"Dialoguing with the Secular World"
By Rev. Akuila Yabaki
Oct 10, 2005, 12:26

The theme “Dialoguing with the Secular World” discussed in the context of this Assembly’s theme, “Communication & the Church” needs to be set within an appropriate framework of the mission of the church to the rest of the world.

The Church in the World

The characteristic institution of Christianity is the church. Internal to the church are patterns of sacrament, proclamation and the form of administration shape the character of the religious institution. Every church will have at least an implicit ethic of sex and the family, of politics and power, of economy and work, and of communication and the arts consistent with its core beliefs. Christian principles of right and wrong as they bear on urban, military, international, scientific, technological, professional institutions is one of the most important tasks of Christian ethics as the church faces an increasingly complex network of local, societal, and global,

But as the church sees itself as a piece of the world used by God to approach the world which God would redeem, it is then rescued from the temptation to think that God speaks only within the institution of the Church.

Knowing that God’s purpose enfolds the whole world, and the church is a segment of the world which exists for the world, it also knows that God is at work in the rest of the world outside the Church. In the Bible we see references to pagan witnesses and that God speaks to the world also through pagan witnesses. Yahweh appointed King Cyrus to help his servant Israel whom he has chosen ( Isaiah 45.1f). In the New Testament, in Romans 13 the early Christian community lived under the Roman Empire, a pagan authority structure. The Canaanite women of Mark 7.24f answered with remarkable faith and Matthew 25.31f where in the last judgement pagan nations are included amongst the righteous for services to the needy.

Secularization is about the process by which religion loses some if not all its authority, power and dominance. Its not necessarily inimical to religion. Some beliefs and practices in Judaism and Christianity may have fostered secularization. In the 1960s some theologians , in part under the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, defended what they called worldly, secular, and religionless Christianity. By this Bonhoeffer meant unpietistic, unchurchy Christianity and Christian faith manifested in the whole life of the world , political, social and so forth. The Church must therefore watch for the signs of God’s presence in the world, ready to reach out to work with God at the points where God is at work and to be open to dialogue with pagans.

In this dynamic way of seeing the Church as servant of God’s mission to the world the boundary lines between the Church and the world get dissolved and forces the Church to seek continually for forms of life which will enable it to maintain situations of dialogue in the world and lines of service within the institutions of the world.

Power of Religion

Religion however has the power in the contemporary world to give an answer to the big questions of ‘Who’ and ‘Why’. This is important at a time when globalization threatens to reduce the human person to a mere ‘tool’ for economic progress. This is where the great world religions have a role to play in finding an alternative framework for discussion and action on issues of major concern. However as systems of meaning and purpose, the world’s great faiths are full of dangers. Fiji is an example where the 1987 and 2000 coup leaders from the secular world invoked Christian sentiments to mobilize, manipulate and direct people’s passion and simplicity of beliefs towards racial and religious hatred and bigotry.

For one hundred and twenty five years the three major religions present in Fiji namely Christianity, Hinduism and Islam have co-existed. In the most recent census (1996) of nine years ago Christians make up over half the population, one third are followers of Hinduism, and ten percent are Muslims. The policies of racial segregation practiced during the British colonial period has left a legacy of people living in separate compartments. Because the racial divide is largely a religious one most ethnic Fijians are Christians and most Indo-Fijians are Hindus or Muslim – there has been a tendency for the religions to be isolated from one another.

DEVELOPING DIALOGUE

What this means is that those of us who belong to a faith must wrestle with the sources of religious extremism and fanaticism within our faith. Its called fundamentalism. This is where the struggle for meaningful peace must take place. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book titled The Dignity of Difference (2002) argues for a fresh look at our understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition in view of what is happening in our world today. Based on his reflections and study of the Hebrew Bible, he convincingly argued that God creates difference and that difference is divinely ordained and hence has dignity. Hence all faiths have the imprint of the divine image. And thereforereligions must also enter into dialogue withi one another on peace, for instance.

He argues that the Jewish view is that universalism is not the end but rather the beginning. What this means is that we go for the universal to the particular. For example while I am an advocate of human rights and democracy, I also recognize that support is thin on the ground in Fiji and that it has not penetrated into the Christian, Hindu or Muslim religious consciousness. This has been a constant struggle. My view is that what matters most to people are the moralities of their own religions and cultures and not some abstract ideas. Hence, the language of democracy and human rights must then find its way into the moralities of people’s cultures and religions and what matters most to them. This then has been the basis of my own organisation’s advocacy work on human rights and democracy. If we cherish our own religion, then we will understand the value of others. But if faith is a mere burden, not only will we not value ours, we will not value the faith of someone else. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes,

Understanding the particularity of what matters to us is the best way of coming to appreciate what matters to others. Only when we realize the danger of wishing that everyone should be the same will we prevent senseless violent conflicts and loss of human lives. We learn to live with diversity once we understand that there is dignity in difference.

This view has real implications to our understanding of peace, justice and reconciliation. If the stranger bears the divine imprint then we are liable to treat the stranger with a justice, a reconciliation and a peace that befits the image of God in those whose faith is not ours.

From the point of view of Christian ethics, one of the most important features of secularization in the modern world is the increasing autonomy of social institutions Such institutions earlier resided under what Peter Berger called “sacred canopy” but they now tend to operate according to the functional logic of their own particular domain. In some cases the values embedded in those institutions are defensible –some of them may have originated in Christianity eg the norm of equality – and may be possible to appeal to those values to criticize and direct policies.

PERSONAL JOURNEY

Over thirty years of my ministry I have found myself at the margin of the institutional church and from that position gained a vantage point of how the church seeks to communicate with the world.

In the Pacific the church insulates itself from the modern world. If given the choice to speak the liberating good news of Jesus Christ or justify the existence of religion in its cultural form the church will opt for justifying culture more than the Gospel.

I was born in a koro or village called Ravitaki in Kadavu south of Fiji. I was not born in a hospital but in village, delivered by the village nurse. As a Fijian I belong to a tokatoka, a mataqali (landowning unit) and yavusa. I am happy to a Fijian and proud to be so not because I look down on those who are not indigenous Fijians but because it gives me a sense of identity in the big wide world. My father died when I was very young so my mother brought me up together with a younger sister. Years later when I lived in Britain I found out that mother could be called a single parent and received support from the state. But my mother was trained school teacher and she taught in Methodist Church schools a round Fiji. With her small income she was barely able to make ends meet for the family. School fees were not possible without the help of friends from overseas who had served as missionaries in Fiji.

At about 10 years old my mother was moved from Richmond school in Kadavu to the western side of Viti Levu, the main island in Fiji and to teach in church schools. This was my first contact with the outside world. Western Viti Levu is where the sugar industry is concentrated in Fiji. The steam engine or train pulling the carriages carrying the sugar cane fascinated me; I for the first time met Indo-Fijian farmers. The conversation between Fijian villagers and Indian farmers were mostly either in the Fijian local dialect or Hindi ; they understood each other and this left a deep impression on me as a young boy. The ordinary citizens whether Fijians or Indians practice interdependence which goes beyond blood kinship ties and they had a way of dealing with each other. When our family ran out of money we took Fijian mat to an Indian farmer and sold it as chatai. I got to know and ate Indian sweets as hot beans and peanuts and food such roti and curry. I became used to seeing Indians and Fijians drinking yaqona using enamel basin and piala.

We traveled fairly often on the free train operated by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) connecting the sugar cane fields with the sugar mills. Something about the culture of sugar growing and milling of it and the mix of people that was an ingredient of the sugar industry was part of my upbringing. Later this became known as multiracial population. But I just knew them as ordinary people who went about living their ordinary lives sharing in their struggle for survival.

In 1952 entered a boarding school for eight long years at Lelean Memorial School near Nausori which at the time also had a sugar industry going. I recall the names of some of my class mates; Barkat Ali, Chanderhass, Saiyad Mohammed and also Epeli Hau’ofa and Ilisoni Ligairi.

Again this is multiracial education alongside people from Muslim and Hindu backgrounds.

Early in my ministry I was appointed General Secretary of the Fiji Student Christian Movement. I took a youth leadership role in focusing the attention of high school and University of the South Pacific students on national building. Together with the help of teachers we ran school camps where we had speakers and study groups on the scriptures and its relevance to contemporary issues of the day.

I began to develop an understanding of Christianity that its not an ideology; an abstract doctrine of a fixed system of rituals but as good news which entered the world in a dynamic force encompassing all sides of life, open to everything created by God in nature and in human beings. Christianity is not just a religion and which has existed for the last twenty centuries but a way focused on the future. Christianity amongst the earliest believers was called a Way. (John 14.6; Acts16.17;18.26).

STAND FOR JUSTICE

I spent 15 years in the United Kingdom. first I was appointed to a multicultural congregation in West London between 1979- 86. I returned to Fiji with my family in 1986 and there was a coup in 1987. I became the Fiji Methodist Church’s secretary of communication, a role that put me in charge, amongst other things of the Methodist Church’s newspaper. After the coup de tat of 1987 coup I was one of the few Fijian ministers to publicly protest, individually, in letters to local newspapers, and through editorship of the church newspaper.

With the backing of the ecumenical international communication network which then existed available within WACC I took a stand against the Rabuka military coup. This was in the form of a letter published in the Fiji Times on July 9th, 1987 openly critical of the military coup and the racism which was implicit in it. Whereas the majority in the Church said that the coups was a response to the call of God I begged to differ. The open letter set off a wide debate or controversy not only in the press and radio – no television in Fiji then - but in the streets of Suva in public gatherings in Sukuna Park, around the yaqona bowl in the island communities.

I received anonymous hate letters and phone calls but also support from individual church leaders but more from people of other faiths and the secular world. The letter became the subject widespread debate local international because it provided a Christian perspective which signified that not all in the Methodist Church in Fiji agreed with the coup. It spoke about values of justice and reconciliation which somehow put the coup makers and their protagonists within the Church on the defensive.

It was not long before there was reaction from church supporters of the coup. I was then moved. I took on job as secretary for peace, justice and development with the Pacific Conference of Churches regional office also in Suva. Then my second stint in UK came in 1990 until 1999 when I was appointed by the Methodist Church in Britain as Secretary for Asia and Pacific based in London. In that job I visited churches in Bangladesh, Burma or Myanmar, China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and the Pacific. Over those years, my sense of awareness about the plight and oppression of the minorities largely down trodden was keenly sharpened.

The experience of living abroad for those years has manifested itself in my way of being and existence. It manifested itself for instance in my inward dialogue between experience earned from working in solidarity with the minorities in Asia. It could be said that I look on the issues in the Pacific with tinted glasses. In this connection I have often been subjected to critical comments when on Fijian language talk back radio. One comment is that I am out of touch with indigenous community environment having lived away for so long. The second critical comment is that I am bringing to the local context foreign liberal ideas about human rights. But I have often withstood the accusation because having had a world wide experience I am able to live with the tension of two worlds and engaged in an inward dialogue in myself between the global and the local. Here I accept the view that dialogue is not something added to human being but its constituent and constituting dimension. To be is to dialogue; so that human existence is constituted dialogically.

The coup de tat of 1987 brought the latent prejudices of Christians out into the open as the coup leaders declared that the actions were in response to the call of God. The use of God to justify the coup came largely from Methodists and were based on an understanding of certain parts of the Old Testament scriptures in the Bible.

The coup de tat of 2000 though different in some way from 1987 also had a strong religious tone with Christian worship taking place frequently among the people occupying Parliamentary complex. When hostages were held in Parliament these Pentecostal preachings were heard thundering from around the Parliament; some sermons went on to the middle of the night. The lack of social conscience amongst right wing religion manifested during the hostage crisis is also continued in these days with their constant attack on homosexuality.

With the inseparable union between vanua ( land, chief and people), the lotu

( the church) and matanitu ( state & government) underlined again in 200 coup and the subsequent formation of the Assembly of the Christian Churches of Fiji (ACCF) o bring together the more fundamentalist churches which sought to supersede the Fiji council of Churches there is a need to look for an alternative manifestation of current conservative fundamentalist religion.

DEVELOPING A PROPHETIC STANCE

Many religious traditions have their prophetic streams. Jewish and Christian faith has their prophetic tradition. The Biblical prophets encourage us to be suspicious of the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few; they encourage us not to trust ideological rationale that endorses ethnicity as the primary form of separating the people who belong to one nation. The religion of the prophet encourages us to be sensitive to the poor in a time of increasing poverty; the marginalized and the stranger.

Two thousand years ago Jesus of Nazareth liberated his followers from religion; for this he was killed because he believed and taught that his own religion Judaism was just a form. He taught that his religion was an imperfect vehicle for what is real: what is real is the immediate presence of God. The reason why the religious authorities were threatened was because even though Jesus practised religion faithfully he did not ultimately believe in religion. He believed in God in life.

These words ring true for anyone. Jesus’ teachings usually come in parables; life experiences woven into stories with question and answers between the story teller and the hearers. Jesus usually ends by saying, ‘those who have ears to hear let them hear!” The radical religious perspective was such a liberating experience that early Christians were willing to give up all or everything for it, even their lives. And when their leader died, they had an experience with him not of defeat but of victory and rebirth.

But by the early fourth century the institutionalization of Christianity brought about under Emperor Constantine changed all that. Social and political pressure resulted in thousands joining up, and institution grew. What was a way of living, a refreshing and liberating sense of the nearness and love of God now evolved into a thing again for many Christians.

When it did theology replaced experience. Jesus was set on a pedestal as an object. Requirements for membership, belief, and behavior crept in. Instead of reliance upon God in life, there was once more a reliance upon the form itself. The legacy of Constantine remains with us for far too long, so we have continued to maintain the church as a closed system. The move by some churches in the Pacific to legislate for Sunday bans and for a Christian state is part of this legacy.

ISSUES OF DIALOGUE

In Fiji there have been two issues of great public concern and over which debates have been raging in the media these last few months. One is the differing theological and ethical positions within the Christian tradition regarding homosexuality. There can be four differing positions.

There is first, a reject and punitive position. This is the position taken by those who are condemning gays and lesbians. And it’s the position espoused by many in church groups. Those who make this claim insist strongly that since Christianity make up 53% of Fiji’s population this single viewpoint must be accepted. The ruling of the High Court must therefore be overturned following the acquittal of the two men charged with homosexual activities.

But a dialogical approach would I believe accept diversity of positions and consider other viewpoints.

There can be other positions. The second position that may be taken is a non-punitive rejection, where homosexual acts are condemned as unnatural and violating God’s creative intent, but a distinction is drawn between the acts themselves and the sexual orientation of the individual concerned. This position views the homosexual person in the light of God’s mercy, to be treated compassionately, as one in need of the church’s ministry.

The third position is that of qualified acceptance. It affirms God’s heterosexual intent in creation, but accepts that homosexuality is a “given” – fixed in early childhood or before, and in adults not susceptible to reorientation or change.

The fourth and final theological position on homosexuality is full acceptance, with homosexual sex viewed no more nor less favourably than heterosexual sex, and gays and lesbians treated no differently to anyone else.

RECONCILIATION BILL

The other issue of current public concern is the Reconciliation, Tolerance and Unity Bill 2005 which is being subtly but forcefully promoted by the ruling SDL Government. Though referred to as Reconciliation Bill there have been widespread criticisms from Fiji Law Society, the Military, the Fiji Police,Fiji Human Rights Commission, the Catholic Church apart from Political parties and NGOs eg ECREA and CCF and including a group of concerned mothers who collected over 35,000 signatures against the Bill. The Bill is also opposed by members of the international community notably USA and New Zealand and the International Court of Jurists.

For support Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase counts on the 14 Provincial Councils, largely rural based and the Methodist Church in Fiji. Qarase has taken a divisive approach in claiming support of sections of the indigenous Fijian community as opposed to the Indo-Fijian community.

At the heart of the debate is the issue of offering amnesty to perpetrators of the civil unrest of 2000. The Bill provides a window for those who may wish to apply for amnesty if they can prove to a special committee that they had a “political objective”. But those opposed believe the Bill has amongst others, the following undesirable features:

· the Bill undermines the rule of law

· the Bill undermines the judiciary

· the Bill is a licence for state sponsored terrorism

· the Bill retrospectively legalizes the offence of treason during the designated period

· it will threaten Fiji’s security damaging the required environment to attract foreign investment and stimulate the country’s economic growth.

What is needed is a dialogical approach between the perpetrators and the victims, largely Indo-Fijian who have been forgotten in the rush towards finding a “quick fix solution” before the General Elections in 2006.

CONCLUSION

Try to drop for a moment assumptions about the Christian religion: what it teaches, what it demands, what it stands for. Instead read through one of the Gospels look at what Jesus himself taught and ask of those with whom he comes in contact, how he points them back toward their lives: love God with your thinking, feeling, acting, and with your soul, love every person because you are all children of God; name the evil for what it is but love the evil doer, feed the hungry and help the suffering; don’t be worried; be especially respectful of children and those who are outcasts, forgive people who hurt you, do not be attached to wealth and be joyful and willing to suffer and die for this way of life because God is more powerful than hatred, fear and death.

Dialogue with the secular world is an approach in which the church listens and regards every person as a child of God regardless of religion, status or birth. The church willing to die and suffer for the cause for it was brought into existence as servant community and renouncing the trappings of power.