergy was not trusted. The Religious Orders in the forefront of the missions justified their reluctance to hand over responsibility to the native clergy by describing every Religious House as a fort and every white Religious as a captain in the service of the Crown.(7) It was not different anywhere in the colonies. A viceroy of Mexico once observed: "In each friar in the Philippines, the king has the equivalent of a captain-general and an entire army"(8) The missionaries were far cheaper and more effective than large and costly garrisons would have been.
With the advent of imperialism and the breaking of the Chinese melon and the partition of Africa in the 19th century, missionary societies, predominantly Protestant, mushroomed all over the colonies. The Treaty of Berlin provided for free movement of missionary societies across territorial boundaries irrespective of the colonial powers which ruled the territories in question. In practice, however, each colonial power tended to accord preferential treatment to missionary societies originating in its own metropolitan country.
Christian missionaries were sent specifically to "civilize" the natives of the colonies and to act as the links between the rulers and the ruled. They were to provide literacy and other skills to the people who were later to become interpreters, clerks, teachers, evangelists, and artisans in the service of the colonial administrations. The converts became extension officers in the process of Europeanization. The degree of conversion to Christianity was defined in terms of the extent to which the convert had absorbed and adopted the culture of the resident missionary. This acculturation was meant to help in the long run to create tastes in the native population for goods that the imperialists had to offer. It was a process in which the western missionaries cooperated enthusiastically till the political process of de-colonization put an end to it. The newly emerged independent nations saw in their political independence the necessary pre-condition for socio-economic and cultural advancement. In reality, the end of colonialism and its physical restrictions on the world-market was a requirement for the emergence of Financial Capitalism in the United States of America in the early decades of this century.
Third World countries are now politically independent, but also fully exposed to the neo-colonial exploitation of Western capitalism. The situation of dependence continues to enable the West to protect its agencies (multinational corporations) in the dependent regions and the Churches have not been very free from its manipulative capacity. Problems confront the churches of the world "periphery" on two fronts. They must struggle for their indigenous character and at the same time and in opposition to their "mother" churches, seek to create an understanding of the needs of their poverty-stricken masses, exploited by a system which, located at the "centre", benefits those same "mother" churches which supposedly aid the "periphery" with their "alms", which amount to only an insignificant fraction of what has been extracted from the "periphery" in the form of profits in an unjust international system.(9)
While the mission of the Church is to witness to the Gospel, we have seen briefly the destruction that this mission wrought in the Third World in collaboration with the Western powers. Though the destructive contribution of the missions to the Third World will never be sufficiently emphasized, one needs to see also the direct and indirect positive aspects that could be classified as "saving" features. It is to be noted, for example, that in most cases the conversions were made among the oppressed sections of the native society. Their conversion and collaboration with the external elements to challenge the predominance of the elite held out a concealed threat and acted as a catalytic agent for promoting reform during the centuries.
In India, for instance, the mass conversions acted as a shock-retreatment on the orthodox Hindu society. It has now learned that the revolutionary potential of low castes, outcastes and tribals cannot be underestimated. However, in the post-independent era the converted minorities are facing a crisis of cultural identity and this is due to the earlier process of acculturation which made them a cultural tragi-comedy, people who do not belong either to the Western culture or to the national Eastern culture. This is how many Christians in Hong Kong may find themselves, between the devil and the deep, unwanted by England and misfits for the Chinese dispensation. This is where the issue of inculturation becomes urgent. Translated bibles and translated rituals cannot provide satisfactory results. Christianity will still remain an implant, and never be a graft living on the sap of the native culture.
Church institutions which have been imported from the West and are deemed as vital for the universality of the Church and its unity, need to be subjected to acceptance or rejection by the native cultural world-view and its values wherever these do not conflict with genuine Gospel values. Unfortunately, in countries where the Western capitalist system does not have full sway, the presumed necessity of many juridical and other expressions of authority and discipline is no longer considered essential.
Generally it is the financial dependence of the Third World Churches needed to maintain institutional luxuries that keeps the clerical bourgeoisie linked with the West to safeguard personal privileges. As a result of its self-sufficiency with funds from abroad, the hierarchy does not need to depend on local resources. This enables it to live well without full integration in the concerns of the people. Within the hierarchy, moreover, those who depend more on foreign resources are also likely to act as watchdogs of foreign interests and to seek external intervention in matters which could and should be sorted out in the country.
It is in this context that an extra-territorial juridical centre does not appear to be a help towards the successful inculturation of local churches. The reluctance of Rome to acknowledge a greater autonomy on the part of the national episcopal conferences is one cause for serious concern and suspicion. Does Rome really serve the local churches, or wish them to grow out of their centuries of domination, including religious domination, and begin to live at a level of equality and genuine communion with all churches under the spiritual leadership, rather than the juridico-political domination of the Pope? Or is Rome only peddling documents on "Local Churches" to keep them humoured? Is it possible that an episcopal conference like that of India, with about 122 bishops, is incompetent to decide most of the matters pertaining to their national church? As a result we have an old church in India which has not really grown up. The process of deculturation may have to continue before Christians in Asia and elsewhere can truly be at home in their own countries and experience the Incarnation.
4.Wallerstein, I 37 ff.
5.Rizal, Noli me Tangere (Trans. Leon Ma. Guerrero, Hong Kong, 1986) 157.
6.Valignano, Historia del Principio y Progresso de la Compania de Jesus en las Indias Orientals (ed. J. Wicki, Rome, 1944) 70.
7.Teotonio R. de Souza, "The Portuguese in Asia and their Church Patronage", in : Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity (ed. M. D. David, Bombay, 1988) 11-29.
8.C.R. Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion (Baltimore, 1978) 75.
9.E. Dussel, "Some Hypotheses", in : Towards a History of the Church in the Third World (ed. Lukas Vischer, Bern, 1985) 110-130.
Asian Cultures and Inculturation
We are still in need of more than stereotypes for understanding what may be called Asian cultural traits. Some of the stereotypes were created by foreign dominators to suit their own interests. One current stereotype is the difference between materialist and spiritual societies. Pre-industrial societies were regarded as more spiritual. This reinforced the notion of the spirituality of the Indian pre-industrial past. It was a sort of compensation for the humiliation of the present. Gandhi even took pride in the absence of technological change and attributed it to the wisdom of the forefathers, "who knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre".(10)
Gunnar Myrdal in his Asian Drama explains Indian "spirituality" as due to a lack of sufficient calories! Non-violence in Indian culture is particularly related to cow-protection, and, in the form of ahimsa, the Buddhists and Jains have made a general ethical value of it. Possibly it was meant to discourage inter-tribal warfare and encourage the expansion of settled agriculture and trade. Buddhism and Jains are known for their origin from new urbanization in the Ganges valley based on iron, the widespread domestication of the horse, and the extension of plough agriculture. The reaction of the new sects is understandable against the background of the concept of matsyanyaya, or the large fish devouring the small fish, known from the Mahabharata and Manusmriti and Dharmashastras. The competition for power ended in the 4th century B. C. with the emergence of the Mauryan empire, which during the reign of Asoka comprised almost the entire subcontinent, and the emergence of Buddhism, which reflected his concern for safeguarding his acquisitions against prospective rivals. Hence, history has little to vouch for the non-violence and spirituality of the Indian culture.(11)
The above considerations are important for any meaningful study of the issue of inculturation. The concept of "culture" that a national bourgeoisie tends to cultivate is often the same as that which the Catholic Church holds because of its own bourgeois composition. This is a "museum" or "entertainment" concept of culture, and not that of culture as "manifestations" of the life-style of people. Which such a concept of culture, one fails to grasp that culture is "living" and that any contribution to it should help the people to cope with their present life-challenges.
All efforts at inculturation of the Church will have to keep these considerations in mind. Inculturation cannot be imposed by force, and much less by a clergy that is alienated from the masses of the people by its training, its institutional affiliations and its association with extra-territorial mentors. This is an area for the church leadership in Hong Kong to reflect seriously on. There may be a need of greater involvement on the part of the clergy in the life-concerns of the common and marginalized people, and this should be done by soiling their hands and feet. Inculturation will then take care of itself.(12) Only then will the true meaning of mission be restored and genuine witnessing of the Good News captivate more hearts.(13)
Even if the Catholic Church wishes to persist in its managerial attitude, particularly with its West-based and centralizing Roman curia, it should by now take serious note of the failure of its global machinery to raise the membership of the Catholic Church in Asia to more than an insignificant percentage of its millions. Even poverty has not been a sufficient motivation for Asians to accept the westernized brand of Christianity. And it is less likely to be an attraction in the post-colonial period with greater sensitivity to national cultures. Hence, the West-based, West-trained, or West-influenced Church managers may have to learn carefully the Asian cultural traits that make Asian cultures immune or resistant to the Westernized package of Christianity.
10.Quoted by R. Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History (Delhi, 1978) 17.
11.R. Thapar, op. cit. 46, 54, 308.
12.cf. Aloysius Pieris, An Asian Theology of Liberation, (New York, 1988) 38ff.
13.Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, (Michigan, 1962).
Some Asian Culture Traits
Since 1967 IBM had been conducting worldwide comparative attitude surveys of its employees. By 1973 they had collected 116000 answer forms in 20 different languages from 72 countries. The analysis of these data showed that there were four dimensions on which the culture differences between countries could be measured. The researchers identified these four dimensions as (1) Power Distance; (2) Individualism-Collectivism; (3)Masculinity-Femininity; (4)Uncertainty Avoidance.
(1) Power Distance represents the extent to which the less powerful members of an organization or institution (e.g. the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. The inequality is defined from below, not from above; and a society's level of inequality is endorsed by its followers as much as by its leaders.
(2) Individualism - Collectivism describes the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. In individualist groups the ties between individuals are loose, and everyone is expected to look after himself / herself and the immediate family. In collectivist societies people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups. Often their extended families continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word "collectivism" here has no political meaning. It refers to a group, not to the state.
(3) Masculinity - Femininity. The distribution of roles between the sexes is a fundamental issue in any society. In some societies men's values differ very much from women's values, while in other societies this difference is not very great. In Western societies men are supposed to be very assertive and competitive, while women are supposed to be modest and nurturing. On the basis of the degree of assertiveness and competitiveness we can speak of masculine countries and feminine countries.
The above three dimensions refer to three types of expected social behaviour: Behaviour towards people higher or lower in rank (Power Distance), behaviour towards the group (Individualism-Collectism), and behaviour according to one's sex role (Masculinity-Femininity). If we compare the three dimensions with the teaching of Confucius, it will be no surprise that the dragon countries are high on Power Distance, low on Individualism, and mid-range in Masculinity-Femininity.
(4) The fourth dimension was Uncertainty Avoidance. This indicates to what extent a culture programmes its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Uncertainty-avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of novel, unknown, surprising situations by adhering to strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and a belief in absolute truths. People in uncertainty-avoiding countries are also more emotional and motivated by inner nervous energy. Uncertainty-accepting cultures are more tolerant of differences in behaviour and opinion; they try to have as few rules as possible, they are relativist in their beliefs, and allow many currents to flow side by side. People in these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative; their environment does not expect them to express emotions. The dragon countries are weak in uncertainty-avoidance.
Two other studies independently designed and conducted also attempt to measure cultural differences. The Rockeach Value Survey designed in the U. S. A. surveyed nine Asian countries among others; and the Chinese Value Survey designed in Hong Kong surveyed 82 different countries of the world. The overlap between the findings of the three studies was remarkable because they used completely different questionnaires on different populations during different years. The reason may be that the three types of expected social behaviour towards senior / juniors, towards the group, and as a function of one's sex role are so fundamental to any human society that they are found regardless of whether the value surveys were designed by a Western or an Eastern mind. They are truly universal human traits in the sense that all societies share the same problems, but different societies have "chosen" different solutions. Unfortunately these cultural traits and corresponding resistances have never been properly understood or taken seriously in the response of the local churches of Asia.
A more serious consideration of the Asian cultural traits is crucial for the inculturation of Christianity and for the rejection of West-imposed attitudes and institutions as part of Christian faith. The Church in Hong Kong may need to do such an exercise to adapt its institutions to its cultural traits and shed the cultural values that alienating it from the masses of its people (not just "common" Christians) by being too much of a mix of Christian faith and Western colonial values.