Trust in Theological Education

Eve Parker

Description

As those coming forward for ministerial training change and diversify, is the way we learn theology changing too?
Integrity within our training institutions has often been assumed and granted to white, male, or those from the middle or upper classes. This has come at the expense of the faith truths, beliefs and perspectives offered by women, people of colour, indigenous theologies and the working classes, whose testimonies have often been ignored or marginalised by the dominant discourses that have been deemed more trustworthy as a consequence of the way in which imperialism has enabled knowledge and religion to be constructed and controlled.
Yet theological education also has a potential to challenge these norms. It holds the potential to challenge oppressive cultures, theologies and pedagogies.
Relying on feminist, black, indecent, and postcolonial theologies, Trust in Theological Education will deconstruct dominant models of theological education, by incorporating ethnographic research, alongside educational theory, liberation theology and radical exegesis’. It will demonstrate theological educations potential to change, and be transformed in order to enable those who have been excluded and marginalised to become speaking subjects and agents for systemic change.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Education
• Philosophie et théologie
• Adult

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334061465
• Langue: English

Extrait

Trust in Theological Education
Deconstructing ‘Trustworthiness’ for a Pedagogy of Liberation
Eve Parker






© Eve Parker 2022
Published in 2022 by SCM Press
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The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978-0-334-06144-1
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd



Contents
Introduction

1. Trusting in Theological Knowledge
2. Bodies Tell Stories
3. Being Seen as ‘Trustworthy’: The Gaze in Theological Education
4. The Priest and the Temptress: Engendering Theological Education
5. Distrusting Whiteness in Theological Education
6. Towards a Pedagogy of Trust



Introduction
In the struggle for change, we must be neither solely patient nor solely impatient, but patiently impatient.
Paulo Freire 1

Every truth, it seems, has its time.
Njabulo Ndebele 2
In 1894 Bishop Macrorie of the Church of England described the need to be cautious over trusting in the motives and faith of the ‘heathen’ in the missionary efforts of the Church. He stated:
We must recognize the fact that there are often mixed motives that bring the heathen to us. And while we must not altogether despise mixed motives, we are bound to watch their working … we must expect to find, among those who come to the missionary, some who, so far from having a good report of them that are without, have lost their position among their old neighbours, and are outcasts or refugees from their tribe, and thus calculated to bring some discredit upon those to whom they attach themselves. 3
The bishop’s words show no trust in the sentiments, actions, intent and beliefs of the so-called ‘heathen’. The bishop holds the position of authority and therefore assumes that his words and acts are to be trusted, maintaining that his trustworthiness is God-given. In contrast, the colonialized – whose land has been taken, religion dismissed, community pillaged and social structures mocked, labelled a ‘tribal’, ‘heathen’ – is described as having ‘mixed motives’, in other words, not to be trusted. In this narrative, trustworthiness is a social construct influenced by power and privilege, where the preconceived judgements of the religious leader shame and condemn the colonialized. The gaze of the ruling class, in this case the missionary, is that of white supremacy, which fixes the other into a state of distrust, and it becomes clear that trust is political. Trustworthiness is complex – it is dependent and influenced by one’s socio-economic class status, religion, ethnicity and sexuality, it is gendered and is often manipulated. This is evident throughout the history of the Church and society, where ‘trustworthiness’ has been used as a social mechanism of control. In the medieval Church:
The effect that the ideology of ecclesiastical trustworthiness had upon the distribution of economic resources was considerable, but it was arguably even more significant in entrenching assumptions about masculinity and femininity, hardening attitudes against female participation in public life, and projecting the alliance between patriarchal institutions and male heads of household far into the future. 4
Through Eurocentric paradigms the boundaries of trust have become even more rigid: modernity, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy have valued individuals differently, creating a hierarchy and enforcing differing standards of humanity and worth. 5 Theological education in the Western world has been complicit in validating such hierarchies, being dominated by educational models shaped by white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity. To quote Willie James Jennings: ‘Theological education in the West was born in white hegemony and homogeneity, and it continues to baptize homogeneity, making it holy and right and efficient – when it is none of these things.’ 6 Such an education has not adequately addressed its colonial past, racist histories and narratives of oppression. After all, ‘It was in academic spaces of theological training that ideas of Christian supremacy were manufactured as knowledge, to be put to the project of conquest, colonization, conversion as they made their way from lecture hall, to pulpit, to legislative assemblies.’ 7 How can those of us involved in such a theological education be trusted in the process of learning and formation if we are not honest about our history or if we are ignorant or indifferent to the struggles of those who have been, and continue to be, marginalized by such an education? The bishop’s words in the opening quote capture the misuse of power and the ingrained notions of trust that have been normalized and ingrained within the Church and theological education institutes. Polarized notions of trust and decency shaped by cultural ignorance and Eurocentric rationality shape our ways of knowing and being. Ignorance and a culture of deference permeate British society, enabling the ‘knowledge’ of the white ruling classes to remain dominant. In the words of Charles Mills:
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly – not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge. 8
Such ignorance has consciously concealed its own geo-historical and socio-political locations, thereby creating the idea of universal knowledge, the only knowledge to be trusted. As Walter Mignolo remarks, ‘The colonial matrix of power, put in place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was framed in and by Christian theology. Christian theology was the ultimate horizon of knowledge – since and after the Renaissance – that incorporated Greek rationality.’ 9 The theology of the Church in the context of the UK continues to be rooted in the norms that such knowledge has dictated, inclusive of patriarchy, heterosexuality and capitalism and grounded in binary notions of decency and indecency. Oppression and marginalization are maintained through the rigidity of these norms that preserve the privileges of the white, male, heterosexual ruling classes. Trust is maintained by controlling the boundaries of such norms. The means by which the mechanisms of trust have been imposed have been determined by systems of power that include the processes of globalization, such as colonial Christianity from the West, which has been driven by the ‘desire to transform “the other” and thus undertaken with a spirit of mission and conversion, of exclusivism and superiority’. 10 During the colonial period great efforts were made by the colonizers to eradicate indigenous beliefs, languages and cultures, in order to control and colonialize the minds of the people. Consequently, Western beliefs, practices, theories, philosophies and theologies dominated the world practically and intellectually. Through a process of normalization, trust was granted – and internalized – to the hegemonic knowledge of the West that formulated a grand narrative in which the epistemologies of the colonized were marginalized and mocked. According to Mhango, ‘since the inception of Western colonised and hegemonic education as espoused by the current dominant Western grand narrative, almost all fields of education have been hugely held and totally dominated by Western intellectualism which ignores other cultures by relegating them to the peripheries.’ 11 Ignorance of such peripheral knowledge equates to distrust in the powerful, because the world views, knowledge, value systems, philosophy and theologies that have been at the underside of modernity have been shamefully silenced by those with power. Trust therefore requires power, because we are told to trust in other humans, but certain humans have been disqualified from ‘full humanity’, some throughout history have only been considered ‘partially human’. Smith notes that ‘Ideas about what counted as human in association with the power to define people as human or not human were already encoded in imperial and colonial discourses prior to the period of imperialism.’ 12 Take, for example, portrayals of the incarnate Christ: for the missionaries he had to be reimagined as a white European man in order for him to be fully human. To the colonialized subject, the God of Christianity then appeared as the White man, and the White man demanded that the people put all their trust in God, the same God made in their mirror image. Through the polarized imagery of the White male gaze, Christ was conveyed in opposition to the woman, the ‘heathen’ and the ‘whore’, and theology was used to establish such models of ‘decency’ and divinity. Consequently, women in particular were portrayed as untrustworthy, the origina