ERAP'S PARDON IS CHEAP GRACE

Dear friends,

We are sending herewith the ISACC draft statement on Erap’s pardon. We focused on the moral issue as this is our major concern as a faith-based organization.

Please send in your comments on or before 12:00NN tomorrow, so we can finalize and send it in to the newspapers before 5:00PM. You may affix your signature at the end of the document if you subscribe to the Statement.

We would appreciate prayers for this. Feel free to circulate this to your own network of friends. This is a good teaching moment for our churches and constituencies to think biblically on current issues.

Warmly,

Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.




ISACC Statement


Erap’s pardon is cheap grace


On the surface, granting former President Joseph Estrada executive clemency may seem like an act of compassion. In reality, it is cheap grace.

A pardon is an act of grace. It is a concept borrowed by jurisprudence from the biblical idea of ‘unmerited favor,’ meaning that the offender is spared the penalty for ‘sin’ or breaking the law, not because of any merit in him nor of any circumstance that might lighten his case, but because the punishment has been paid for in his behalf by someone else – the Son of God himself. For God to forgive, his own son had to be sent to the cross.

The demands of justice had to be met before God could pardon our sins. Because he is just, he did not seek reconciliation by simply sweeping things under the rug. He did not issue a general amnesty and bury our guilt and grievances under a show of bonhomie. Instead, in his mercy he stripped himself of immunity, took upon himself our humanity, and suffered the full horror of what it means to die the death that we deserve. As the writer to the Hebrews put it, “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.”

Forgiveness is costly. It is premised on repentance, on acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Estrada goes scot-free without bowing to the court’s judgment that he is guilty. We do not expect from our leaders a ‘moral revolution’; only that those who profess to have seen the light should, like Zaccheus, show signs of true repentance by admitting wrong and making restitution.

Likewise, we deplore the undue haste with which Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has pardoned Estrada, betraying a gross moral callousness over the seriousness of his crime. Hot on the heels of the revelation that the President is implicated in the ZTE scandal, the timing arouses suspicion.

Leaders set a moral benchmark for the nation. The President’s free-and-easy pardon, coming just a month after the Sandiganbayan declared him guilty of plunder, further erodes faith in the justice system and the rule of law. It sends the signal that the powerful can commit a heinous crime and run free just because they can threaten mayhem on those who uneasily sit in power because unsure of legitimacy.

Justice and mercy go together. This is what the cross tells us. Without justice, compassion becomes capitulation and sinks this nation ever deeper into moral rot and corrosion.


--- Staff, members and friends of
The Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture

Signed:

Dr. Melba Padilla Maggay
Dr. Violeta Bautista
Cynthia A. Lucasan
Clayton Y. Lucasan
Celine A. Lucasan
Lanie Permano
Ligaya ____
Gina B. Duanan
Mely Estoque
Judilyn Arielle Ferrer
Dixie Lacuesta
Mrs. Dolly I. Girao
Michael Suguitan
Erlinda Eileen G. Lolarga
William B. Girao
Maria Fabella C. Fajardo

A Derelict Democracy

This Monday, May 14, the citizens of the oldest republic in Asia will troop to the polls and cast their votes in the country’s mid-term elections.

Many are likely to vote quite willy-nilly, with no great expectations that the exercise will mean something to the vast poor crowding in its rapidly mushrooming slums. It is a political right that has steadily lost its luster since the apparatus of democracy was restored following the “people power” uprising two decades ago.

Months before, this election was seen as a kind of referendum on the legitimacy of the Arroyo government. Just like the US midterm elections, which sent clear signals that the Bush policy on Iraq was way out of line, it promised an orderly way of ascertaining what the people must feel about the unresolved allegations of fraud that has hounded the Arroyo presidency.

It also held out the possibility of recomposing the balance of power in Congress, and with it the off-chance that the fast train bulldozing its way on a wild rush toward constitutional changes could be stopped.

This optimism as to its significance quickly dwindled into disillusionment. The expectation that the battle lines will be drawn along the divide over these critical issues has evaporated. The parties in this contest have come together, not because of a common stand on policy, but because of a common pragmatism premised on the realities of “winnability.”

With the exception of Kapatiran, a rather quixotic attempt at a “politics of principle rather than personality,” the major parties—the administration’s Team Unity and the Genuine Opposition—are bands of miscellaneous rabble glued together by political convenience.

In this election, we see the final dissolution of the party system as more normal democracies know it. This is partly a residue of the Marcos regime, which once dismantled it and turned it into a shadow play, the protagonists totally controlled from behind the scenes. But it is also partly a product of an entrenched political elite, whose dynastic character is perpetuated by the intertwining of power and privilege through a complex system of patronage and a closed network of clan alliances and loyalties.

For some time now, the lack of a clear party system, as seen in the ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans in the US, or the current contestation between socialists and the Center-Right in France, has been bewailed by more reflective elements in Philippine polity.

The pronounced preference for personality rather than ideology on the part of voters has challenged the cultural premises of those schooled in “good governance” as practiced in the West.

The palpable presence of political dynasties and personalism in voting patterns have persisted despite the half a century of direct tutelage in American-style democracy. A former colony of the US, the Philippines was once billed as America’s “showcase of democracy in Asia.” This myth was shattered when nary a whimper was heard from mainstream citizenry when martial law was declared and the iron hand of authoritarianism fell on dissenters in 1972.

The euphoric rise of “people power” as a direct instrument for expressing popular will has briefly fanned hopes of a government that the people can own. This quickly developed a dark underside, however.

“People power” became a tool for those wanting a show of popular support for their vested interests. An example of this was the so-called Edsa Tres, an assault on the seat of power mounted by a ragtag collection of poor people in support of Joseph Estrada who was ousted in 2001 in a second uprising called Edsa 2. Since then, crowds have been mustered for a variety of political purposes.

The fallout of all these has been a deepened disenchantment with the electoral process and the mechanisms of democracy as a whole. There is a perception that ours is a derelict democracy that has lost its way, rendered dysfunctional by the realities of oligarchic power, social monopolies and a political system disconnected from indigenous ways of doing things.

Already, the ghosts of history haunt the political landscape: there are voices wanting a return to the supposed “disciplined order” of strongman rule, and the government’s “war on terrorism” has taken the form of masked men on motorcycles lawlessly gunning down supposed insurgents, dark knights of primitive justice let loose in a general climate of apathy.

The Philippines is America’s oldest experiment in transplanting democracy in an alien setting. Its continuing failure is a patent lesson on why grandiose projects like democracy in Iraq will not flourish. There are deep structures of culture, power and social networks that need to be engaged even before mechanisms resembling democracy can be put in place. While peoples everywhere want freedom and self-determination. American-style systems are not exactly what will work.

The Philippines, like every nation, has to find its own way and fashion a viable democracy out of the dislocations of its colonial history and the aggressive influences of the current global order and polity. To come up with a system that works, it needs to fit and root itself in the traditional culture while negotiating with the demands of effective governance in a postmodern world.

Why I'm voting for Kapatiran

http://archive.inquirer.net/view.php?db=1&story_id=65724

First posted 01:27:41 (Mla time) May 14, 2007
Melba Padilla Maggay
Inquirer




THE SOCIAL WEATHER STATIONS finding that 77 percent of the people would vote according to conscience whether or not the candidate will win is welcome news to those who wish to see the end of the "segurista" (sure thing) mentality that keeps qualified candidates from winning simply because they do not, at first instance, figure in the survey ratings.

If in today's elections our people do vote according to conscience, there is some chance for marginal parties like Kapatiran. A strong showing by its candidates will send a strong signal that there are people of conscience out there who can be a healing force in our diseased politics.

This possibility is like a drop of rain in a long summer season of drought and political discontent. This election has seen the collapse of an already fragmented party system into free-floating groupings of vested interests.

The hope that it would be a sort of referendum on the legitimacy of the Arroyo administration has been dashed by the lack of clarity and coherence in the stance of major parties on issues needing closure.

There is great doubt that the will of the people will truly surface, mainly because of widespread fear of fraud in the actual vote count, presided over as it is by a Commission on Elections tainted by the "Garci" scandal and headed by a chairman with proven ethical pliability.

Yet at the same time, quite softly and without much fanfare, an alternative that may turn out to be historic has presented itself.

Kapatiran, the party which alone has a clear platform, has managed to resonate among those seeking a way out of the morass of our morally greasy politics. One wonders why savvy politicians with some remaining shreds of idealism had stayed away from it. What would it be like if the Kapatiran is taken a little more seriously as something more than a quixotic blip on the radar screen of politicians and voters alike?

Preference for personality

A long lament over the state of our politics is this pronounced preference for personality rather than platform. Kapatiran stands for a politics of principle, and because of this it has dared to put up candidates that are not known and have no name recall, but are competent and have the character to match their brains and the published aims of the party.

Zosimo Paredes, Adrian Sison and Martin Bautista will not be noticed if they walk down the corridors of a mall or a grocery store. They are known only to colleagues and friends who witness their daily walk of faithfulness in the big and small things they are called to be responsible for.

In this they are similar to the many faceless men and women in this country who have what it takes to rule this country well, but remain in the margins because they do not push themselves forward.

But then these days these Kapatiran candidates have taken a step that is distinctly out of character with the rest of this country's talent pool.

Unlike those who migrate or are content to sit on the sidelines, these men have been prepared to be thrust into the mess of politics and leave their careers, their comfort zones and quiet pursuits to obey a call to "put God at the center of politics." Precisely because they are not your garden variety politicians, it is not without sacrifice that they put themselves forward in the service of the larger good.

Politics of virtue

The possible effect of a "politics of virtue" is not to be scoffed at in a time when our people are utterly sick of our political elite, perceived to be mostly scoundrels merely taking turns in seizing power.

The huge crowds that surfaced in the rallies of Eddie Villanueva, the religious leader-turned-presidential aspirant in the election of 2004, is sign enough of a latent electoral power that could be summoned given a cause of some moral credibility.

The fact that this crusade for "moral governance" frittered away quite quickly in the aftermath of the elections is also an indication that our people are discerning enough to decisively withdraw support and turn away disenchanted once they smell the faintest whiff of moral rot.

Research shows that our people gravitate toward leaders who combine in themselves genuine charisma and moral authority. Leaders of millenarian movements, like Hermano Pule, are of this type; there is a great deal of longing in the culture of men and women who will lead with spiritual integrity.

It is not an accident that the brunt of resistance against Spanish and American colonialism had been waged by leaders of such quasi-religious movements. We should not be surprised that our religious leaders today have an almost medieval power over their flock, and tend to have more credibility than politicians. It also explains the very low trust level accorded those who currently occupy seats of power and by past choices or "lapse in judgment" have soiled themselves.

Fusing political, spiritual goals

As in our wars of independence, there is a long tradition of fusing the political and spiritual in our national affairs. The Kapatiran is a contemporary example of this impulse.

Far from conjuring images of Rasputin and Cardinal Richelieu from the muddled history of Church-State relations in the West, the Kapatiran is a national political party, not of clerics but of lay people seeking to make a difference in this country from their faith perspectives.

Having learned from failed socialist experiments that love of neighbor without love of God ends in killing fields, they believe that all change begins from the inside, even as they also know that injustice can be entrenched in structures and need confronting systematically.

I have no illusions that the Kapatiran candidates will make it. It will take a major miracle for any of them to land in the top 12. But then, I am not voting for success; I am voting for change. And who knows? If the 77 percent who said they will vote according to conscience really did so, they may stand a chance. So remember: Paredes, Sison, Bautista. Para Sa Bayan ito.

Religion, Human Rights and Development Cooperation: Some New Wineskins*

Introduction
In the face of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, an Indian writer puts to words the central concern pressing upon us : “There is now a peculiar double-bind in Indian politics: the ills of religion have found political expression but the strengths of it have not been available for checking corruption and violence in public life.” 1

This about sums up the task before us.

By way of moving forward, let me outline some perspectives already surfaced in this conference and reframe them, hoping that in doing so we can look at these things afresh and find some answers.

Some perspectives
The rise of political religions: imagining the past as future. The rise of fundamentalisms, -- whether Muslim, Christian or Hindu – is perhaps best seen as a reaction to the perceived decadence of western liberal democratic values. The Two-Thirds World, particularly, feel the threat of homogenizing forces from today’s global centers. In the face of these we are rediscovering the power of the old religions as a buttress against unwanted modernizing forces. The more reflective elements in these societies do not wish to be trapped in the ‘iron cage of modernity’ – with its impersonal rules and bureaucratic systems and the social costs of unbridled economic rationality.

Most of these societies, while linked to the global economy, remain, at bottom, traditional. Culture pride and identity often supersedes the desire for material wealth. This can be seen particularly in those with memories of a lost civilization and feel a sense of present humiliation, like the Arab world with its history of the Ottoman Empire and its splendid caliphates in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The past is re-imagined and projected as a goal for the future.

Secularism as ideology and secularization as a cultural development process. We need to make a distinction between secularism, which relegates religion to a corner of life, and secularization, which is a process of cultural elaboration and differentiation from the once dominant hold of religion as an institution. Both are historical products of the Protestant Reformation, issuing from Calvin’s idea that the whole earth is ‘theatre of God’s glory.’ The sciences, politics and the arts were freed from the dictates of the church, gaining what the statesman Abraham Kuyper calls ‘sphere sovereignty.’ Unfortunately, in the two hundred years after the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment, it broke away from these moorings. It came to mean that religion is to be kept in the private realm, without relevance to public life.

In contrast, most of the cultures of the world are still religiously-based. The western concept of religion as a private and separate compartment in life does not exist in any of my indigenous languages nor in Indian and Chinese languages. All of life is lived within a religious worldview. There is no divide between the secular and the sacred. It is only the modern West which has secularized and is an exception to this.

This wholism is consistent with the biblical understanding that all of life is religion. Jesus’ command to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and Luther’s doctrine of the ‘two swords’ does not mean that the church is separate from society. Augustine’s civitas dei and civitas terrena are both realms where God acts and is sovereign.

But then history tells us that the higher the degree of influence of religious institutions in civic life, the less progressive they tend to be. Orthodoxy and conformity are rewarded, whether in medieval papacy or in regimes ruled by ayatollahs. Hence secularization, the idea of the separation of powers between church and state, is a necessary and desirable evolution in political thought.

Minority rights within a context dominated by a majority religion. There is no escaping the fact that in any one culture, there is always a majority religion. This is due to the historical fact that all cultures are, at bottom, religiously based. As the missiologist Stephen Neill once put it, “There has never yet been a great religion which did not find its expression in a great culture. There has never yet been a great culture which did not have deep roots in a great religion.” 2

In today’s global village, what this means is that migrant communities whose ethnic and religious identities are different from that of the mainstream culture will find themselves always at risk and vulnerable. In spite of all the talk about tolerance and civility, those in the majority religion will tend to press their entitlements or sense a threat to their culture and history, whether they be in pluralistic megasocieties or in multi-ethnic countries. In both pre-modern and post-modern worlds, identities are shaped, not by the sense of nation, but by more primal self-definitions based on ethnicity or religion. Where I come from, our Muslim minorities no longer identify themselves as ‘Filipinos’. They are, I am told by one of their scholars, ‘Malays’, this ethnicity being synonymous with ‘Muslim’ in Southeast Asia.

Social integration in multicultural societies has always been a problem. What gives it a sharper edge in our day is that political conflicts are now seen as civilizational and given force and power by underlying religious convictions. Modernity once prophesied that religion will be replaced by science, tribes by individuals. Today, not only does religion persist, it has re-tribalized societies even as it goes global.

The question that now confronts us is this: how do we maintain cultural diversity and respect for minorities when a dominant religion tells us that its truth claims are universal and ought to be believed and lived by all ?

Democracy and human rights. Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat sent by his government in 1831 to investigate the prison system in the US, traveled for seven months all across America with this research question: why had the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon, while the American Revolution led peacefully to constitutional democracy ? The simple answer is that in the small townships and church congregations of Puritan settlements in New England, respect for individual freedom, supported by social and economic equality, nurtured the roots of what we now know as democracy. ‘It was not democracy that paved the way for the freedom of worship, but freedom of worship that made democracy possible.”3

The Christian idea that all are made in the image of God, that there is something about each of us that is utterly valuable and precious and can not be violated, was the seedbed for the Bill of Rights. This much is acknowledged even by those who have difficulties believing in God. Says Jeffrie Murphy: ‘the liberal theory of rights requires a doctrine of human dignity, preciousness and sacredness that can not be utterly detached from a belief in God or at least from a worldview that would be properly called religious….’ 4

It is this kind of religious sense which in modern times had been lost and which had led to the massive erosion of human rights in those societies where the state had been apotheosized. Much earlier, the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky had already foretold what happens when we push human autonomy to its logical conclusion: with the downfall of the altar of God, we are left with the anthill, -- that humless social machine where an individual is valued only in so far as he is part of the collective, an abstract human being defined as ‘a multitude of one million divided by one million’ as Arthur Koestler once put it -- or the myth of the superman who becomes a law unto himself, to whom, as Raskolnikov argues, ‘everything is permitted.’ Past the experience of authoritarian states, we know where this kind of language leads us.

To me, religion is important not mainly because it contributes to the common good or fosters respect for law and order or can support the nation-building projects of the state. More critically, it relativizes Caesar. There is a Lord higher than Caesar. That the Vatican, for instance, is a sovereign state stands as a sign that there exists a realm outside the rule of temporal powers. There is the sphere of individual conscience, where the human spirit, against all constraints, asserts its will to be free.

Some proposals
Focus on faith and economic values. It has been a while since Max Weber linked a faith value – the ‘Protestant work ethic’ – as a causal explanation for the rise of capitalism in the West. Picking up from this are some studies like the Soul of Development which documents improvement in well-being and economic conditions among mostly poor Pentecostals in Latin America.5 While it is quite sweeping to stereotype whole cultures as either ‘development-prone’ or ‘development-resistant’,6 there is some empirical evidence that a genuine faith awakening leads to better life conditions.

Within the Christian tradition, this phenomenon has often been seen and documented and goes by the name of ‘redemptive lift.’ In a research our Institute did on the coming of American Protestantism in the 1900s, we noticed that many families of early converts climbed from poor to middle class in one generation. Today we see this again among urban and rural poor people who come to faith. A woman in an Indian village was asked what her newfound faith now means to her. She replied, “one brick at a time.” What she meant was that now her husband no longer drinks; the money saved goes to buying one brick at a time for the house that she was building. There are plenty of such stories about the economic gains from no alcohol, no gambling, and ‘righteous living’ that issues from a conversion experience. In a microfinance institution where I sit in the Board, scores of women report that because of their faith they have better relationships with their husbands, and their business gets better and more sustainable because of the consequent family support. Faith-based development organizations that are very intentional in their value formation are often able to do much good that is far in proportion to their resources.

While there is no evidence that spirituality necessarily leads to economic success, there is at least substantial witness that genuine faith transforms people into becoming more just and honest and better stewards of resources. This leads to a degree of social wellness over the long haul.

What this means is that donor organizations ought to pay a bit more attention on identifying and strengthening values within faith traditions that make for development, particularly those related to wealth creation. Some cultures may need to have changes in their mental sets regarding time and their attitudes towards the future, the use of resources, risk-taking and other such values needed for more efficient stewardship.

Engage the informal and deep structures of the culture. Development efforts seeking structural changes often deal only with the formal systems and structures – matters of governance, peace talks that mostly have the local elite and government leaders talking, official development assistance for roads, telecommunications and other such large investments on physical infrastructure. The fact is that in many of these initiatives, the level of engagement stays on the level of the elite, whether local or national. Also, only the surface structures are engaged. A law or policy may be put in place, but it is rendered unenforceable or dysfunctional for want of the necessary supportive norms that will make it work. We may, for instance, tie up funding to policy changes in gender practices. But if the culture has no ‘software’ of values to support those changes, but instead continues to have a compelling metanarrative that justifies, say, female circumcision, laws prohibiting this will simply die a natural death.

Changes in systems and policy structures must be backed up by a corresponding change in values. Mere ‘institution-building’ will not do without the appropriate infraculture. A country may have a democratic structure in place but the ‘software’ of totalitarianism may continue.

This means that we must engage the deep structures of the culture, and not just impose conditionalities. As Daniel Etounga-Manguelle puts it, what Africa needs is a ‘cultural adjustment program,’ not just structural adjustments. “Culture is the mother; institutions are the children.” 7

Also, we need to look out for what actually works in the culture on the informal level, and simply formalize it. We have found, for instance, that a great deal more peacemaking happens when people work together. In our southern part of the country where most of our Muslims are, there is an organization called Al Hayat where Muslims and Christians discover each other as human beings as they organize communities together. Similarly, there is a common experience of bonding among those of us who belong to different faiths and yet work together for justice and other such concerns. On this note a remark made to me by a Catholic nun may be relevant: “It seems that we have no trouble working together for a cause. It is when we talk theology that we divide and break into conflicts. Why is this ?”

Name the idols of our time. A perplexity that disables many of us is the reality that while there is no lack of religion in today’s world, this has not issued in justice nor a deeper ethical life in our societies. There are many complex reasons behind this. One helpful lead is to grasp that religion, when it is true to the best of what it believes, is liberating. When it is not it is most oppressing. The reason for this is the phenomenon of what in anthropology is known as ‘extension transference’ ( ET ). There is a tendency in all of us to confuse the Creator with the creature, to transfer our ultimate loyalties from an invisible, transcendent God to a visible and immanent representation of him. The old term for this is idolatry. In the place of God we erect a golden calf, and this is seen in a variety of contemporary social behaviour. It is seen in our tendency to absolutize our extensions, our cultural elaborations, of what God is all about. We absolutize our theologies, such that they become ideologies. We then sacrifice human beings to the altar of a fixed idea. Dogma and dead orthodoxy replaces a living and growing relationship with a God whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and whose ways are not our ways. Those of us who are not particularly religious idolize economic wealth or the state, or the tools, systems and procedures that give us a measure of control and order in our lives. This is particularly true with the West. Those of us in Asia tend to surrender all autonomy to authorities or the pull of social ties and clan loyalties.

How then do we engage these idolatries ?

First, I think we must begin with the recognition that there has to be some critiquing element in all of our societies. Some things are universally bad and some things are universally good in whatever culture we find them. The caste system is bad, and so is materialism, authoritarianism or female genital mutilation. Cultural respect does not mean that we tread softly and do not engage each other on the roots of our failure as societies. This is paternalism. A genuine conversation begins with the mutual recognition that both sides have truth claims that may or may not be shared by the other. A theologian says that what we need is an ‘ecumenism of conviction, not an ecumenism of accommodation.’ 8

Having said this, it is really quite wonderful that in spite of our differences, we do have common values. The right to life, for instance, is a value shared by most religions, finding justification from the Christian idea of the image of God in men and women or the Buddhist concept of ahimsa or non-violence towards all beings. We need to identify and discover those areas of ‘overlapping consensus’ that are critical to public order.

At the same time, we may need to ask if it is necessary to have a uniform civil code that should apply to all citizens of a country. We may need to allow a ‘plurality of secularisms’ to flourish, the look and shape of which should emerge, not from the influence of globalization or western-educated elites, but from dialogue with the defenders of tradition in our grassroots communities.9 Societies in transition must be accompanied, not towards the beaten path of western modernization as articulated by the likes of Walt Rostow, but towards their own development according to the peculiarities of their historical, cultural and political context.

We need to have a plural sense of the ‘good life.’ What is the people’s concept of development ? Often, the people’s notion of the good life is not merely economics-driven. In my context, people define this as freedom from poverty within a context of social harmony. I suspect this is probably true with many cultures that put a premium on a high relational quotient. Capitalism and its excesses is not human nature as neoliberal economists believe.

Secondly, we need to name precisely the idols of our time, including the way our organizations are shaped. One of the ironies of the post-Marxist era is that we are now much more determined by economics. Donor agencies, simply by specifying their preferred projects, coopt the agenda of those in the South. I am told by bible scholars that Jesus talked more about money than about the Kingdom. I suspect that the reason is that of all possible idols, Mammon is the most seductive, most comprehensive rival to God.

Also, in a time when there is increasing conflict between human rights and citizenship rights, particularly in global centers, development agencies will need to serve as culture brokers. Most of you have experienced the vulnerabilities and complexities of living in other cultures. There is need to articulate, both theologically and sociologically, the rights and plight of the stranger and sojourner who has come to live among us.

Related to this is the difficult task of widening access to opportunity of minorities. Conflict begins when religious identity becomes synonymous with social status – in my country, to be Muslim is to be poor. I do not think that political mechanisms such as affirmative action is the answer to this. Those of us who live in soft states do not have high expectations from government in this regard. What should drive this is not politics but economics, an economic development that has at the center of its vision the poor and the just distribution of resources.

This was brought home with renewed force to me when an election commissioner told me that violence and vote-buying in our Muslim south and other such pockets of deprivation can not be stopped. The people are too poor. It is a perfectly rational choice to sell votes. Our Abu Sayyaf bandits recruit from among young people there who have no skills and no future. The only real industry in the area is the making and selling of home-made guns. Solve the problem of poverty and you solve as well the problem of political dynasties and bad governance.

Studies show that when people have no means for achieving the goals desired by a society, like wealth or success, people reject the rules of the game. They innovate or break the rules. Countries with a high achievement motivation but also a high level of inequality and narrow options, like Russia or the Philippines, tend to be corrupt and unstable. In these countries, there is a critical mass of highly educated and culturally sophisticated people who get frustrated and turn to crime and mayhem because they have no access to opportunities, either for leadership or the flourishing of their careers and gifts. It is not an accident that the latest suicide bombers are British in nationality.

Make a space for grace. By now, most of us who have been in development work for quite a while will have learned that it is not primarily structures, policies, or programs that spell change. There is a growing consensus, -- from management gurus to grassroots community organizers, -- that all change begins from the inside. It begins when something happens to people, in that place where God alone can go and where we move from resignation and helplessness to a sense of power, from despair to hope. Quite beyond our making, things come together and surprise us.

This, to me, is grace, -- that margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse and we come face to face with something altogether wonderful and unexpected. These are movements of the Spirit that we do well to tune in and follow. We must keep the door open for unexpected outcomes, for processes outside our logframes and our usual measures of success or failure. We need to come up with new wineskins, new benchmarks for capturing the fresh work of the Spirit among us.

Through the years I have become convinced that a genuine work of transformation is often higher and deeper and messier than what can be contained within three-year projects. I have often wished that donor agencies would partner with us over the long term towards the kind of change that begins with movements of the small – those moments when ordinary people wake up to their own sense of purpose and potential and pull in their weight towards the growing good of the world – mustard seeds that take years to grow into trees. The yeast as metaphor for the Kingdom tells us that it works in quiet, hidden ways. Unlike conflicts and disasters, it rarely gets into the papers. Yet silently, steadily, it does its work in human society such that one morning we wake up and find that things have changed.

-----------------------------------
Maggay, Melba Padilla, Ph.D. ( President and CEO, Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture ). Conference on “Religion and Spirituality as Source of Human Rights and Development Cooperation”. Soesterberg, Holland,a Sept. 6-8, 2005. Read on September 8, 2005.


Notes
1. Ashish Nandy, quoted by T.N. Madan, “Secularism in its Place”, Journal of Asian Studies, 46.4, 1987, p.757.

2. Stephen Neill, “Religion and Culture: A Historical Introduction,” The Gospel and Culture, John RW Stott and Robert T. Coote, eds., William Carey Library, Pasadena California, 1979, p.1. Copyright by Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization.

3. Vinoth Ramachandra, Faiths in Conflict ? Christian Integrity in a Multicultural World, London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity, Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, England, 1999, p.157.

4. Jeffrie Murphy, “Afterword: Constitutionalism, Moral Skepticism and Religious Belief” in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Constitutionalism, the Philosophical Dimension p.248, as quoted by M. J .Perry, The Idea of Human Rights, Four Inquiries, Oxford & NY, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.41.

5. A.L.Sherman, The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.

6. Mariano Grondona, “A Cultural Typology of Economic Development,” in Culture Maters, How Values Shape Human Progress, Lawrence G. Harrison and Samuel G. Huntington, eds., Basic Books, NY 2000.

7. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, “Does Africa Need a Cultural Ajustment Program ?” Culture Matters, ibid. pp.65-77.

8. Dr. Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School and executive editor
of Christianity Today, commenting on the declaration, Dominus Jesus issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as quoted by Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square”, First Things, November 2000 No.107, p.69.

A Call for Moral Courage and Social Discipline

We, the officers, members and friends of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC), express our deep concern over the gross scandals rocking the government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Likewise, we decry opportunistic attempts to use these as political fodder for destabilization and a power grab on the part of the opposition.

We deplore the stench of corruption and the cloud of doubt that has descended on the highest office of the land. The accusations now being hurled against the seat of power need swift response from the President.

We call on President Arroyo to demonstrate beyond doubt the will to stamp out corruption by letting the law run its full course on the charges brought against her, her relatives and her administration. We want her to dispel the grey pall of doom and doubt that hovers round her office by a forthright display of moral courage.

Time is running out and there is but a small window of opportunity left her to put her house in order. She should come clean, or else resign and allow an orderly succession to take place.

At the same time, we stand against any entity or force that would make a mockery of our democratic ideals, our Constitution and our laws by creating conditions that lead to lawlessness, mob rule and the use of force in effecting a change of power.

While we acknowledge the right of everyone to an opinion on the present crisis, we see calls for ‘civil disobedience’ and ‘people power’ as cynical mimicry of such historic forms of expressing popular will. We condemn in no uncertain terms the machinations of coup plotters and all forms of military adventurism.

Our Constitution and our laws have provided the proper venues where grievances may be appropriately addressed.

Let the corruption complaints and the allegations of electoral fraud be sufficiently backed up by incontrovertible evidence and brought before duly-constituted authorities. These should not be unduly dramatized and sensationalized by media before the blood-thirsty bar of so-called public opinion.

Irresponsible accusations of fraud should not be allowed to taint and cast doubt on the over-all credibility of our democratic institutions. To do so would negate the hard-won gains of our people in the struggle to restore our democratic tradition.

To our people we urge wisdom and vigilance against the seductive wiles of those who wish to subvert our democratic processes. Let us not lose hope in the efficacy of our political institutions, no matter how imperfect and subject to anomalous pressures.

To all who believe that there is a sovereign God who rules over the affairs and doings of nations, let us heed these words from a church father named Cyprian as the Roman Empire crumbled and tottered before his eyes: “Let us stand upright amid the ruins of the world, and not lie on the ground as those who have no hope.”

Signed by Board and Staff of the
Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture
Representing 200 individual members and friends and 30 organizations

Plots, Plausibility and the Politics of People Power

Once again, the swords are drawn and the gathering armies of both the administration and the opposition are plotting in the shadows their next moves. So far, the center seems to hold although it has been fatally exposed as having a soft underbelly; murky revelations from the slimy underworld of illegal gambling and hints of reptilian tricks from an even slimier bureaucracy greased by vote-buying money do not seem to have had the destabilizing effect intended as this government has wildly feared.

The events of the past week or so have quite nakedly bared two tendencies of our political elite that now and again surface in times of intense contestation: the opposition’s brazenly cynical mimicry of the emotional power of the two EDSA uprisings, and the administration’s equally underhanded instinct to protect and preserve itself at all cost, as in the readiness to whip up an obviously tall tale about two tapes, a preemptive measure ostensibly in defense of the security of the state.

The marks of a contrived populism are evident in the re-staging of events ala EDSA: shady characters appearing on the scene with their sordid tales, the appeal to the people to rise and mass together for another ‘people power’, the surfacing of a key witness clutching for display the ‘mother of all tapes,’ inciting an aggrieved widow to foment unrest while at the same time entreating the Church for protection.

Contrary to the expectations of those behind this crude imitation of history, the net effect so far has been a bad case of déjà vu: one feels subjected to witnessing a forced performance of bad actors mouthing lines one has heard before, only this time the lines have a hollow and deceptive ring to them and the major players are all soiled characters about as capable of inspiring sympathy as the tacky sleaze of a grade B movie.

It is no wonder that our people are not rushing to the barricades as imagined by those who wish to stage another mutiny. Instead of stirrings of moral outrage, one feels a certain fatigue tinged with rage at being so blatantly manipulated. The media may huff and puff and expend a lot of hot air blowing out of proportion putative signs of instabilities, but the rest of us are unmoved, a feeling shared widely among grassroots communities. A recent pulsing done in the urban poor community of Payatas shows that the people do not want any more ‘people power’; they are sick of being out in the streets for nothing.

This is not to be taken as a repudiation of people power per se.

The fact that EDSA II had uncanny resemblances with the original EDSA experience shows that there are constant cultural forces behind these uprisings. This time, what seems to be behind the reluctance to once again take to the streets is the perception that events are being stagemanaged, besides the disillusionment of seeing the promises of EDSA thwarted and whittled down to zero significance, hijacked by the political elite of this country. What had sprung as a genuinely popular impulse for direct democracy had been appropriated by the elite as a tool for demagoguery, a way to return to power and corner the spoils of the system.

Conscious of this travesty, our people are wisely remaining on the sidelines, impervious to trumped up agitations.

Social theory tells us that ideas and movements do not succeed in history simply because they are true or represent valid causes. You need ‘plausibility structures’, the right mix of social forces and processes to gather momentum for a wind change.

While the seat of power has been dealt severe damage, the elements that would make a change of government likely at this time have yet to come together.

For one thing, the people have to be convinced that this drama has at its root a moral justification. Part of our indigenous political culture is the bias for a highly emotional response to issues at the fairly primal level of what is sensed to be right and wrong. People do not get roused by abstract ideological reasons, but by moral outrage triggered by a sense of identification, either with a fallen underdog like Benigno Aquino ( ‘hindi ka nag-iisa’ ) or with a hapless victim like Flor Contemplacion, an iconic symbol of our misfortunes. The force of this is seen in the two EDSA rebellions, which are but the tip of a submerged culture of protest and solidarity that now and again rises to the surface. Historians tell us that through the long years of colonization under Spain, the Filipino people were not at all quiescent but mounted intermittent rebellions every 25 years or so. The reasons had little to do with power politics but with grievances arising from a sense of wrong and victimization.

This force, which arises from moral conviction, is missing as a push factor in the ill-disguised plottings of the opposition. For all its savvy in orchestrating pressures on the present leadership, it lacks the moral credibility necessary to galvanize the seething sentiments of discontent swirling round the presidency.

Similarly, perhaps the greatest disservice of the Arroyo administration to the nation and even to itself is the sore lack of a moral center. Communication studies show that leadership, to be effective, needs to demonstrate at least three things: competence, character and charisma. All three have to be together, and the most critical, to my judgment, is character. Charisma without character is disaster, as we have seen in the previous mafioso-like regime of Joseph Estrada. Competence without character impairs authority, and inspires neither the loyalty that makes for constancy and stability nor the credibility necessary to rally a people in times of extreme duress.

Without a moral compass, a deep enough principle behind its leadership, a ship of state goes adrift, rudderless and subject to being tossed and fro by the winds that blow from all corners of the social weather.

The instincts of our people are right. They are not going to lift a finger to rescue a beleaguered regime caught in the darksome toils of its own spinning, and neither do they wish to have anything to do with the ingenious plottings of failed adventurers and a politics reduced to a mere contest for power between one set of crooks and another set of crooks.

---- Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.
Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture

The War on Terrorism and Its Moral Ambiguities

Years ago there was a movie on the presence of the US bases here, likening the fight against it to that of a little moth taking on a giant eagle, 'minsa'y isang gamugamo ang lumaban sa lawin…' This comes to mind again as we see a small cell of terrorists inflict damage, perhaps far beyond what was originally planned, on a perceived arch enemy whose ubiquitous power and sheer size annoys many small nations into at least rattling it a bit.
It cannot be hidden, this repressed glee at seeing a lumbering giant hop and skip and fall by a bite at its heel. The Arab world crowed about it, sanctioned by its mullahs. The rest of us were appalled, while feeling some discomfort that the poor of the world die daily without notice, with neither rage nor a whiff of whimper from those of us who can do something about it. It touched me to witness much of Europe simultaneously standing still a few days after, mourning in silence the death of those who perished. At the same time, there was this niggling sense that the outpouring of sympathy was as much a product of visual incitement from BBC and CNN as a moving testament to human solidarity in the face of grief.
From this little corner of the earth I tend to look at this big event with the eyes of small people. This is not because I happen to believe that there is that genetic fault in our race which Nick Joaquin has named, quite controversially, as our 'heritage of smallness.' It is simply because our circumstances as a failing state somehow connects me to many unsuccessful people all around the world who look at the doings of the great from the bottom side, or what the Latin Americans call the 'underside of history.'
The bombing of Afghanistan, for instance, feels like one of those things we expect from a war, or at least a war where one of the protagonists is so used to being big it can not imagine any other way of 'smoking out' the enemy than razing down to the ground an entire country. Like the Afghan refugees who have fled and now mass round the borders of surrounding countries, I sensed a kind of inevitability, a fatalism even, as we heard the distant drums of war getting nearer and nearer. There is a certain inexorability about this tidal turn of events. It is a time for war, I said to myself, and no amount of shuttle diplomacy could put a stop to the logic of revenge. The poor Afghans, perhaps inured to decades of conflict, quietly accepted the prospect of mass slaughter and hied off to the borders. For the powerless, the only wise thing to do is to get out of the way. As an African proverb nicely puts it, "when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled upon."
It should be said, though, that this conflict is not, strictly speaking, a 'war of the elephants.' It has features that are quite unusual, perhaps because we are seeing asymmetries, things that do not quite fit conventional notions of what a war is about.
It is not only that the contest is uneven, with strange results. On the one side is a roused behemoth, smashing about with a sophisticated arsenal of killing machines. Yet, while the weaponry is said to be smart, they have yet to hit their intended targets. On the other side is a loose network of scattered groups of firebrands, holed up in caves or lurking in the shadows in major cities. Operating as discrete cells, they are intractable. With fairly low technology they strike with an astonishing precision, imagination and suicidal daring.
Yet what makes this war really quite out of the usual is the way it is framed in religious terms. As bystanders we feel we are watching a deadly morality play, something straight out of the pages of history, as in medieval times when religion defined what was significant and men and women lived and fought and died for it.
George Bush talks of the war against terrorism as part of America's 'calling', at one time saying it is a virtual 'crusade', a quest for 'infinite justice,' a grand battle between good and evil. These are stirring words, resonating with that part of us that recoiled in shock and disbelief upon seeing so many innocent people sacrificed so coldly to the altar of a religious conviction gone haywire.
Then Osama Bin Laden comes on view in our TV screens, swearing to God that " America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Muhammad." In a single speech, he pulled together the many threads of grievance that the Arab world has against America and its allies, alluding to the suffering of innocents in Iraq, the carving up of Palestine, the undue presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia. Such injuries reminded those of us in the Two-Thirds World of our own histories, of long-standing wrong in the hands of the West, with the US as its leader in a continuing dominance that many of us resent.
The political element in all this makes us sympathetic to the underpinnings of Bin Laden's cause, though we may not share the twisted, tortuous conclusions to which he has brought the logic of his faith. The religious element in his crusade gives us the creeps, seeing how the Taliban has institutionalized its own brand of theocracy, turning a country into a clerical state that visits terror and retribution on those of its own citizens who do not happen to toe the line of its tight and narrow fundamentalisms.
There are many things in this war that throw a wrench in our usual mental grid in doing analysis. Bin Laden is not, at bottom, a politician. He is instead a religious idealist, constructing from out of the mythic past an imaginary order built out of a resurgent faith and the decayed remains of an ancient civilization. As such he is intractable, foisting on us that margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse and we come face to face with the power of human recalcitrance.
It does not help that the US, so far thwarted in its efforts at nailing down Bin Laden, seems bent on pulverizing Afghanistan till something gives way. The initial fellow-feeling in its time of sorrow is fast dwindling into discomfort over the heavy-handed way it pursues justice. From a moving woundedness as victim, it is now back to what the world perceives as its old role—the big guy trying to police the neighborhood, this time also acting as judge and executioner.
These moral ambiguities, apart from the many unknowns of this conflict, lie behind much of the hesitation to support the US militarily in its ongoing drive against terrorism. The recent APEC summit's refusal to back the US in its military campaign is part of the general reluctance to get embroiled in what looks like a war against a people. It is a wonder, in the light of this, that the Philippine government does not stop in its tracks and pause a bit. It is one thing to support the war against terrorism. It is another thing to assist in the bombing of a country wholesale, when all that is intended is to hunt down an elusive handful of misguided terrorists. Such actions merely serve to set militants aflame, instigating fresh recruits into marching in the streets or plotting mayhem, the hope of paradise glinting in their hard and shining eyes.
© Melba Padilla Maggay

The Enigma of John Paul II

The weeping crowds say it more than words can: in death as in life, this Pope moves the hearts of millions.

There is always a deep, solemn resonance that echoes in our hearts when a man of such great stature passes away. Karol Wojtila is undoubtedly a large man. On his watch, the lofty but paling shadow of Rome over its more than a billion faithful has sharpened once again into a stark chiaroscuro of light and dark. Weighted by centuries of tradition and gilded ritual, with checkered moments of mysticism and spiritual fervor along with cruel fanaticism and corrupt decadence, the Roman Catholic Church stands today as a bastion of moral certitude, pulled out of the shadows by a Pope whose sunny warmth and force of conviction has given it a dry and hard clarity in a time when much of the modern world prefers to live in the murky, misty shades of relativism.

One can not help but be drawn to the immense magnetism of this smiling, charming man waving to large crowds wherever he went, treating the world as his parish. One felt inexplicably moved, awed and touched by something authentically human yet altogether joyful and good. Here was genuine star power, but with a depth of intellect and a luminous charisma rarely seen together. An actor before he became priest, John Paul II knew how to communicate by word and symbol. His visits were virtual theatre, his motorcades a stunning show of populist power that unnerved totalitarian regimes and pressured dictatorships into loosening up.

Yet there was, in this Pope, a rocklike intransigence, a hard edge that baffles those who are warmed by his passion for social reform but turn cold stiff at the hardline conservatism of his theology.
Invested with the pomp and circumstance of his office, John Paul II used the magisterial power of the papacy along with his own considerable personal influence to lend authority and force to things he obviously believed in as of first importance. With shrewdness and passion, he applied it in equal measure to the support of dissidents and human rights movements under repressive regimes, the critique of consumerism, the Gulf War and global arms trade as well as to the buttressing of ancient dogma and church tradition against what he saw as the corrosions brought about by modern secularism, be it in liberal or marxist form.

Hailed as an apostle of ecumenism in his historic rapprochements with Jews and Muslims, he was nevertheless undauntingly forthright, as in the remark that Buddhism was essentíally “an atheistic system.” From all accounts capable of tender relationships with women, his uncompromising views on female ordination, contraception, abortion and other gender-related issues have sent many feminists up the wall in anguish and rage. A staunch defender of individual rights and a ringing advocate for the cause of the poor, he was high-handedly autocratic in disciplining those in his ranks he deemed to be wayward, particularly those known to be involved in socially-progressive projects.

What lies behind the seeming contradictions, the supposed paradoxes in the life and legacy of this extraordinary pope ?

The answer perhaps can be found in the very nature of his faith. The millenium Pope, while at home in the tools and the mental stock-in-trade of modern society, is a thoroughly unmodern believer rooted in the ancient certainties of his faith. He lived in a generation that saw the horrors of war and the constant specter of guilt and betrayal raised by the Holocaust among those who survived. It was a time when it was possible to live, only by a horrific descent to the animal instinct for survival, or by a depth of spirituality that enables human beings to miraculously rise from the ash heap and find an adequate reason for which to live and die.

According to accounts, the young Karol’s spirituality was forged out of the sufferings endured by the people of Poland under nazism and totalitarianism. The Germans began the bombing of Krakow on September 1, 1939 as the young priest served his first mass. He saw his Jewish friends and neighbors taken away, his university shut down and his professors disappear. Already distraught by the early loss of his entire family, the trampling of Poland under the bootheels of Hitler’s troops and then its subsequent subjection to Stalinist terror seems to have driven this intense, thoughtful man deeper into the search for meaning and transcendence in the face of such horrors.

Out of this crucible of suffering seems to have emerged a faith that was centered on the vast confidence that God is there; in our loneliness, desolation and despair there is someone home in the universe. It is not empty. At the same time, it must have impressed on the future pope the reality of evil, and the philosophical moorings that give rise to it.

Both nazism and totalitarianism were, in a way, modern social experiments that merely pushed to a logical, though extreme, conclusion the so-called ‘death of God’ as announced by Nietzche. As another Slavic, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, once put it, “with the downfall of the altar of God, all we are left with is the anthill or the superman.” Having lost an absolute reference for proportioning the exact value of human beings, we either pulverize people into little ants that have significance only in so far as they are part of a larger grouping that can move history, or deify them into heroic figures that are beyond mere conventions of good and evil, like Raskolnikov who in the novel Crime and Punishment fancied himself as a superman to whom ‘everything is permitted.’
We either apotheosize the collective and come up with the myth of the classless society, or raise certain nations and ethnicities to the status of demigods like the German folk belief in the supremacy of the Aryan race.

These practical consequences of secularism and the moral relativism that came trailing it may have shaped the Pope’s own dogged fight against what he saw as threats to the sanctity of the individual’s right to life. His own intimate experience of the social devastations of apostate relativism, or the loss of belief in absolute truth and absolute values rooted in the very nature of God, may have framed his attitudes towards those who assert complete autonomy in their ‘right to choose.’

As he says himself in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “We can not afford forms of permissiveness that would lead directly to the trampling of human rights, and also to the complete destruction of values which are fundamental not only for the lives of individuals and families, but for society itself. ”

However this may be construed by pro-life and pro-choice protagonists, it is clear that the Pope’s views on abortion and other sex issues stems from his fear of the dam breaking, as it were. The West has unleashed its highly developed language for ‘rights’ from its original Christian moorings. This has released a floodtide of permissiveness that has broken down traditional boundaries between right and wrong, maleness and femaleness and even what constitutes a family. This reaction to the excesses of western secular liberalism is echoed here by a rather caustic remark of our own Cardinal Sin: “Two men live together with a dog and you call that a family ?”

Undeniably, there is an element of fundamentalist militance here. The Pope’s stringent boundary-keeping is seen as of a piece with the way he is associated with the Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ, conservative groups that are seen to be Catholicism’s equivalent of Protestant fundamentalists. Someone had observed that this Pope had a ‘siege mentality,’ the feeling of being surrounded by forces hostile to the fundamental truths of his faith. This has been accounted to the fact that he grew up in an environment where belief in his faith and even the very survival of Polish identity was a matter of life and death and tied up to the ever-present possibility of martyreia.

This sense of ‘siege,’ this fundamentalist streak of being keeper of the faith in an age of doubt and disorder, also seems to be behind the silencing of theologians like Hans Kung and Leonardo Boff. This seemed like a throwback to those medieval days when the Church punished its best and brightest by subjecting them to the deadly inquisitions of those anxious to preserve dead orthodoxies. The Pope showed in no uncertain terms that he was prepared to excommunicate and bludgeon into submission those who stray from what he considered to be the straight and narrow path.

The public censure of activist priests Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel D’Escoto in the Sandinista government also appears to be seamlessly connected to the Pope’s direct experience of the evils of East European socialism. Asked about his views on liberation theology, the Pope was straightforward and spoke plainly: “It depends on whose liberation theology. If we’re talking about the liberation theology of Christ, not Marx, I am very much for it.” The Pope would have none of the unholy synthesis of Christianity and Marxism that had been the hallmark of much liberation theology and praxis then in vogue in Latin America.

Queried once about the iron-handedness of this doctrinal cleansing of the ranks, he replied, “It’s a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to faith and truth.” As a Pole who lived through a war and a totalitarian system, the Pope had little appreciation for the tolerant niceties of pluralism, nor was he a Protestant, raised within a church tradition that allowed believers great space and latitude for the free exercise of individual conscience. “You can not take a vote on truth.”

Theologians from both the Catholic and Protestant traditions may take issue with many of the things he unconditionally pronounced to be ‘the truth.’ John Paul II may indeed, through time, fade into the mists of history as some think because he was, merely, “a great man, but not a great Pope” as an English Catholic editor, John Wilkins, has remarked.

Still, the blunt and brave simplicity with which he took on many of the raging issues of our day had an appealing clarity to the masses of people who looked up to him for guidance and direction in a time of confusion and moral collapse.

The millions who now file past the dead Pope witness to something quite obvious yet has largely gone unremarked. This Pope is grieved over, not so much because of his lofty office, but because of the warmth and authenticity of his faith. This successor to Peter proved to be solid rock, not perhaps because he was, at first instance, tough, but because he had a depth of inner life born out of a genuine walk with God. He lived as if there is, really, another world, an alternative social reality and a moral order that saw good and evil as real and distinct, not woolly abstractions that cloud and sicken the mind. With the clarity of daylight, he led with courage and insight those who needed to be shown the way.

According to Robert Moynihan, editor of the magazine Inside the Vatican, the Pope believed that if we keep following the road, we are likely to find that “some kind of eternal, holy being wants human beings to be holy and happy.”

Quite fittingly, his visits to the many countries he covered had the feel of virtual epiphanies. In a world bereft of a sense of transcendence, he gave us what the sociologist Emile Durkheim calls ‘times of effervescence,’ that unbearable lightness of feeling that bubbles over with a luminous joy when face to face with something authentically touched with the holy.


Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.
for PATMOS FEATURES
of Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture
April 7, 2005

Towards Contextualization from Within: Some Tools and Culture Themes

Introduction


It has been more than three decades since gospel and culture issues, now technically known as ‘contextualization,’ became a major concern for Two-Thirds World churches. The Willowbank Consultation on Gospel and Culture held in Bermuda in 1978 acknowledged that human beings are all creatures of their culture, and that everything we think, say and do is conditioned by it.1 This means that we can not, strictly speaking, view the gospel as unconditioned by history and the cultures in which it had encrypted itself. There is no such thing as a ‘pure gospel’, if by this we mean that there is a free-floating Word somewhere which is not somehow incarnated in a human culture and language.

That the Word became flesh means that like Jesus, the gospel goes through a process of inculturation in particular cultures. This is what the Jew-Gentile social crisis of the first century church was about. All those narratives in the book of Acts regarding what to do with the Gentile churches, all those polemics in Galatians and Philippians against Judaizers, all those questions regarding food offered to idols and other such cultural issues, and that grand treatise in Romans about justification by faith and not by works of the law – all these are struggles of the early churches to understand the meaning of the cross in cultures other than that of the Jews. Then as now, the gospel was in search of new wineskins. The new wine brought by the person and work of Jesus could no longer be contained within the old Jewish wineskins. It had to break out, find new jars of clay in which the treasures of the gospel, hidden through the ages, could be revealed and sniffed as a new scent, a new fragrance among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.

Since the gospel broke out of its Jewish wineskins, contextualization had been happening, whether consciously or unconsciously. Both the sending culture and the recipient culture are participants in this process. The effort of translating Scripture and preaching it in the indigenous languages of receiving churches is by itself an attempt to make the Word at home in another context. A people’s appropriation of this received message is likewise already an attempt to give it sense within the meaning system of the local culture. However imperfectly, there is a mutual adjustment, a mutual accommodation that is taking place.

This is so even even in the case of almost four centuries of Spanish Catholicism in this country. Those of us who are Protestants tend to dismiss the impact of Iberian Christianity on our culture. Quite rightly, we see it occurring on the level of surface structures -- a mere exhange of statues, for instance, where wooden images of dark-skinned anitos are replaced by plaster saints with Caucasian features. These are changes that have been mostly on the level of what anthropologists call ‘surface structures,’ artifacts of the culture whose appearances have changed but whose underlying worldview or meaning system remains the same.

Yet through time, it is also worth noting that the symbolic forms by which Spanish Christianity had expressed its faith – like the Pasyon -- also became what the historian Reynaldo Ileto calls ‘a grammar of dissent’ for the restive masses that bore the brunt of resistance against Spain and, later, the American occupation of the country.2 These were mostly members of millenarian movements round Mount Banahaw who sourced their piety and revolutionary inspiration from the teachings of Hermano Pule, a spiritual leader who, according to one account, had read the Bible while he was a sacristan doing service for a priest. 3 Whatever else we may want to make out of this, it is clear that some kind of cultural appropriation, some process that is now described as a ‘theft of symbol,’ was taking place.

This appropriation of the passion of Christ as a paradigm of the suffering masses may be a process similar to the way Jesus was presented by an anonymous group of Jewish believers who fled from Jerusalem and preached to Greeks for the first time. The title they used was not Messiah or the ‘Anointed’ or ‘smeared one’, which culturally was senseless to their audience of Antiochan Gentiles, but Kyrios or ‘Lord,’ which was used by devotees of East Mediterranean religions to refer to their cult divinities. It was, according to the missiologist and historian Andrew Walls, a daring piece of cross-cultural transaction. It opened the way to a truly Hellenistic understanding of Jesus. 4

The history of Christianity since then has been a story of peoples appropriating for themselves the manifold wisdom of God as revealed through the peculiarities of their customs and traditions. The themes surfaced by the western churches have for a time dominated the discourse on what the gospel is about. The rise of liberation theology, African native cults, millenarian movements, various kinds of primal and eastern religions, resurgent fundamentalisms and other such kinds of regional spiritualities has challenged and expanded the terms and parameters of the discourse. The shift of Christianity’s center from its western homelands to the pluralistic environments of nonwestern cultures has occasioned critical reflections as well as new appropriations of what the gospel is about.

This brings me to the main concern of this paper, which is to attempt an answer to the question, ‘How, precisely, do we contextualize ?’ I would like to think that we are now past the reactive phase, past taking to task the old western missionary movement and its imperialisms. We are at a stage where our resources as a church are enough to move us to a constructive phase. So then, how do we preach the gospel in such a way that it truly dwells among our people ?

For a starter, let me suggest some tools for framing our local discourse.


Communicating in context: some tools


The late Virgilio Enriquez, speaking of cross-cultural psychology, once made a distinction between indigenization from without and indigenization from within. This distinction seems to me helpful when we are trying to ‘contextualize’ or ‘inculturate’ concepts from a Christianity that had been processed and articulated elsewhere.

Usually, when we speak of ‘contextualization,’ we mean ‘Christianity in local dress’ or some such metaphor, assuming that it is simply a matter of changing clothes. Nagpapalit lang ng damit. This implies an ‘outer part,’ which is changeable and purely formal, and an ‘inner part’ which is the ‘essence’ or the substance, which is quite fixed and unchanging. This is a habit of thought characteristic of all Greek-based thinking, which divides reality between an abstract ‘essence’ and a concrete ‘form.’

This is behind the process I call ‘contextualization from without,’ where a fixed gospel formulated from the outside is translated and reinterpreted into local context. This is mere adaptation. We translate gospel tracts and books, substitute rice for bread in communion, or use folk tunes for hymns, but do not think that the ‘gospel’ or our message itself may need changing.

Now it is true that there is a universality to the gospel of Christ. That ‘Jesus came and died and was buried and rose again and will one day come again to judge the living and the dead’ is a fairly universal statement of what the gospel is about. But this is of no use when speaking to people with centuries of Christian tradition, or those who are at least aware of this outline for having observed Christendom celebrate Christmas, Holy Week and Easter. For this universal gospel to make sense in a specific context, it needs to ‘come down’ as it were, become ‘flesh’ for a people.

Communication theory talks about a ladder of abstraction. There are levels of abstraction to the way we talk.

( see diagram 1 )

This tells us that the more general our statements, the more abstract they become. Conversely, the more specific our message, the more concrete it becomes.

This means that for the gospel to make sense in a given context, we need to go down the ladder of abstraction. The meaning of the gospel needs to be articulated in a culture-specific way to specific peoples. This is why we talk about ‘people groups.’ Our message, and not just our methodologies, must have culture-fit. We need specific texts that will engage the people in their context. This is what I mean by contextualization from within.

So how does this work ?

First, we look at a culture’s system of meaning. This is usually embedded in language. Since Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, we have been made aware that language is not just an instrument for expressing ideas. It shapes that very world of ideas. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” says Langer.5 We see only what has been labeled for us.

The presence or absence of words in a culture already tells us what is important in that culture. We have no indigenous word for ‘sin’ for instance. The most that the Spanish missionaries could come up with was the word ‘sala,’ which literally means ‘off the mark.’ While this does carry one theological meaning of the word, which is ‘missing the mark,’ it is the most superficial. Centuries of usage does not seem to have lent seriousness to the word, like the sense that we have offended a righteous God whose law has been transgressed. We use the word casually, as with a friend who has been remiss in fulfilling some minor rituals of friendship: “Hoy, may kasalanan ka sa akin. ” Translated in English, this means “Hey, you have sinned against me.” The English word ‘sin’ is just never used in this casual way. But in our language, kasalanan may mean any range of casual meanings, from ‘fault’ to ‘infraction’ to ‘mischief.’ Nalihis lang ng landas.

What this tells us is that we are dealing with a culture that has yet to have a sense of sin as transgression of an absolute moral law, of hard and fast rules that source their authority in a God whose character does not change and whose anger when roused can not be negotiated. There is about us a certain softness about the ‘law,’ a lack of hardness which is probably due to the fact that in our folklore, the high god is perceived as good but tolerant and so can be conveniently ignored. A Visayan story tells of Bathala getting increasingly depressed but not wrathful at the sight of humankind debasing themselves with all kinds of wickedness.6 This is a stark contrast to the picture of God in Puritan literature, as with Jonathan Edwards’ classic sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Anger, it seems, is an emotion reserved to the anitos or lesser spirits, who can get spiteful or capricious. These, however, can be bribed or appeased by offerings. There is a sense of reciprocity in these exchanges. The anitos get the offerings due them, and the people wangle some kind of protection or at least non-disturbance from them. As with our relations with the spirit world, we get the sense that everything can be negotiated, including traffic rules and governance.

As has been shown, language is a window to a people’s worldview. It can tell us a great deal about what a culture is about. This means that in doing analysis, we should pay careful attention to the words, their frequency or paucity in a given culture. This can give us a sense of the culture themes, the great concepts and belief systems that animate a culture and need addressing if we are to truly engage its deeper structures.

To contextualize from within means that we search for texts that will engage such culture themes. The message must be framed within the meaning system of the culture-bearers. The perspective is emic and not etic, from the perspective of those inside the culture and not those from the outside of the culture. We source our message from the categories by which the culture itself makes sense of the world.

This is especially important in a culture that makes a sharp distinction between the loob and the labas. We do not make a distinction between public and private; we have no indigenous word for privacy. We do not know the concept. But we draw a line when behaving towards those considered taga-loob and those who are taga-labas. Propriety demands that we treat the ibang tao with great hospitality and respect; our primary mode of behaving towards them is formal and accommodative. Those who are no longer outsiders, who are di ibang tao, we treat informally and we become confrontative. The loob is the place where the inmost being resides. Any call for a decision for Christ whose terms are outside this loob consigns itself to being merely a social invitation. What we get in response is not conversion but accommodation. The dynamic at work is the highly socialized instinct of a people whose passion for connectedness will make them adapt but not really convert.

This brings me to another key concept that is useful in contextualizing the gospel in this culture. This is to make a distinction between core values or core traits and surface values or traits. Core values are those that belong to the deep structures, the root metaphors that define a people and describe a culture and rarely change through time. The sense of connectedness, of group-centeredness, is a Filipino core value. It does not change through time or geography. Professionals in New York or domestic helpers in Hongkong respond to the same pull of communal life, whether a fiesta at times Square or a Sunday outing at Statue Square.

Surface values are usually maladaptions, surface traits acquired as coping mechanisms, survival techniques learned through centuries of colonial experience, like the kanya-kanya syndrome or the so-called talangka mentality. We should be careful not to account to culture what are really accidents of history or a product of social arrangements. These, through time, tend to disappear once the social system returns to more normal function.

The core values and traits frame our meaning system. It is within this infraculture that the gospel has to make sense.

Contextual communication then is developing a message and communicating it within the thought forms of a culture. It is not merely adapting for the consumption of local people a formulation that has served its uses elsewhere. It is finding within both the Scripture as text and culture as context a ‘gospel’ that is fit for the needs of a specific people.

The following is an example of how this process of contextualization from within actually works.


Contextualization from within: some core themes


The book of Acts gives us examples of how Paul contextualized the gospel according to the conceptual framework of his hearers. To the Jews in Pisidian Antioch he spoke of Jesus as the son of David, the Messiah long promised to their ancestors. To the pagans at Lystra, he brought good news of the living God who made heaven and earth, and gives rain and fruitful seasons, satisfying their hearts with food and gladness. To the sophisticated Athenians, he spoke of the unknown God who does not live in shrines made by hands, but is so near that “in him we live and move and have our being” as their poets say. 7 Paul did not have a highly generalized, generic gospel that he took from culture to culture. Instead, he identified themes that were significant to the culture and crafted a message of hope that connected with his hearers.

What is the good news to Filipinos ? What is that which to us would be really good news if only someone listened to us long enough to be able to tell us what we need to hear ?

Let me cite just one or two core themes.

the tagapamagitan

Deep in the culture is the concept of the tagapamagitan, the one who stands in our place and pleads for us if we are in need of a champion, or someone who delicately sets forth our case when negotiating, when something needs to be fixed, or when we are in need of some favor from the powers. We use the tagapamagitan for healing ruptures in relationships, for advancing our cause in courtship, or for expressing feelings that are sensitive and best sent indirectly.

Jesus is like this, a reconciling God who makes peace with his blood and breaks down the dividing wall of hostility between us and those who have somehow been estranged from us. His blood is better than the blood of bulls and goats, or the entrails of chickens and pigs, for it is able to appease, not just the spirits, but the high god whose displeasure has made him distant from his own creation.

He is the go-between God, the one who is able to mediate the power and presence of God. This needs to be stressed in the light of the sense that the gods are distant and inaccessible.There is a deep longing in the culture for the gods to be present, even if only in the bullul or in the statues of numerous saints. It is unfortunate that when Protestants refer to 1 Timothy 2:5, the emphasis is on the one mediator, rather than there is one mediator, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all and wants all to be saved.

Likewise, the image in Hebrews of Jesus as a great high priest is important to a culture that turns to Mary precisely because she is human, an empathetic woman who understands us all and can well represent us to the Godhead. This man, we are told, is “not unable to sympathize with human weakness.” He is just like us, and yet by his death has broken through the curtain so that we may, with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace. 8

the God of Abraham


A core theme in our culture is the sense of connectedness, of being part of an intricate network of relationships. The metaphor used to describe this is the ‘multiple fried eggs.’ If you fry many eggs in one large pan, the whites are seamlessly connected to each other. While there are individual yolks, you don’t know where one egg begins and where it ends. This, they say, is the Filipino sense of self. It is always connected, always part of a larger sakop. It is this that gets roused when, in rare moments of solidarity, Filipinos stand together to bring down a dictatorship or a corrupt presidency.

This deep sense of interconnectedness extends to maintaining relationships with the ancestral dead. The dead are separated only by a curtain of invisibility. Otherwise, they continue to be part of human society.

The depth of this is seen in the profusion of ancient funerary rites, art objects, and other artifacts expressive of deep reverence for the dead and their continuing importance to the living. The almost baroque rituals connected to Todos los Santos, and the extended time of mourning signified by pasiyam, padasal, babang luksa and other such commemorative markers, speak of a people whose relational sense is unbroken by death and remains as a basis for the continuing claims of the dead upon the living.

Many of the festivities of upland communities are meant for their ancestral heroes, like Kabigat and Balitok among the Ikalahan. In these communities, the canao is, at its base, not so much a religious as a social rite, a way of affirming ties with the ancestral spirits who are invited to participate in the drinking, feasting and dancing. It is also, as Dr. Delbert Rice points out, a way of identifying who belongs to the community. It is a sign and a seal of the people’s sense of identity together as a community.9

This sense of connectedness also explains the anxiety and concern even of Protestant converts in the Cordilleras that their dead should have a burial blanket that identifies them with the clan to which they belong. The practice serves as locus of identity, of who they are and what they shall be in the afterlife. To be without a blanket is to wander about like an outcast, not able to belong anywhere.

There is much soundness behind the proposition that our indigenous religion really ought to be called anitismo rather than animism.10 For it is not, technically speaking, preoccupied with the worship of spiritual life forces, but with the maintenance of harmonious ties with our ancestor anitos and all other spirit beings.

To a culture like this, it makes sense to talk of being surrounded by a ‘great cloud of witnesses,’ this assembly of great spirits who watch over us and wish us to win the race that is set before us. The Christian faith is continuous with the faith of our ancestral heroes, and its God is as much the god of our anitos as he was the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. To other cultures, this formulaic introduction to God’s self-disclosure may seem like a minor Jewish literary convention. But to us it is a major text, emphasizing the sense of continuity, of God’s generational presence across the divide that separates the living from the dead.

Unfortunately, much of our evangelism is centered on the ruptures that must occur as proof of the genuineness of our conversion. While there are certainly elements in the Christian faith that will necessarily disrupt cultures, the vast part of it is continuous with the primitive revelation that we find in all religions.

Our people’s sensing that we are not alone, that we are part of a great community that stretches back through many generations, darkly prefigures the biblical idea of a ‘communion of saints.’ Our tribal cultures may know more of what this means than those of us who have been initiated into a religion that assumes we are all atomized individuals who live entirely in the present, without any notion that our lives have some connection to an invisible society of those who have gone before.


Authenticity as context


Framing a message within the conceptual world of our hearers is one part of communicating in context. The other part is framing the message within a context of unity and authenticity.

The Word has to have a Body, a community that serves as a sign to the world that there is a new order of things. Jesus’ prayer in John 17 ties the unity of believers to the plausibility of their witness. He prays that they may all be one, so that the world may believe that the Father has sent him. Francis Schaeffer calls this the ‘final apologetic.’

The science of communication tells us that in a communication situation that involves people of the same culture, only 30 % of the communicating that is happening is mediated by words. Seventy percent is non-verbal. And when what is being said conflicts with what is being done, when the verbal is not consistent with the non-verbals, people tend to believe the non-verbal.

What this tells us is that what we manage to say is not as important as what people sense and see. Proclamation has to be backed up by authentic witness. Word and deed, proclamation and presence must go together. Our story makes sense only within a visible context of authentic community.

This, to me, is what contextualization is all about. It pays attention to the entire context of what happens when we communicate. It wrestles with both the intellectual and ethical content of the gospel that we proclaim, even as it engages the cultural and social context of the people to whom we are sent.


Concluding remarks


We live in a time when our people suffer a great deal of psychological discomposure. As we look at the prosperity of our neighbors in the region we feel a loss of self-esteem. We feel kulelat. Some of us get into fits of rage and ill temper – nawawalan ng bait, we call it. A lot of people are under great emotional and mental stress besides the usual financial distress. We are sick as a people.

In the old days, according to the historian Zeus Salazar, sickness was seen as caused by the kaluluwa wandering away from the body. As a way of healing, the katalonan would place herbal leaves on the forehead and pray and call on the kaluluwa to hover around and sit on the head since it is the person’s seat of consciousness. The soul has to return for the person to recover and regain strength.

This concept of the soul returning is captured in the idea of pagbabalik-loob, the return to one’s inmost being. It carries connotations of having lost one’s way, of having made a wrong turn that caused us to wander away like a lost soul – galang kaluluwa, as they say.

It is possible that we are sick as a nation because we have lost our soul, we have forgotten who we are and have lost our way by listening too much to voices from the outside. We define ourselves by what they tell us.

But it is possible to find our way home again. We can return to the loob, to that place where we meet ourselves and meet with Christ. Magbalik-loob is our culture’s equivalent of calling people to repentance. It is a much better paradigm and nearer to the biblical idea than the word the Spanish missionaries used, pagsisisi, which at best means ‘regret’ in Tagalog.

The loob is the place where we return for healing and the recovery of identity. It is where genuine conversion takes place, the stage upon which our own Damascus experience as a people happens. It is there that we truly turn from idols to the living God.

Magbalik-loob tayo, mga kapatid.



Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.
Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture
March 2005
Notes


1. John RW Stott, “Twenty Ýears after Lausanne: Some Personal Reflections,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol.19, No.2, April 1995, p.50.

2. See Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 1979.

3. My informant for this is my friend, Sonia Zaide, from documents inherited from her father, the famous historian Gregorio F. Zaide.

4. Adrew F. Walls, “Old Athens and New Jerusalem: Some Signposts for Christian Scholarship in the Early History of Mission Studies,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol.21 No.4, October 1997, p.146.

5. Suzanne Langer, as quoted by Don F. Faule and Dennis C. Alexander, Communication and Social Behavior: A Symbolic Interactive Perspective, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Illinois, 1978, p.16.

6. Sylvia Palugod, Filipino Religious Consciousness, Track 2 Report on the research, Conversion to Protestant Christianity Under Early American Rule, Vol.III, 1997-1998, p.53.

7. See the various preaching contexts of Acts 13:13ff.; 14:8-18; 17:16ff.

8. Hebrews 4:14-16

9. Interview with Dr. Delbert Rice, Appendix D of the research Report, Conversion to Protestant Christianity Under Early American Rule, Vol.II, 1996-1997, pp.15-16.

10. Dr. Prospero Covar, “Filipino Religious Consciousness as Glimpsed from Studies of Religious Movements,” Appendix D of the Report on the research, Conversion to Protestant Christianity Under Early American Rule, Vol.1, 1995-1996, pp.33-34.

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