Theology: Contextual Theology: Post-Colonial Theology

What is post-colonial theology? How does it relate to theology that emerged in historically colonial situations? These are two questions that get to the heart of Robert S. Heaney's work as he considers the extent to which theologians predating the emergence of post-colonial theology might be considered as precursors to this theological movement. Heaney argues that the work of innovative theologians John S. Mbiti and Jesse N.K. Mugambi, important in their own right, must now also be considered in relation to the continued emergence of post-colonial theology. When this is done, fresh perspectives on both the nature of post-colonial theology and contextual theology emerge. Through a sympathetic and critical reading of Mbiti and Mugambi, Heaney offers a series of constructive moves that counter the ongoing temptation toward acontextualism that continues to haunt theology both in the North and in the South.

Hate is unveiled on our streets. Politics is polarized and the cohesion of communities is under stress and threat. Religious and theological leaders appear compromised or paralyzed. Robert S. Heaney grew up in a Northern Ireland where enmity paraded itself and policed the boundaries between segregated identities and aspirations. Such conflict, with deep historic roots, is inextricably linked to religion and colonization. The theologizing of colonialism, and the ongoing implications of colonialism, cannot be ignored by those who wish to understand the most intractable of human conflicts. Religious adherents and scholars are increasingly seeking to understand colonialism and decolonization in theological terms. The field of post-colonial studies, across a range of contexts and in a complex network of inter-disciplinary analyses, has emerged as a major scholarly movement seeking to provide resources for such a task. Theologians have increasingly seen the field as a resource and have made their own contributions to its development. However, depending as it does on a series of theoretical and technical commitments, post-colonialism remains inaccessible to the uninitiated. Beginning with his own particular context of formation, in this book Heaney provides an accessible introduction to post-colonial theology.

A theology in tune with postcolonial theory has the potential to creatively inform and transform ecclesial practice. Focusing on the relation of theology to postcolonial theory, Postcolonial Theologies brings together a wide diversity of authors, many of them fresh and exciting theological voices, in essays that are stunningly creative and prophetically lucid. All essays are theologically constructive, not merely deconstructive or critical, in their visions for Christianity. Forming a sort of doctrinal landscape, they emerge under the themes of theological anthropology shaped by ethnicity, class, and privilege; a Christology that intersects the claims of Christ and empire; and a Cosmology that imagines a postcolonial world.

This original and ambitious book considers the terms of engagement between Christian theology and other religious traditions, beginning with criticism of Christian theology of religions as entangled with European colonial modernity. Jenny Daggers covers recent efforts to disentangle Eurocentrism from the meeting of the religions, and investigates new constructive possibilities arising in the postcolonial context. In dialogue with Asian and feminist theologies, she reflects on ways forward for relations between the religions and offers a particularist model for theology of religions, standing within a classical Trinitarian framework.

How far away is God? How different is God from human beings? This is the theological question of transcendence, and theology has long struggled to find answers that affirm a human relationship with God. In this provocative new work, Mayra Rivera's answer is that God is not within human grasp but is always within human touch. With a strikingly relevant concept of God as transcendent within--transcendence different from the ideas of God as far away, as outside human life and experience, or as above the human plane of existence--Rivera concentrates on transcendence as a relationship and uses it to describe how humans can touch God. In doing so, she engages a number of theological movements, including liberation theology, Radical Orthodoxy, feminism, and postcolonialism.