Theology everywhere?

by Richard Clutterbuck.

Theology Everywhere is an intriguing and ambiguous title.  Both words can carry a variety of meaning. Let me try and tease this out a little through my own story. Forty-five years ago, in January 1979, I flew out of Heathrow, on my first ever flight, to begin my  presbyteral ministry as a mission partner in the South Pacific islands of Tonga. Suddenly I found myself on the other side of the world, a stranger in a (to me) strange land. It’s almost impossible for me to convey just how disorientating it was. Climate, language, culture, geography: everything was unfamiliar and difficult to adjust to. And yet I was still within the wider family of the Christian Church and, more specifically, the Methodist family. Day by day, in college chapel, we sang in Tongan translation the great Wesleyan hymns. On Sunday mornings we prayed through Wesleyan Morning Prayer, translated by Victorian missionaries. I can still sing the first verse of Love Divine in Tongan, and make a stab at reciting the opening  preface to Morning Prayer. My job was teaching theology in the college of the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga, an autonomous church that took on the role of supervising my probation and, the following year, ordaining me to the ministry of word and sacrament. In those days, little was heard of contextual theology and so most of my teaching was based on textbooks imported from Western Europe and North America. Unsurprisingly, many of them were totally unsuitable for the situation in Oceania.

One way of reading my story would be in terms of the history of colonialism, in which the arrival of European missionaries in the Pacific islands was part and parcel of the economic, cultural and religious domination of indigenous people by powerful outsiders. My own ministry would then be a late flourish in an intellectual colonialism, an anachronistic attempt to maintain an influence that had lost its relevance. This perspective is deeply suspicious of a Theology Everywhere that might imply one (white, European) theology serving each and every situation. That post-colonial theological perspective has been at the forefront in recent decades, with authors such as  the Sri Lankan, R S Sugirtharajah (see, for example, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation, OUP, 2002) arguing for a theology that dethrones Western norms and replaces them with contextual theologies from the margins. More recently, Tongan theologian Jione Havea ( e.g. his Reading Ruth in the Pacific, SCM, 2021)  has worked on post-colonial theology in an Oceanic setting, developing grass-roots perspectives that challenge both European norms and local authority structures.

There is a need to take on board this post-colonial challenge. There has been something deeply wrong about a ‘one-size fits all’ theology – especially when it is our theology and based on our size. Contrasting and competing theological voices need to be heard. That is true in the Everywhere of the world-wide Church; it is also true of the Church in each place, so that feminist, black, gay and other perspectives are properly recognised.

And yet – this, at least, is my belief – there is more to Theology Everywhere than the sum total of all local, contextual and identity theologies. So, here’s how I would begin to explain it:

• The Everywhere of theology is the whole inhabited earth, in all its richness and diversity, and it is the wholeness of each particular context. It is an Everywhere that is both global and locally contextual.
  
  
• Furthermore, this Everywhere has a temporal dimension alongside the dimensions of geographical and cultural identity. It embraces the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (with their multitude of voices), together with the many voices that have sounded in the history of Christian theology.
  
  
• The Theology that is Everywhere is both the multitude of different contextual and identity theologies and   a shared theology that links together the many theological elsewheres and makes them an Everywhere.
  
  
• The shared Theology that is Everywhere needs to be negotiated, confessionally and ecumenically. The Faith and Order movement within the World Council of Churches may not be glamorous, but its projects (like Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry and the more recent The Church, Towards a Common Vision) provide a mechanism for the many local churches of the world to have a voice in the shared theology that belongs everywhere.
  
  
• This will mean a chastened role for Christian doctrine (the shared theology of Christians everywhere), but an important role nonetheless. Theology needs to be both something that holds us together as well as something that marks out our distinctions. It is, after all, the same God who meets us here, there and everywhere.