2001_h The Concerns of George M. Soares-Prabhu, S.J., in: Francis X. D'Sa, Theology of Liberation: An Indian Biblical Perspective, Collected Writings

of George M. Soares-Prabhu, S.J., Vol. IV, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth Theology Series (Pune: Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, 2001), xi-xxxix.

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THE CONCERNS OF GEORGE M. SOARES-PRABHU , S.J.

Francis X. D'Sa, S.J.

INTRODUCTION

“Concern for the poor and fascination for the person of Jesus" is the Sutra that ties together the personal as well as the scholarly threads of George SOARES-PRABHU 's life. It is not surprising then that liberation themes constitute the bulk of his writing. Today liberation has come to be associated in (though not limited to) theological circles from the perspective of the theologies of liberation emanating from the Latin American sub-continent.1 In SOARES-PRABHU 's case, liberation had two specific characteristics: one biblical and the other Indian. His is quite distinctly a biblical theology of liberation seen through Indian eyes. And because it is biblical and Indian it culminates in a new reading of the New Testament. There is hardly any piece of writing of his that does not witness to this specific outlook.

Speaking generally, liberation and liberation theology have rightly come to be associated with Latin America; for it is from that continent that the light of liberation – lux ex occidente – has been spreading hope to ‘the poor of the earth’ as also to ‘the poor of theology’. For liberation is, among other things, also liberation of theology and of the theologians of the Third World from Eurocentrism. Such were also the thoughts of SOARES-PRABHU who was influenced in no small measure by the writings of the Latin American liberation theologians.2

On the other hand, SOARES-PRABHU whose versatility is very much in evidence in his writings was not one to reproduce someone else’s ideas, as those who knew him will readily testify,. Though open to new ways of thinking and theologizing, he was never easy to convince; in this he was a strict follower of the Scriptures in that he consistently tested the

1 Cf. The influence of liberation theology is not limited to Indian theologians alone. See, for example, how a secular historican, Sumit Sarkar, looks at it in his, “Conversions and Politics of Hindu Right”, in Economic and Political Weekly (June 26, 1999) 1691-1700, esp. 1698.

2 See his “Inculturation – Liberation – Dialogue. Challenges to Christian Theology in Asia Today”, in Biblical Themes for a Contextual Theology Today where he speaks of Latin America’s ‘Liberation Theology’ as a ‘brilliant exception’ which is not ‘Western’ in colour and texture (p. 53); later on he again speaks of the liberation theology that is “being elaborated with such success in Latin America” (p. 56). Furthermore: “As such, Liberation Theology has been a powerful inspiration to Asian theologians, and has served to awaken them from the drugged slumber of their privatized spirituality (accentuated by the individualism of the Asian religions among which they live) to an awareness of the social demands of the gospel.” Ibid. See also his “The Jesus of Faith: A Christological Contribution to an Ecumenical Third World Spirituality”, p. 5 where be bemoans that “Third World theologies (except for Latin American liberation theology which has taken off and become, I believe, the most significant theology in the Christian world today) have yet to acquire a life and confirguration of their own.”

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spirits as this volume will testify. In all his writings he refers to a wide variety of shades and schools of thought but what he himself proposed stands out clearly as his specific contribution. Invigorated as he was by the fresh winds of liberation theology he was not blind to the wide differences between the Latin American situation and the Indian context. He was convinced that any theology of liberation that India produces will have to recognize the fact that there is no substitute for fidelity to the Indian context. We find repeated statements to this effect in his writings.

Liberation, the central theme – the Sutra – of this volume has three centres as it were: one revolves round methodological concerns, the second around the situation of India and the Third World, and the last around themes from the Scriptures. (The plural is deliberate since there is repeated reference in SOARES-PRABHU’s writings also to Indian [Hindu and Buddhist] Scriptures.) The circles are not separate, only distinct. What emerges from the threefold revolution are the first intimations of a genuine Indian theology of liberation from a biblical perspective that is specifically Indian. Indian because it is an Indian heart that listens to the cry of the poor and oppressed and reads the signs of the times in India, and helps the readers to understand the situation from the ‘down-side of history’. Biblical because SOARES-PRABHU turns to the Bible for light and inspiration; and finally it is theology of liberation because it is with the help of the Scriptures that SOARES-PRABHU attempted to read and interpret the signs of the times in the Third World. Not surprisingly then his reading of the Bible culminates in a new approach to the person and message of Jesus - the Jesus of Faith.3

To help readers follow these three movements the articles have been arranged in four parts: the ground is prepared by Part One which concentrates on Interpreting the Bible in India Today. Part Two puts up the structure that houses The Bible and Liberation. In Part Three the house is furnished with different aspects of A Biblical Theology of Liberation for India. Lastly, Part Four Christology for India: The Jesus of Faith turns this house into a home by focusing on Jesus, the centre of gravity of SOARES-PRABHU ’s theological and spiritual dwelling. Christologically speaking then, the highpoint of his theology is the Jesus of Faith.

PART I: INTERPRETING THE BIBLE IN INDIA TODAY

Part One concentrates on articles which give importance to methodological questions. What distinguishes SOARES-PRABHU from other exegetes is that for him exegesis was only a spring-board for theologizing. Besides, in his exegetical endeavours he employed tools whose validity he did not take for granted; he tested them very critically and gave a reasoned account of them. Though he rarely ventured into deep hermeneutical waters he regularly prefaced his essays with questions of method and hermeneutics. Though he did not fully agree with WALTER WINK that “historical biblical criticism is bankrupt”,4 he was by no means ignorant of "the growing awareness that the method is not quite as 'neutral' as it pretends to be and that it is not really adequate for the study of a book like the bible which is

3 See the last essay in this volume.

4 Walter Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation (Philadelphia, 1975).

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not a scientific but a religious text; and which aims not at communicating historical information but at evoking a religious response".5

When it came to the Bible SOARES-PRABHU's concern was with “Interpreting the Bible in India Today”. His quest was for new and more contextualized ways of reading the Bible. He was fully acquainted with the fact that: "These [contextualized ways] shift attention from the author to the text and the reader. Modern hermeneutical theory sees the text not simply as the repository of a static 'author meaning', which is to be dug out by the careful use of philological and grammatical tools, accessible only to the expert, but as an intelligible linguistic structure, a texture of words, with an autonomous 'text meaning' of its own."6 For him the Bible like all religious texts was the expression of an inexhaustible ‘originary experience’ “which can be actualized in many different ways, none of which can claim to be definitive."7 Dialogue, not archaeology, he held, was the paradigm for biblical interpretation since the meaning of a text results from the dialogue between the reader and the text.8 That is to say, the two worlds of the reader and the text have to fuse, if a contextual meaning is to emerge.

The world of the authentic Indian reader, as SOARES-PRABHU sees it, refers to the Indian situation and the Indian mind.9 While the former is constituted by massive poverty, pervasive religiosity and the apparently immutable structure of caste, the latter is context-sensitive and sees reality as an interrelated and interdependent whole. "Because of its passion for wholeness the Indian mind is prepared to risk the chance of error rather than the loss of any part of truth."10 But this whole, far from being monolithic, "holds together seemingly contradictory aspects of reality as complementary parts of a never fully to be apprehended

5 SOARES-PRABHU , “Interpreting the Bible in India Today” p.1.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. p.72 In his defence of the historical critical method SOARES-PRABHU seems to overstates his case. His remarks about Osho Rajneesh's reading of the sayings of Jesus make it appear that the latter's reading is pure eisegesis, forgetting that, as he [SOARES-PRABHU] himself states it, it is the language structure of the religious texts that embodies an originary experience of the Absolute which is inexhaustible and which makes its claim on a Rajneesh or a Rushdie – in its own way. It is true that, to a certain extent, Rajneesh does not allow the text to speak for itself; but even here appearances are deceptive. What Rajneesh says the text is saying is but another way of (Rajneesh) acknowledging the author-ity of the text! In spite of Rajneesh trumpeting his own tantric-advaita, Soares-Prabhu acknowledges that Osho’s books “abound in extraordinary creative insights (unavailable elsewhere) into what Jesus means today” (See the last essay “Jesus of Faith” in this volume). Is this not sufficient proof for Soares-Prabhu’s contention that meaning arises from a dialogue between text and reader, even though the dialogue might not be perfect. Furthermore it is not because it is a religious text that its surplus of meaning is inexhaustible, it is the other way round: because of its semantic autonomy a text’s surplus of meaning is inexhaustible. This is much more so in the case of a religious text. Similarly SOARES-PRABHU's statement that "a genuine Indian Christian reading of the bible cannot dispense with historical criticism as easily as radical hermeneutists like Ricoeur and Gadamer...would like to do" (“Interpreting the Bible in India Today” p. ) seems to me to be inaccurate. Neither Ricoeur and Gadamer, I believe, can be accused of such a stance.

9 Ibid. pp. 75ff

10 Ibid. p. 77.

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whole"11. This is so because its logic is inclusive, not exclusive. Accordingly an Indian interpretation that does justice to such a context can only be brought forth by a pluri-religious group working for the transformation of Indian society.

The essay “The Prophet as Theologian. Biblical Prophetism as a Paradigm for Doing Theology Today” is methodologically oriented and proposes the thesis that for a theology to be genuinely biblical both its content (the ‘what’) and its method (the ‘how’) have to be biblical.12 The essay narrows down the biblical aspect to the prophets who are taken as the paradigm for theologizing because it is the prophets who inveigh, after the Exodus, against the reversal by the monarchy of the Mosaic revolution of an ‘economy of equality and a politics of justice’ and a ‘religion of the absolute freedom of God’.

The prophetic protest – which is the essence of prophetic theologizing - consists of a two-fold criticism: religious and social. The former warns against idolatry and the latter against social injustice. Idolatry is the absolutization of things like money, kingship and temple or the reduction of God to an idol. Positively it asks for fidelity to their God-experience that is liberative, not legitimizing. It is social because it condems all forms of exploitation and oppression. The prophetic protest is historically situated and proposes an ‘alternative vision’.13 The language of the prophet is symbolic, not conceptual and it is authentic because, among other things, it is contextualized.

Next follows an elaborate essay “Commitment and Conversion: A Biblical Hermeneutic for India Today” wherein SOARES-PRABHU attempts both to explore the state of and to work out the conditions necessary for any sound biblical hermeneutics in India. For the purposes of the first he examines two extreme attempts at interpreting the Bible in India, one that relies wholly on the historical critical method and the other which ignoring the historicality of the biblical text offers a commentary with the help of Indian religious texts. The second part of the essay is an elaborate disquisition on hermeneutical principles which, Soares-Prabhu believes, are necessary for an Indian reading of the Bible. Such a reading relies on a dialogical hermeneutics which is based on the autonomy of the text. This implies openness of the text to the interpreters which, in its turn, challenges the interpreters to open themselves up to the text. A hermeneutical reading of the text means, over and above what has been stated, reading through the glasses of the reader’s concerns. Simple as this may sound, it presupposes an hermeneutical circle which, following Juan Luis Segundo, refers to a fourfold movement: (1) A new experience of reality (2) renders us suspicious of our understanding of reality; (3) this in its turn makes us suspicious of the way we go about the Bible. (4) Out of this emerges the attempt to re-interpret the Bible.

The readers’ understanding of reality has to be affected by the concerns that are specific to their context; these are necessary for an authentic Indian reading. Concretely this implies commitment to the poor and conversion to the Indian world-view. The Indian world-view, as SOARES-PRABHU sees it, is i�n�c�l�u�s �i�v�e�,� �c�o�s �m�o�c�e�n�t�r �i�c�,� �s �y�m�b�o�l�i�c� �a�n�d� �p�r �a�g�m�a�t�i�c� By pragmatic he means that the search is not for knowledge of liberation; it is a quest for � �l�i�b�e�r �a�t�i�o�n itself�! �.

11 Ibid.

12 “The Prophet as Theologian. Biblical Prophetism as a Paradigm for Doing Theology Today”, p. 3.

13 Ibid. pp. 6-7.

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In the final analysis modernization, S �o�a�r �e�s �- �P �r �a�b�h�u� �a�r �g�u�e�s, makes the historical critical investigation of the scriptures indispensable. “But modernization does not exhaust the possibilities of Indian life; neither does historical criticism (however necessary) exhaust the possibilities of biblical interpretation.”14

Arguably SOARES-PRABHU’s attitude to the historical critical method remained ambiguous to the end. In view of his conviction that the historical critical method is indispensable where fidelity to the text is concerned, the extreme severity of his criticism and the space he devote to it is not easily justifiable. One would have thought that, using Occam’s razor, it would have been more than enough to state the limits of the method, and then proceed to show just at what level it is indispensable to take the world of the text seriously. The long discussions about the shortcomings of the historical critical method are bound to confuse the reader who may not be familiar with the problematic of truth and method.15

Again in his “Two Mission Commands” we encounter a rather long disquisition on the merit or otherwise of the historical critical method which precedes his reflection on an Asian reading of the Scriptures. The focus on liberation, Soares–Prabhu believed, brings together our Asian stories and texts with the Bible. He understood liberation at three different levels: first, liberation from the pre-critical dogmatism which pervades the Asian traditions and which sporadically gives rise to fundamentalism in different parts of Asia today; second, liberation from the “overwhelming poverty, social oppression and patriarchy” of Asian society and third, liberation “from the bondage of inordinate attachments” because “The ‘enlightenment’ of Kant must be completed by the enlightenment of the Buddha, the liberation of Marx with the ‘liberation’ (moksha) of the Gita.”16

With a theological background like this and basing himself on the character of the semantic autonomy of a text Soares-Prabhu tries out an experiment in ‘intertextuality’, that is, he applies here what may be called the principles of presence and absence. There are in each text (or tradition) elements that are hidden and therefore ignored or overlooked, and others which are missing but not known as such. When texts of different cultures are brought together the light of one text brings out elements that were hidden or missing in the other. Taking the Mahåvagga text of the Buddhists SOARES-PRABHU works out the factors present or absent in Mt. 28:16-20 and vice versa he shows how the text of Mt 28:16-20 throws light on aspects which are either hidden or ignored and on others which are found to be altogether missing in the Mahåvagga text. The article is basically a conscious and deliberate attempt at inculturation.17

14 Ibid. p. 15.

15 H-G. GADAMER

16 SOARES-PRABHU , “Two Mission Commands”, p. 273

17 Cfr. Thomas Manjaly (Ed), Proclaiming Jesus in India Today. Challenges and Prospects. (CCBI Commission for Proclamation 2000), p. 27: “It is through inculturation one recognizes the enriching or dehumanizing elements that are operative in the cultures. Inculturation then is the process through which the Spirit guides us to discern the chaff of false values from the wheat of genuine growth.”

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PART II: THE BIBLE AND LIBERATION

Part Two of this volume focuses on The Bible and Liberation. Liberation is discussed in the areas of human rights, the poor as a social class, economic liberation, a liberated and liberating community and the dimension of love as the source of all liberation.

SOARES-PRABHU sees the Bible as the magna carta of movements of liberation and human rights. As is to be expected the vocabulary of the Bible is innocent of categories such as social class, human rights, economic liberation, etc. But its understanding of the human person implies principles which are the source of human and societal rights. SOARES-PRABHU highlights two such principles: the sacredness of the human person and “our responsibility for the welfare of people and specially of those in need” – one of the most characteristic features of the Bible.18

The two creation stories (the Priestly story of Gen 1:1-24a and the Yahwist story of Gen 2:4b-25), says SOARES-PRABHU, forcefully affirm the principle: “Humankind is clearly set off from the rest of creation as its crowning summit in Gen 1:2-30, and as the centre round and for which the rest of the world is made in Gen 2:7-9.” The affirmation of the special place of humankind is to be found in the “striking pronouncement that humankind has been made in the image of God.”19 Moreover the role of stewardship belongs to all humankind, not to individuals as such.20

Be that as it may, the further point that SOARES-PRABHU makes in this context is significant. The locus of our encounter with God, he argues, is humankind. He reasons this out from the manner in which Jesus interprets Deut 6:5 with the help of the obscure text from Leviticus (19:18). "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might,” this means, according to SOARES-PRABHU’s paraphrase, that “you must love your neighbour as yourself” For “Right relations with God depend on right relationships with people.”21 Such is the dignity of humans and such is the basis of human rights and logically of the welfare of society. The Bible’s insistence on protection for "the widow, the orphan and the refugee” (Deut 10:17-19; 27:19; Jer 22:3; Zech 7:10) seems

18 SOARES-PRABHU , “The Bible as Magna Carta of Movements for Liberation and Human Rights”

19 Ibid

20 Surprisingly SOARES-PRABHU discovers, I submit, an unequal parallel between the Genesis creation account and the emanation of the universe as depicted in the Purusha-sukta (Rigveda X 90) because – apparently – one can discover in the former the homo equalis of the Western traditions and in the latter the homo hierarchichus of the Hindu traditions. ‘Apparently’ because SOARES-PRABHU’s reasoning, it seems to be, is far from convincing. In the case of Genesis the starting-point is humankind’s stewardship and in that of the Purusha-sukta of a cosmic organism. In both cases their respective effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) is a series of misuses and misinterpretations by vested interests. In spite of that SOARES-PRABHU concludes that in the Genesis story homo equalis is the base of the understanding of humans while homo hierarchicus is there right from the beginning in the case of the Purusha-sukta. Could one not argue similarly and parallelly in the case of the Purusha-sukta and say that in the human organism there is no hierarchy but only interconnectedness and interrelatedness through wholeness-and-totality (Sarvam) become manifest? See, for example, what he has to say about the ‘organic whole’ in his essay on “Jesus of Faith”, p. 25: “Flesh stands for the solidarity of humankind, for the fact that humankind is not a collection of isolated individuals, but an organic whole in which what happens to one happens to all.” My emphasis.

21 “The Bible as Magna Carta of Movements for Liberation and Human Rights”

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to be built on the conviction that the strength of a chain is proportionate to the strength of its weakest member[s]. Welfare of all is not possible without special protection of the weak and the helpless. It is the solidarity of God’s family where “God is experienced as parent and people as brothers and sisters”22.

The title of the next article “The New Testament Church and the Economic Liberation of Man”? might raise eye-brows. Could the Early Church at all be interested in economic liberation when it was so “inhibited by apocalytic passivism”?23 Thus, for instance, though Paul shields Philemon, he does not question the institution of slavery. Furthermore Paul focuses on what one could call ‘eschatological detachment’? While we have to face “the oddly non-committal attitude of the first Christians to the burning social issues of their day”24, the New Testament writings, SOARES-PRABHU reminds us, enunciate principles and attitudes towards poverty and wealth, that could “inspire any Christian programme of economic reform”25

The letter of James has three significant passages of ‘increasing vehemence’. Jas 1:9-10 reminds us of the passing nature of the world – and of the rich. Jas 2:5-7 speaks of the “poor in the world” as chosen by God and therefore as rich in the faith and heirs of the kingdom. In contrast the rich dishonour and oppress the poor and blaspheme “the honourable name”. Lastly, Jas 5:1-6 violently attacks “the godless rich who have put their trust in their riches”26. SOARES-PRABHU tells us that this protest “centres round a single burning issue – the non-payment by the rich of the wages due to the poor – for this was the social injustice that weighed down most widely and most crushingly the large masses of landless labourers that constituted the proletariat of the ancient world, and was the commonest form of exploitation then prevalent”.27

Christian concern is always and everywhere about neighbour. Its first concretization on a broad basis was the ‘love-communism’ of the Early Church. Though it projects an ideal vision it gives us “a basically true picture of the Jerusalem Church”28. But speaking generally, social action in the Early Church remains on the level of organized charity and economic relief. It does however provide us with elements “enough for a powerful critique of consumer society and a radical programme of social reform”29.

The essay “Class in the Bible: The Biblical Poor as a Social Class” may appear to be of academic interest but SOARES-PRABHU reflects here on the meaning of the ‘poor’ in

22 “The New Testament Church and the Economic Liberation of Man”, p.

23 Ibid. p. 205.

24 Ibid. p. 198.

25 Ibid. p. 200.

26 Ibid. p. 204.

27 Ibid. p. 205.

28 Ibid. p. 208.

29 Ibid. p. 210.

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the Bible because we have all fallen a prey to ‘spiritualizing’ poverty.30 We need to heed SOARES-PRABHU’s warning that we have to be sensitive to the social, economic and political dimension of the Bible. We tend to ignore this because all our reading is “inevitably coloured by cultural and class prejudices”.31 These are the significant contributions of liberation theology.

The elaborate analyses which SOARES-PRABHU undertakes of the Old and the New Testaments show that the poor of the Bible cannot be reduced only to those who are economically poor, nor are they the ‘spiritually poor and lowly’ who are open to or dependent on God; much less are they to be understood in the marxist sense of a class that is engaged in an ongoing class struggle. The poor are those whose sociological situation renders them powerless and needy. The Bible has a specific understanding of the role of the poor which SOARES-PRABHU spells out in three propositions: “(1) the poor in the Bible form a sociological group whose identity is defined not by their religious attitude but by their social situation, (2) the poor in the Bible are a dialectical group whose situation is determined by antagonstic groups standing over and against them; and (3) the poor in the Bible are a dynamic group who are not the passive victim of history but those through whom God shapes his history.”32

These propositions [should] give us pause to think. We not only have the poor among us but their numbers are growing dramatically. That is as much of a scandal to us all as it was to the conscience of Israel. For Israel it was a warning, says SOARES-PRABHU, that it had failed to live up to its calling.

With “The Synoptic Love-Commandment: The Dimensions of Love in the Teaching of Jesus” SOARES-PRABHU shifts his exegetical and theological focus on to the love-commandment articulated in ‘the mahåvåkya of the New Testament’. SOARES-PRABHU is justified in using this appellation on the basis of the importance given to it by each of the three synoptics. The love-commandment brings together in a unique manner love of God (Dt 6:5) and love of neighbour (Lev 19:18). SOARES-PRABHU argues persuasively that no one except Jesus would have dared to “put this obscure text [Lev 19:18] on to a level with the the shema’ (Dt 6:4-5), the great confession of Israel's faith”33.

We are so used to the text of the love-commandment that the uniqueness of Jesus’ contribution in its formulation may not strike us at all. Jesus’ interpretation does not separate love of God and love of neighbour; the result is revolutionary: “To love God means to love neighbour”.34 The implications of this formula are spelled out in the sub-headings of

30 Ibid. p. 330: “Western exegesis as part of the immense ideological production of an affluent and intensely acquisitive society, built on principles diametrically oposed to those of Jesus… has tried systematically to spiritualize the gospel understanding of the poor.”

31 Ibid. p. 322.

32 Ibid. p. 327

33 “The Synoptic Love-Commandment: The Dimensions of Love in the Teaching of Jesus”, p.86.

34 Ibid. p. 87

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this article: Love is the basis of the Law, Neighbour is the Focus of Love, and God is Loved when neighbour is Loved.35

But it does not stop at this; there are various dimensions of the love-commandment. Loving one’s neighbour “reaches beyond all limits of personal preference, of class or caste solidarity, of religious or social oneness”36 and reaches out to those in need and the unrewarding, but not excluding “even those who are hostile to us”37. Not less important is the dimension of love that does justice because it is here that we encounter the specifically ‘Christian’ love which is “active in character and utterly universal in scope, [and] for which the New Testament has its own special word, agap∑. ”38 “Effective love (agap∑), then, will respond to the needs of the exploited and oppressed neighbour by engaging in action for the removal of the structures that are responsibe for such exploitation and oppression. In an unjust society agap∑ inevitably becomes a struggle for justice: it strives ‘to set free the oppressed’ (Lk 4:18).”39

To love is most significantly to be a child of our Abba in heaven.40 The experience of agap∑ then has its roots in the experience of God as Abba, our loving Parent. God loves us all; our response can make no exception to this love: all are our sisters and brothers. “Beloved let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.” (I Jn 4:7-8)

With love as the source of the new movement that Jesus set in motion it is pertinent to ask, as SOARES-PRABHU does in his “Radical Beginnings: The Jesus Community as the Archetype of the Church”, “What was the Jesus community like?”41 He answers the question on the historical, not theological level. To do this he sketches briefly the sociological milieu of Jesus’ time with its economic, cultural and religious crisis. Roman colonialism, the main cause of the crisis, exacted every year from Judea a heavy tribute in addition to the civil, religious and temple taxes – all of which weighed heavily on the people. The cultural shock with the Hellenization of Palestine brought with it among others extreme responses like Herodianism and Zealotism. The religious crisis centred round the preservation of Jewish identity. Some, like the Zealots, stressed the religious prescriptions of the Torah; others like the Qumran sectarians and the Pharisees laid emphasis on the observance of its religious and its social prescriptions. Clearly these extreme groups hardly helped to resolve the religious crisis.42

35 Ibid. pp. 87-90.

36 Ibid. p. 91.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid. p.95.

39 Ibid. p. 96.

40 Ibid. p. 98.

41 “Radical Beginnings: The Jesus Community as the Archetype of the Church”, p. 308.

42 Ibid. p. 317.

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The religious response of the Jesus movement was characterized by a radical obedience to the spirit of the law very aptly articulated by Paul in his letter to the Galatians (5:14): “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.” This radicalism expressed itself in a community of radical freedom (“from both internal compulsions towards greed and ambition, and from the external constraints of a servile bondage to ritual and law”43); in a community of radical universalism (“The experience of God as abba implies experiencing all human beings as brothers and sisters, and so rules out all discrimination on any ground whatsoever.”44); in a community of radical sharing (“More basically, sharing means the assumption of responsibility by each member of the community for the welfare of all – an attitude which today might need far more radical forms of expression than were feasible in the infant Church.”45); in a community of radical service (“In imitation of Jesus, who came ‘not to be served but to serve’ [Mk 10:45], the Jesus community is essentially a community that serves.”46) and finally in a community of radical equality (“But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher and you are all brethren. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father who is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ.” Mt. 23: 8-10).

SOARES-PRABHU insists that the creative response to the multiple crisis derived from the “liberative experience of God as abba”47. This experience “called into being a radically free community, which could respond to the economic plight of the poor by ‘sharing’; face cultural threat by abandoning defensive encystment for cultural pluralism; overcome the ‘will to power’ through an unlimited readiness to serve; and confront the towering inequalties of a racist, sexist and slavish society by affirming the radical equality of all human beings.”48

PART III: BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION FOR INDIA

Part Three (of our volume) Biblical Theology of Liberation for India begins with “The Dharma of Jesus: An Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount”. Its ideas are in many ways similar to those of the previous essay. But whereas in the previous essay the focus was on Mk 1:14-15 here Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount occupies centre stage. Accordingly SOARES-PRABHU explains meticulously the context and the structure of the Sermon on the Mount as they “provide significant clues to its meaning”49. The result is that Jesus is seen as the new Moses proclaiming his Sermon on the Mount not as law but as love, Gospel and a goal-directive. For Jesus has come to fuilfill, not to abolish the law. The dharma of the Sermon on the Mount then proclaims freedom from the burden of the law, since it is

43 Ibid. p. 319.

44 Ibid. p. 321.

45 Ibid. p. 322.

46 Ibid. p. 323.

47 Ibid. p. 325.

48 Ibid.

49 “The Dharma of Jesus: An Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount”, p. 362.

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grounded on an experience of God as abba who loves us his children with an unconditional love. This dharma of concern for the neighbour, that is, concern for any one in need, is really the essence of the dharma of Jesus.

In “Jesus and the Poor” SOARES-PRABHU brings out the similarity in the exploitative situation of the poor in Palestine at the time of Jesus with that of the poor in India. Helpfully he locates the different classes of people that we encounter in the Gospels (chief priests, money changers, stewards, Pharisees, tax-collectors, tanners, shepherds, lepers, possessed, etc.) in their socio-economic and religious context. As we saw earlier, the poor in the Bible stand not merely “for the economically destitute but also for the socially marginalized groups that have been mentioned above: the illiterate, the outcast, the ritually polluted, the physically handicapped and the mentally ill.”50 All these victims of oppression (this is how the Bible views them) are the ånåwim.

SOARES-PRABHU’s Jesus identifies himself with the poor in his ‘active and effective concern’ for them. The objective of such concern is to bring an end to their ‘social’ poverty, “while calling for… a ‘spiritual’ poverty that will set them and their rich exploiters free from ‘mammon’, the compulsive urge to possess.”51 Jesus’ concern reveals his ‘compassion’ which SOARES-PRABHU paraphrases as “that active, caring and passionate love which defines so sharply his life-style and sets a pattern for the life style of his followers, because it is, ultimately, the ‘life-style’ as it were of God himself.”52

What is to be “The Christian Response to the Indian Situation?” SOARES-PRABHU believes that we can discern an answer in the Bible, because in spite of its diversity it deals with the unique God-experience of a people, a God-experience “mediated in the focal events of the Exodus and the Cross”53. The revelation of God in the Bible takes place progressively in history. Whereas Jahweh is a God who liberates all, Jesus’ abba is a God who loves all with an unconditional love. The response to such a progressive revelation, according to SOARES-PRABHU, can only be historical54 (because God is encountered in history where in the eyes of faith God is leading humankind from chaos to cosmos), incarnational55 (because God enters history in and through the person of Jesus – “the human face of God”56

50 “Jesus and the Poor”, p. 6.

51 Ibid. pp. 7-8.

52 Ibid.

53 “The Christian Response to the Indian Situation”, p. 150. 54 The words historical, incarnational and integral might tend to sound like cliches. In Soares-Prabhu’s thinking they have a special significance. They are closely connected to his understanding of Jesus’ message. Unlike in the spirituality of the Hindu traditions where the primary stress is on interiority in Jesus’ message, as Soares-Prabhu reads and interprets it, the stress is on the historical, the external, the other. That is why history and the historical are of the essence in Christian proclamation. (To avoid any misunderstanding I must state that the contrast is intended to illustrate not superiority but difference in approach to the Ultimate.) 55 The other distinguishing mark of the Christian approach is the Incarnation which happens in history but is not of history. In the Jesus of history we could a dimension that is not accessible to the eyes of history. At the same time history is affected ‘substantially’ by this dimension. What the Incarnation points to is that though history is real (“true man”) it is only one dimension of reality; We must forget that the divine is really also a dimension of the real (“true God”).

56 Ibid. p. 155.

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– which reveals the way of loving God through our neighbour57), preferentially weighted (because, in the words of John Paul II at Puebla, "An authentically evangelical commitment like that of Christ, is primarily a commitment to those most in need."58), and integral59 (because the liberation preached by Jesus is not just liberation from social poverty; it is at the same time a fostering of spiritual poverty and detachment which is the way to integral liberation.

“A Dalit Reading of the Decalogue” may surprise readers: a non-Dalit doing a Dalit reading! After describing the social discriminations that Dalits have to undergo in addition to their miserable economic condition, SOARES-PRABHU turns his attention to Dalit Christians whose condition is not much better than that of their Hindu counterparts. However: “It is only recently”, he says, “that the emergence of a militant Dalit Christian movement claiming their rights has (hopefully) begun to make the Christian churches conscious of their sin. Part of this movement is the attempt to fashion a Dalit theology that will read the Bible from a Dalit point of view. I attempt to do this here for the Decalogue in Ex 20.1-17.” What SOARES-PRABHU’s interpretation of the Decalogue offers here is the equality of all humans, whatever their status, before the law. This, he believes, is in definite contrast, for example, to the Laws of Manu.

After this follows another (not too successful) effort at inculturation: “Reading the Prologue of John with an Indian Mind”. SOARES-PRABHU speaks briefly of the ‘Indian mind’ as referring to the world-view of the dominant majority who belong to the Hindu traditions and then goes over to an equally brief reference to the first verse of the famous Èßåvåsya Upanishad which he takes as “a powerful mantra against the mortal illness of consumerism that plagues the world today”60. The Word does surely suggest våc or ßabdabrahman to the Indian readers but the Indian reading, unfortunately, does not go beyond that. When SOARES-PRABHU states that “when the Prologue goes on to affirm that the Word became flesh and lived among us, (1:14), it reveals a dimension of God’s presence in the world which goes beyond what Hinduism has conceived”61 it is difficult to see how the logic of this assertion. The world that one faith projects cannot be ‘better’ than the world of another faith. What is said to be specific to the Prologue (“the whole human race is graced”) is really specific to the world of Christian faith; in much the same way that what is specific to the Gita (“the world as the Body of God”) belongs to the world of the Gita faith. Neither is better or worse, neither can go beyond the other. In general, one can safely assert that when SOARES-PRABHU indulges in comparisons with the Hindu traditions not seldom there is an element of ‘methodological inequality’ involved.

PART IV: CHRISTOLOGY FOR INDIA: THE JESUS OF FAITH 57 Paradoxically the world view of history is the ground most suited for sowing the seed of the Incarnation. The ideal of the Incarnation has to be realized in history: to love God by loving our neighbour.

58 Quoted in “The Christian Response to the Indian Situation”, p. 158.

59 Integral connotes in Soares-Prabhu’s thought holism in the sense of an integration of all the dimensions of the real. Accordingly in a scheme of things like this, poverty is more than social, economic poverty. Poverty as detachment – spiritual poverty – is an important aspect of integral liberation.

60 “Reading the Prologue of John with an Indian Mind”, p. 2.

61 Ibid. p. 5.

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This brings us to the last and final part of this collection of essays. In Part Four Christology for India: The Jesus of Faith the floodlights are on the person of Jesus. The highpoint of SOARES-PRABHU’s ideas on biblical liberation is to be found in his seminal essay “The Kingdom of God: Jesus’ Vision of a New Society”. After disposing off some ideologically loaded suspicions regarding the possibility of studying Jesus’ vision he points out that the sayings of Jesus are to a great extent authentic. “A substantial number of them can be shown to be authentic; and these allow us to reconstruct with some confidence – as even Bultmann admits - the central message of Jesus (the ‘Kingdom of God’), the core-experience from which this message derives (the ‘abba’ experience), the values that it announces (freedom, fellowship and justice), and so, ultimately, the vision of a new human society that is implicit in it.”62

In the second section SOARES-PRABHU deals with the Kingdom and shows how the proclamation (Mk 1:14-15) is the central concern of the words and works of Jesus. He analyses the context of Mk 1:14-15, studies its setting and Jesus’ programmatic proclamation that it contains. Mk 1:15: “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”) comprises two pairs of indicative-imperative sentences following one another. “The Kingdom of God is at hand, repent,” SOARES-PRABHU believes, is the essence of Jesus’ proclamation.63 He then discusses the meaning of the Kingdom of God (the expression is a characteristic feature of Jesus). The English ‘Kingdom’ and its Greek and Hebrew equivalents are circumlocutions for the Old Testament expression ‘God reigns’.64 Borrowed from its neighbours, Kingdom as creation (which is portrayed mythically as a ‘gigantic rescue operation’), is not of primary importance. 65 But the Kingdom as liberation is an important motif of the Old Testament: YHWH means the God who redeems.66 This understanding gave birth among other streams to Davidic messianism (which “looks forward to the realization of God’s promise of liberation through a descendant of David”)67 and apocalyptic hope (that God will destroy this ‘evil age’ and usher in a new age, a new heaven and a new earth). All this is a fitting introduction to the last section of the meaning of the Kingdom. Jesus’ announcement of the Kingdom means “that God is revealing himself as the liberator king by definitively fulfilling the hopes of his people”68. The proclamation is grounded on Jesus’ own experience of God as ‘abba the dear Father who has declared his unconditional love for men. It is this revelation of God’s love (God as ‘abba) that is the true content of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom.”69 Our response to this offer of love is

62 “The Kingdom of God: Jesus’ Vision of a New Society”, pp. 5-6

63 Ibid. pp. 14-15.

64 Ibid. p. 16.

65 Ibid. 17.

66 Ibid. pp. 18-19.

67 Ibid. p. 19.

68 Ibid. p. 22.

69 Ibid. pp. 22-23.

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repentance (metanoia) whose meaning, SOARES-PRABHU reminds us, is to be sought not so much in the moral sphere as in the turning of the total human being towards God.70

“Briefly, then, the core-message of Jesus contains an indicative which epitomizes all Christian theology and an imperative which sums up all Christian ethics.”71

The last section of the essay “The Significance of the Kingdom: A New Society” is SOARES-PRABHU’s most creative contribution. A new society is realized whenever humans become free internally and externally, when there is fellowship of concern among humans and when they strive for a just society. These three dimensions, the personal, the communitarian and the structural are the areas where the success and the failure of the vision become manifest. Ultimately they are the parameters by which the arrival or the delay of God’s reign is to be gauged.

In his “Jesus the Teacher: The Liberative Pedagogy of Jesus of Nazareth” SOARES-PRABHU draws attention to the difficulty inherent in the very nature of the synoptic Gospels of finding out the meaning of ‘teaching’. They present ‘narrative Christologies’ whose objective was to witness to the significance the Jesus experience had for the evangelists and their communities. But it is precisely this aspect about his significance that is historically vouched for by the Gospels. Thus, for instance, we are told that he "went about among the villages (of Galilee) teaching" (Mk 6, 6); that he "taught them as one who had authority and not as the scribes" (Mk 1, 22); “and that he taught everything in parables" (Mk 4, 33). Moreover, whereas he proclaimed the good news of the Kingdom (Mt 4:23), he taught the way to God (Mt 22:16) and this to the truly poor – the ‘little ones’, ‘the tax collectors and sinners’ in Galilee’s “obscure hamlets like Nazareth, mentioned nowhere outside the New Testament (Mt 2, 23; Mk 1, 9); in remote fishing villages like Bethsaida (Mk 6, 45; 8, 22; Lk 9,10); and in small rural townships like Capernaum”72.

Jesus, it is said, “taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mk 1, 22; Mt7:29). SOARES-PRABHU points out how surprising this is. As ‘ordained scholars the scribes commanded authority equipped as they were to occupy key administrative positions (justice, government and education).73 But Jesus’ authority like that of the prophets of old is charismatic because it is built on possession of the spirit. Unlike traditional charismatic authority which tends to be authoritatian Jesus’ authority is liberative. His mode of teaching was parabolic which, SOARES-PRABHU says, is dialogical and critical and involves the listeners in a creative response - a process which Paulo Freire has called ‘conscientization’74 - because it liberates “people by making them conscious of their worth as children of the one Father in heaven” and it liberates them “from the manipulative myths which legitimized their oppressive and alienating society” and leads them to “a new fraternal and non-exploitative ‘world’, in which men and women could live together as

70 Ibid. p. 23.

71 Ibid. p. 24.

72 “Jesus the Teacher: The Liberative Pedagogy of Jesus of Nazareth ”, p. 88.

73 Ibid. p. 91.

74 Ibid. p. 96.

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brothers and sisters under the one Father who is in heaven, taught by the one Teacher who is the Christ (Mt 23, 8-10).

Our volume of essays culminates in “The Jesus of Faith A Christological Contribution to an Ecumenical Third World Spirituality”. Its purpose is clearly spelled out: “Jesus, the giver of life, in our Third World situation of anguish and of death, must be sought afresh by confronting Christian tradition with contemporary Third World experience.”75. From a rapid survey of christological development[s] in the early church SOARES-PRABHU draws three important conclusions: (a) The mystery of Jesus cannot be encapsulated into any formula. We need metaphorical expressions “if we are to understand the significance of Jesus for Third World spiritualty of liberation and dialogue today”.76 (b) No one formula has been accepted as normative by all the Churches, in spite of the fact that (c) all these divergent developments took place within the ‘Hellenistic church’.

Hence Third World theologians will have to turn to the New Testament, the authentic expression of the originary experience of Jesus. “For each New Testament writing has a christology (one might even say is a christology) which interprets and articulates Jesus' experience in response to the specific needs of its community.”77 But these christologies bring out the ‘significance of Jesus’ rather than the ‘structure of his being’.78 Various attempts have been made to follow the development[s] of christology: from future christology to present christology to past christology to pre-existence christology!79 Whatever their merit they “give us a feel for the richness and complexity and relativity of the christological thinking in the New Testament…”80 There seems to be a movement “from Jewish Prophet to Gentile God” as the title of M. CASEY’s book provocatively suggests.81

The New Testament shows a pluralism of christologies born in correspondingly different contexts. However this does not mean, SOARES-PRABHU warns us, that the “earlier christologies have been complemented by Johannine christology”; or that they have they been “surpassed or ‘fulfilled’ by it as non-Christian religions are sometimes said to be ‘fulfilled’ (and therefore surpassed) by the coming of Christianity”.82 Furthermore: “Every community evolves its own understanding of Jesus responding to its own cry for life. And because life changes christologies change too.” The New Testament has preserved them all

75 “The Jesus of Faith: A Christological Contribution to an Ecumenical Third World Spirituality”, p.1.

76 Ibid. p. 3.

77 Ibid. p. 5. My emphasis.

78 Ibid.. p. 6.

79 Ibid. pp. 6-8

80 Ibid. p. 8.

81 From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (London: James Clarke, 1991).

82 “Jesus of Faith”, p. 8.

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without giving preference to the one or the other. This phenomenon indicates, in SOARES-PRABHU ’s felicitous phrase, ‘a christological open-endedness’.83

What lies at the heart of the New Testament christologies is the Jesus who impacted the community. It is this impact that is expressed in symbols like ‘Son of God, ‘bread’, ‘light’ and ‘life’. Christologizing in the Third World will mean then that the cry for life (i.e. a cry for comprehensive liberation) has to be confronted with our Jesus experience, the ‘Jesus (not the Christ’) of faith (not of history)’. “This is the real Jesus who lived in Palestine… as he was encountered and experienced by his first followers.”84 This is the result of “the dialectic interaction of the critic's Jesus of history and the community's Christ of faith.”85 The community that SOARES-PRABHU is talking about is the community of all those who live the values of Jesus (‘freedom, love and justice’) for in Gandhiji’s words “Jesus belongs not only to Christianity, but to the entire world”86; that is, both to ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.

Jesus remains a mystery but to explain the mystery of Jesus history has produced multiple mechanisms, that is, ‘christological models’. In fact, ‘Traditional christology has moved from mystery to mechanism.”87 The former unites whereas the latter divides. “To be a disciple of Jesus,” SOARES-PRABHU tells us, “means to experience God the way that Jesus experienced God.”88 To walk this way SOARES-PRABHU offers a meditation on the significance of the Jesus of faith. The basics of this exposition (freedom, love and justice flowing from his ‘abba experience) we have encountered in a number of essays. What is added here is his interpretation of incarnation as solidarity with the poor, of which conflict with the powerful is an inescapable consequence. Accordingly the cross in his life was not an accident. But the cross also announces his resurrection which however “is accessible to us in our present experience of the living Jesus, which assures us that Jesus is alive.”89 But, and this is a big but, “the faith experience which grounds our hope is only available in a life of love”.90 That means, only a life of love is both a witness to and a validation of the resurrection which is the goal of life.

CONCLUSION: THE THEOLOGICAL METHOD OF SOARES-PRABHU

How does one evaluate the contribution of George M. Soares-Prabhu to Indian Christian Theology? Clearly it is too early for a definitive evaluation (if such a thing is at all

83 Ibid. p. 9.

84 Ibid. p. 11. My emphasis.

85 Ibid. . 12.

86 Ibid. p. 13. Modern Review (October 1964) 67. (Quoted from R. PANIKKAR, Salvation in Christ: Concreteness and Universality, the Supername (Santa Barbara: 1972), 3.

87 Ibid. p. 15.

88 Ibid. p. 18.

89 Ibid. p. 27

90 Ibid. My italics.

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possible). We are too close to the picture; a good view needs distance – a thing we lack today. Though we may have the advantage of personal acquaintance which coming generations will not have, we are not in a position to view the larger landscape wherein the theology of Soares-Prabhu has its real setting. Be that as it may, we can offer from our limited perspective some comments (for whatever they may be worth) on his contribution to theologizing in India and on his specific mode of doing theology.

The first new component that Soares-Prabhu [along with Sebastian Kappen and Samuel Rayan] introduced into Indian theological writing from the very start of his career was concern for the context from which one does theology. Only when readers approach the text with real concerns, can the text respond relevantly but they can do this only when they are ‘inculturated’ in their context. In course of time Soares-Prabhu‘s writings began to show increasing familiarity with data from fields as varied as economics, hermeneutics, history, indology, literature, politics, science and sociology. Speaking personally, he inspired us with the idea that any one wanting to engage in theology should first do studies in a non-theological field, especially in the field of the sciences; theologizing, he was wont to say, needs a base and from that vantage point things theological are bound to look different. That he took his Indian context seriously does not need any explanation; such an awareness is clearly at work in his interpretations of the Scriptures, especially of the New Testament.

The second component that was new in Indian Theology and for which Soares-Prabhu was largely responsible was the kind of scriptural studies he engaged in.91 His reading of Scripture was always on as large a landscape as possible so that the verse or pericope or text that he studied was seen in its setting and context. The need of doing this is still not so obvious as it may seem. One has only to glance through the official documents of the Church which without any hesitation make use (!) of Scripture to support their views. Soares-Prabhu studied every verse and text in its immediate and mediate context. One can rely on the meaning of the text that he works out. In his exegesis he was a middle-of-the road exegete but with a healthy bias towards a Third World perspective.

The result of such meticulous studies was that Scripture took on new meaning for his students and readers. In no way was he interested either in moralising or in converting his readers. His solidly based and carefully crafted writings are persuasive for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. But that was not all. He brought in a further and more important dimension: the hemeneutic perspective. For it is not enough to tell us that the text has been put together with a specific slant by the editors, or that this phrase or that idiom or sentence has this provenance; or even that this kind of miracle story or that kind of narrative mode has been borrowed from a neighbouring culture, etc. Indeed, even telling us what the text means (though this is already a great achievement) is not enough. What is needed and what Soares-Prabhu’s reading inevitably offers is that the text begins to speak to us today in our context. His exegetical endeavours always find their culmination in a hermeneutic reading. Scriptural texts were never grist to his theological mill. He never made use of a text to support his view independently of what the world of the text says nor does he leave his textual interpretation (as many exegetes do)92 hanging in the air.

91 Even today we find few Indian theologians who work on data supplied by other disciplines.

92 See Raymond Brown’s comments in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary…

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Could we then attempt to sketch the way Soares-Prabhu theologizes?93

All method (met’ hodos) is a way towards a goal to be reached or an aim to be achieved. For Soares-Prabhu there was no doubt about the goal he had in mind and that was liberation. But what he meant by liberation was more comprehensive than even that of the liberation theologians: liberation of our understanding of Jesus (and Mary) from dogmatic and a-historical approaches, liberation of the Bible, more especially of the Gospels from a reading that is purely academic, emotional, pietistic, patriachical and ‘spiritual’, liberation from one-sided methods of interpreting the Scriptures, liberation of the Church from authoritarianism and its mission from ‘the triumphalistic mission command’, liberation of the priesthood from ritualistic tendencies, liberation of theology and its method and goal from other-worldly or ideologically loaded starting-points, liberation of the poor from a pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, liberation of women, liberation from consumerism, liberation from communalism, liberation for the Dalits and the tribals, liberation from a colonized mentality, liberation from oppressive practices of religious and social traditions, liberation of christians from attitudes of superiority towards other faith-traditions, and towards the end of his life, liberation of the earth from the rapacity of humans. In short the watch-word of Soares-Prabhu's theology was liberation, liberation from all manner of alienation and oppression.94 Incidentally, it was this overarching concern for holistic liberation that made Soares-Prabhu concentrate on working out "Lessons for an Indian Theology of Liberation"95 (even though he sometimes did appear to give the impression that any theory about the procedure he was employing was a luxury he could not afford to indugle in).

Be that as it may, it is indisputable that all the elements that go into the making of a serious reflection on method were all operative in the way he ‘theologized’. His science background contributed substantially to the ‘scientific’ approach in his exegesis; on the other hand his humanistic interests made him recognize that exegesis was not everything and that, as the bare skeleton of a sound and healthy theology, it needed the flesh and blood of a committed life to come alive and be of real value. This Soares-Prabhu located in the concerns of his Indian/Asian situation as conditioned by the global context.96 Finally, the soul of his

93 The following section is heavily dependent on my “The Contribution of George M. Soares-Prabhu to Method in Theology”, Third Millennium. Indian Journal of Evangelization II (1999) 97-108, esp. 99-103.

94 See, for instance, "The salvation Jesus announces here [Lk 4:18-19] is primarily a liberation from the pressures of social, economic and societal oppression." "Good News to the Poor", in G.M. Soares-Prabhu, A Biblical Theology for India. Edited with an Introduction by Scaria Kuthirakkattel p. 262. Or again: "He [i.e. Jesus] intends rather to bring about both a change of heart (freedom from attachments) and a change of structures (liberation from oppressive social systems); for it is this combination alone that can lead to the new humanity which is the ultimate goal of the long process of total liberation that Jesus has begun." ibid. p. 266.

95 "The Liberative Pedagogy of Jesus. Lessons for an Indian Theology of Liberation", in Biblical Themes for a Contextual Theology Today, pp. 124-140.

96 "The fact that there should be rich (and greedy) Christians in a hungry world is a towering scandal which no amount of private devotions or much publicised almsgiving can take away. For ultimately our greed is a sign of our godlessness; and the presence of the destitute in our midst is the mark of our infidelity to Jesus. God has set himself squarely against mammon (Mt 6:24); and, in a paroxysm of consumerism, Jesus has identified himself with the poor (Mt25: 31-46). Our consumerism, then, is an option against God; our neglect of the poor is a neglect of Jesus." "Good News to the Poor," 267.

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theology was without doubt his faith in and fascination for Jesus.97 It is not an historical accident that he speaks of the "Jesus of Faith".98 With this he not only avoided the pitfalls of the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith but also effectively brought together history and salvation-history. For history without faith is blind and faith without history is contentless. That is to say, theology emerges from faith and leads back through life [i.e. history] to faith. His confession of faith in Jesus could be summed up in his own words: "The man who reads the Gospels critically, with the freshness of its first hearers brought to them, does indeed meet Jesus in all his strangeness and fascination. He finds himself face to face with this man who fits no category and yet belongs to all, who is gentle yet strong, patient yet violent, conscious of his towering authority yet spending himself in service, so tolerant towards sinners yet so adamant against sin. He finds a Jesus utterly like us in his doubt and suffering and anguish, yet awesomely remote in his consciousness of his mission (for he knows that it is in his words and deeds that the rule of God comes), in his relationship to the Father (for which Jew would have dared to address God as Jesus did, as ‘abba’, ‘dear Father’?), in his claim to absolute commitment (for what man could dare to say with Jesus ‘he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’?). He meets Jesus dying on a cross, only to rise again, and there he learns to accept a life that is always threatened by death, and finds the courage to be."99

How did Soares-Prabhu go about realising his Asian/Indian Theology of Liberation? Unlike most writers on the subject, he did not indulge in platitudes100 but put into practice the (hermeneutically) wise adage of learning to walk by walking. So over the years his writings began to reveal the elements of his method as they became increasingly thematic.

a) Retrieving the Context of the Text

As was pointed out earlier, almost every article of his was built on firm exegetical foundations. Though he never fully trusted the modern historical critical methods, he was convinced that a sound theology could never do without an exegesis that takes the characteristics of an historical text seriously.101 Soares-Prabhu never argued on the basis of a

97 Soares-Prabhu speaks of Jesus in epithets that are both traditional and modern : Jesus as Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, 128; Jesus the ‘Son’, the Spirit-filled Servant," 130; the Spirit-filled ‘evangelizer’,133; the Son of God, 131; Jesus the new Adam, ibid.; Jesus the Spirit-Empowered exorcist, ibid.; the Spirit-filled Messiah, 138; (Page nos. refer to the article "Jesus and the Spirit in the Synoptic Gospels"); Jesus the Teacher, 141 in ("Jesus the Teacher. The Liberative Pedagogy of Jesus of Nazareth"); the Teacher of Righteousness (159), the Saviour from Sin (160), Emmanuel (161), the Son of the living God (162), the Son of David (162), the Son of God (163), Jesus as personified wisdom (165), Jesus the Son who reveals the Father (167), the divine Sadguru (168); (Page nos. refer to "Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew"); ‘this secular Christ of the critics, the unknown Christ of Hinduism, this revolutionary and crucified Christ of the poor.’ (197 of "The Man Born Blind"), Jesus the High Priest ("Christian Priesthood in India Today," 224.)

98 See his "The Jesus of Faith: A Christological Contribution to an Ecumenical Third World Spirituality",

pp . of this volume.

99 "Are the Gospels Historical?", A Biblical Theology for India pp. 120-121.

100 As, for example, a good many contributors do in Michael Amaladoss, George Gispert-Sauch and T.K. John (eds.) Theologizing in India (Bangalore: TPI, 1981)!

101 See his "The Historical Critical Method. Reflections on Its Relevance for the Study of the Gospels in India Today" pp. 3-48 and "Are the Gospels Historical?" pp. 105-125 in A Biblical Theology for India.

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solitary or isolated quotation. He worked out meticulously the world of the text, always making sure that his was not a voice in the wilderness but an integration of views that were generally accepted by exegetical authorities. He neither accepted a view uncritically nor rejected it without justification. He was fully aware that the role of the historical study of the Gospels is "to prepare for and support our faith; to enable us to encounter Jesus in whom we believe, and to assure us that in believing in him we are not staking our lives on an illusion and a myth".102

Paradoxically it is due to his interest in exegetical studies that our discussions with Soares-Prabhu began to focus on the subject of hermeneutic awareness. Within the hermeneutic context it was easier to identify the potentiality as well as the limitations of exegesis. Decoding, we came to realize, takes place on a variety of levels. A text is a complex of code-systems and every age discovers new forms of and new approaches to the code-systems that go into the making of a text.

Why do we (and why should we) ascribe this importance to the context of the text? Moreoever, is it at all possible to go back in time? With all our methods, can we reach anything more than a probable state of affairs which we call ‘context’ of the text? And lastly, isn’t interpretation, especially a hermeneutic reading, the most important of all the elements that go into the making of a valid interpretation? These questions imply a lack of familiarity with the hermeneutic process of understanding.

All understanding, whether we like it or not, begins with the semiotic stage. In our daily life we have to familiarize ourselves with the sign-posts on the roads, with code-numbers on the buses and planes, and names of trains going ‘up’ or ‘down’ and a variety of signals for stopping, halting and continuing. In a conversation we have to decode the sounds, the intonation, the stresses, the pauses and silences, the articulation, etc. In any text we have to examine the authenticity of the text, its date of origin, and place and language of origin, the universe of meaning to which it belongs and in which it enjoys a specific meaning. All this in addition to the help that is rendered by archaeology, comparative philology and comparative literature. Each of these efforts helps to retrieve only an aspect of the context. The sum total of these aspects constitutes what we call the context.

But this is not going back to the past. Going back to the past is an impossibility. What we have here is a clarification of the past that is operative in the present. The present is never a ‘pure’ and solipsistic ‘present’. The present always and inescapably stands on the past, the past present. Similarly the present is posed in a specific a direction which is the future, the present future. No moment of time is a mere moment; it is always a trinitarian reality: standing on the past, the present moves towards the future. The very nature of the present is a mediation between the past and the future. That is why the paradox of the present that as such it cannot be experienced is understandable. The present is a mediation.

Obviously the meaning that is arrived at through these mediations is indeed a probable meaning, like the meaning arrived at in all historical research. This however is not at all surprising since it is of a piece with the human condition. Human understanding in the best of conditions is always on the way, never definitive, much less exhaustive.

102 "Are the Gospels Historical?", A Biblical Theology for India. p.120.

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Finally, a clarification about hermeneutic reading. Such a reading is not the last step in the interpretation process; rather it is the whole process in as much as it is accompanied throughout by an hermeneutic awareness. But what is hermeneutic awareness? It is the awareness of the fact that the emergence of a text and the reading of a text are both determined by the preunderstanding operative in their respective worlds. A text does not fall from the heavens into this world in a pure, untainted state but is always filtered by the preunderstanding of its author and the author’s world. In its turn the preunderstanding is an integral part of the tradition in which it lives, moves and has its being. Accordingly understanding a text has as much to do with the preunderstanding of the text (and its world) as with the preunderstanding of the reader (and the reader’s world).

b) Analysing the Signs of the Times

After retrieving the context of the text, we need to analyse our context, the context of our times, of our region, of our country and our community. Soares-Prabhu always argued on the basis of data…contemporary events”.104

Theologians not being social scientists [have to] take help from the latter for a better understanding of society’s structures and workings. But the specific task of theologians is to discover the logos tou theou, the Word of God, speaking in the events of life. Their profession requires that they develop a special antenna to listen to what the Divine Mystery is revealing in and through the happenings of our times. Theologians are aware that for the believer there is no such thing as a mere historical happening; it is always connected with the history of salvation. The events of history have to be viewed on the background of salvation history. The question that theologians have to answer, is this: do the economic, political, social and religious structures of our times collaborate with God’s operative presence in history? Do they give witness to and promote awareness of this dimension of reality? What are the events of our times communicating to us in this regard?

Soares-Prabhu always argued on the basis of data that are generally accepted today. He avoided controversy. When the data or views quoted were controversial, he drew attention to this fact. His [biblical] theological arguments were never in the air but were reasoned out in the context mostly of today’s sociological, political and economic findings. There is hardly an article of his which is not situated in a context about which he was not well informed.103 He made sure that the questions he tackled were today's questions. For "theology is always linked to contemporary events".104

For Soares-Prabhu theology today has to be prophetic - prophetic both in its analysis of contemporary events and in the alternative vision that "runs counter to the vision of dominant groups"105 in society. For "The prophet’s message always derives from a reflection (and not just a religious or an ethical reflection but a historical and therefore ultimate social reflection) on what is going on around him."106 This is because: "The analysis of the prophet

103 Soares-Prabhu treats of the subject thematically in his "Socio-cultural Analysis in Prophetic Theologizing", A Biblical Theology for India. pp. 61-67.

104 Ibid. p.66. 105 Ibid.

106 Ibid.

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shows how intimately our experience of God is linked to our patterns of social behaviour."107 True, socio-cultural analysis alone is not enough. There is the religious dimension that is operative in society. But "Religions, the prophets tell us, is more closely tied up to social attitudes and social systems than we might care to admit. The critique of society is linked to a critique of religion."108

Whether we like it or not and whether we are aware of it or not, religion (every religion) is constantly caught up in the process of interculturation which gives rise to the phenomenon of inculturation. Due to their historical, geographical and social contiguity religions affect and influence each other: this is happening of interculturation. The kairos of our times is that for the first time in history we are gradually become aware of this truth and learning to accept it positively. This has opened our eyes to the fact that Christianity, for instance, has adjusted itself to the caste-system (a negative instance of inculturation) but that on the other hand it is realizing that it has much to learn from the metaphor of the world as the body of God (a positive instance of inculturation).

Though Soares-Prabhu was instinctively suspicious of all superficial modes of ‘indianization’ and ‘inculturation’ his fine antenna never made him forget, in spite of all the negative experiences that history can relate, that the religions of India are treasure-houses which can contribute substantially to decoding the signs of our times. He was always appreciative of attempts that made these riches accessible to one and all and was thrilled whenever re-interpretation of the other faith-traditions was shown to be liberative.109

Clearly, analysing the signs of the times is not just a professorial task but a prophetic assignment. A theology that ignores this prophetic dimension will turn out to be sterile.

c) Interpreting the Significance of the Signs of the Times

Prophetic analysis tells us what our society and our structures are not. The culmination of prophetic theology lies however in projecting a vision of what they should be. This has to do less with moralizing than with interpreting the significance of the diverse kinds of analyses that are germane to the investigation of text and context. It consists in interfacing with the help of analyses the pole of the text with the pole of the reader (or the hearer) in such a way that their currrent makes the light of the text’s significance to shine in the reader’s universe of meaning. What earlier was of no significance now becomes significant in the reader’s life. Peace on earth might have meant only a ‘this-worldly’ task but now it really signifies glory to God in the heavens. Love of neighbour might have meant a relationship merely between individuals but now it symbolizes love of God in a real sense. Freedom, fellowship and justice might have been taken to be mere strategies for maintaining law, order and peace but now they herald the presence and working of the Kingdom of God. Understandably there are no recipes as to how to go about interpreting the significance of an event or a text depicting the event. Just as in art, music and literature one studies the masters so too in theology ‘prophetic’ theologians are our guides. History, I suggest, will number Soares-Prabhu among such theologians.

107 Ibid.

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid.

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Most theologians stop at the porch where the text is decoded; a few go a step further and enter the waiting room where the signs of the times are analyzed but few, very few indeed, like George Soares-Prabhu enter the living room where the challenge of interpreting the significance of the analyses is met and answered. It is given only to creative spirits to enter this chamber of life, the hermeneutic chamber. Though interpretation of the significance of the analyses is not the end of the hermeneutical process, it is an important one since like a dynamo it produces the energy that effects transformation. The paradigm of fast-foods and instant-coffee cannot be the criterion for validating an interpretation; rather it is more like the sprouting of a seed than like the splitting of an atom. Just as a good tree brings forth good fruit, so too the tree of right understanding leads to right action. Real virtuous action flows spontaneously from a virtuous person. Accordingly validation is not action that is planned out and executed with deliberation; rather it is like the laughter that follows a joke. It is slow and almost imperceptible. It rarely makes the headlines but like leaven it transforms from within.

b) A Critique

Does this mean that all is well with what Soares-Prabhu worked out? No discerning student of his writings can overlook some of the deficiencies of his writings: the one-sided emphasis on the central theme of his exegetical work (i.e. the Kingdom and the abba experience) to the exclusion of important themes like art and science, his facile selection of texts from other religious traditions, his somewhat simplistic evaluation of Hindu texts and traditions (expressed in extreme judgements, i.e. excessive praise when contrasting them with western culture but severe condemnation when contrasting them with the message of Jesus), his sharp criticism of the historical critical approach while making copious use of it, his pretension (as a non-dalit and a non-tribal) to offer a dalit theology, a tribal theology, etc.

To be aware of these deficiencies is surely not a negative thing but one has to remember that his greatness has to be judged not only by what he taught and wrote but also and more especially by the courageous creativity as well as by the hermeneutic sense he showed in getting out of the straitjacket of dogmatic exegesis, that is, an exegesis that was an ancilla of dogmatic theology. That he sedulously distanced himself from a doctrinal approach was of a piece with this stance. Not less important and innovative was the seriousness with which he took note of the context of the theologian. It is from such parameters that the merit of his theology has to be evaluated. Those of us who have been shaped and formed by these insights know how important these breakthroughs they were at the time (though today they may be considered to be commonplaces).

Such then has been Soares-Prabhu’s theologizing enterprise. On the Catholic side the relevance of Jesus’ message as Soares-Prabhu interpreted it, has over the years been gradually percolating and spilling out beyond the confines of theological and academic circles. The significance of the Kingdom, the focal point of his theological architecture, is now being discovered as a valid foundation-stone for theologizing in India. However for all this we may not forget his timely warning that ultimately theology does not end in words "but in effective transformation of peoples and society".110

110 "Socio-Cultural Analysis in prophetic Theologizing", A Biblical Theology for India. p. 66.

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