Where/How/For What Purpose Is Christ Being Proclaimed Today: Rethinking Proclamation in the World of Peripheries

Abstract

The content of proclamation cannot go unqueried if the much-needed work of addressing the structures of marginalities that play out in Christianity is to be completed. This task is urgent in order to address the role of Christianity in contemporary societies. To think that the proclamation of Christ is itself neutral, is to refuse to address how the structures that Christianity creates decide the fate of many in the world. A close study of the peripheries that Christian ecclesial structures create reveals the emergence of a form of a decolonial response to the agenda inherent in the embrace of a hegemonic approach to proclamation that plays out at the center of Christianity, and Christianity’s ecclesial institutions. These peripheries are a reminder that the center itself is in need of reform to allow for all who experience erasures to become visible.

1. Introduction

In contemporary societies, especially in an era of globalization, religions are negotiating ways to occupy social spaces. For some religious traditions such as Christianity, proclamation is a deliberate tool to achieve this purpose. However, what does proclamation mean in a world in which competitive ideologies are vying to define and hold captive people’s collective imaginations? To do justice to this question, it is important that I begin this work by problematizing the usage of words that are related to the discourse on proclamation. Words are themselves political for them to have any meaning. By this, I mean that words evoke in the audience a hermeneutic negotiation. It is this negotiation that evokes the political. For example, to say that the meaning of a word is “this or that” is to immediately say all counter meanings are invalidated; here lies the political, the throne of power in its stack nakedness. Again, the negotiation of the meaning that words evoke is already a process that determines the positionalities of the audience interpreting such words. Simply stated, there is no neutrality in the usage of words, because for words to have meaning, they must be interpreted in a manner so that they make sense to the audience hearing them. Such a sense-making process is not neutral. It comes from the entire matrix of cultural wisdom, historical consciousness, and the deposit of past knowledge produced or exposed to by the audience. For example, in Christianity, it is said that the Bible is God’s revelation to the world. However, the content of what God has spoken can only be accessed through the mediation of interpretation. Interpretation is thus the praxis of reception or a form of hermeneutic filtering so that the audience can make sense of what God has revealed. This process of making sense demands that the audience bring to bear their referential processes of meaning making, their usage of language, their past and ongoing experiences, and their sense of social and individual memories; all of these point to the political.

In this work, I intend to intentionally explore the politics of hermeneutics that the praxis of proclamation evokes and show some ways in which the counter politics of meaning are embraced, especially by those who live at the peripheries of the world, and the peripheries of Christianity. The ongoing cultural wars that are playing out in some societies and that are given validity through an appeal to the Christian faith call for a deconstructive engagement. To do this well, a deliberate attempt is made to unpack the politics of hermeneutics and show how it can help Christians to refute the agenda of those who make one perspective on Christian teachings the only valid interpretation.

2. Proclaiming Christ: Who Is Proclaiming What?

Christianity is a religion that perpetuates its continuity through an embrace of proclamation. The Christian Testament bears witness to this mandate. Consequently, Christians have, for centuries, celebrated the lives of those who have heeded the call to be witnesses of the gospel to peoples, cultures, and nations. I do not intend to delegitimize any of these. In fact, I confess that I am a Christian today as a result of the missionary ventures of many Irish men and women who brought the Christian faith to my mother land, Nigeria, during British colonial rule. Nonetheless, I must begin this work by calling attention to a comment a theologian once made at a conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council, which took place at Walsh University in 2012. The theologian in question made the following statement: “Many in our world, especially in faraway lands, are lucky to have been evangelized because Christianity and its missionary agents brought civilization to these dark lands where barbarism once reigned supreme”. As one hears these words, I am convinced that one will be as shocked as I was when I first heard them said by the fellow in question. However, it is important to pause for a minute and reflect on the following question: Why is Christ being proclaimed today?

Proclamation is never a neutral venture. It is always bias-driven. By bias, I do not mean a negative orientation. Rather, bias is a mode of being human in the world. It speaks to a positionality and a hermeneutic framework by which one interacts with the world. Bias is only negative when such a hermeneutic framework is intended to cause harm to others being encountered. On a positive note, bias is why the Samaritan in the Lucan Gospel stopped to render help to the stranger who was attacked by robbers on the side of the road, while others chose to mind their own business (The New American Bible 1998: Luke 10:25–37). Additionally, one can argue that positive bias is the defining marker of the doctrine of the incarnation; God took a biased stance to identify with creation in the concreteness of their lived experiences as creatures in need of salvation so that the promise of God’s goodness that God uttered over creation at the beginning of time will be realized. In other words, soteriology is itself a biased venture that God has embraced in/through/and with creation. Christ is itself the concrete realization of a biased soteriology. What do I mean by this?

From a Christological point of view, the gift of the incarnation is itself an interpretation. God, becoming one with creation is how God receives creation and how creation responds to the invitation to be one with God. The incarnation is not just a truth about the work of God in creation; it is also how God has centered both reception and interpretation as modes of encountering God. Stated differently, this movement of God revealing Godself to creation allows for a hermeneutic response that one can say is possible when one understands the incarnation not as one event in a particular moment in history. Rather, it is an event whose meaning, understood and mediated through its reception, is unfolding throughout history. This unfolding of its hermeneutic significance plays itself out within different contexts in a manner in which the context plays a role in how the event is embraced, understood, and applied. There is never a one-view-fits-all context. This is the issue at stake today in the theological world; indeed, some think that context does not matter, both in the process by which the Gospel is proclaimed and how it ought to be received.

Reception is what makes context matter and it validates context as the authentic place and way that revelation is mediated or epiphanized. In other words, revelation, insofar as it is epiphanic (revealing), is always an interpretation within the domain of reception. What is done or spoken by God must always be received, and it is in the process of reception that interpretation becomes the pneumatological tool for making the content of revelation a living content that speaks to the concrete context of the community receiving it. Without interpretation (reception), revelation itself will not be accessible, because interpretation (reception) makes valid and relevant the lived realities that shape a people’s socio-cultural and political contexts. To make concrete the point being made here, it is important that I shed light on the Christological debates of the early church.

The Christological controversies in the early church reveal a struggle between two extremes and also offer the pathway for reconciling both stances. On one hand, one finds the gnostic flight from the mundane and an embrace of the spiritualized or idealized life that denies the legitimate claim of the material, including the embodied existence of humanity. On the other hand, there is an embrace of the material without a prophetic turn to the spiritual, as though the material is all that constitutes the core and purpose of creation. The conciliar declarations, especially those of Chalcedon, offer the middle path; yes, in Christ there is the reconciliation of the divine and the created. In Christ there lies a union that is itself a biased hypostasis, one that insists on the enduring goodness in creation; this allows for creation to both be given the gift of divinization (theosis), and a summons to embrace a new way of being that allows for the perpetuation and sharing of life with all. By insisting on the full humanity of Christ as the early church did, the Christ of Christianity, as understood by the Chalcedonian church, embodies a bias for an ethical turn towards creation and not away from it. This turn towards the world is also the conveyor of hope that makes whole all that is in need of healing in creation. In other words, to speak Christ is to instantiate hope; this is a concrete hope that addresses, in a liberating manner, all the structures of marginality that play out in creation. This point is not lost in the Christian Testament. Luke 4:18–19 reads the following: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because [s]he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. [S]he has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year of acceptance to the Lord”.

Studying closely the Christological debates of the early church, one notices the following, as noted by John L. Murphy. The cultural context of the major figures tended to shape how ideas were understood by all who were part of the debates. For example, Murphy notes the following about Cyril of Alexandria; he “was a man who spoke and wrote in a terminology that could be misleading; … While Cyril wished to affirm the traditional faith of the Church, the phrase he had used could be taken to indicate something entirely different. As long as Cyril was alive, such confusion could be avoided” (Murphy 1960, p. 55). The issue of context and how it shapes a person’s way of thinking and embrace of the hermeneutic process is at the heart of what Murphy sheds light on as it pertains to the Christological debates. The bishops present at the respective councils, whether Nicaea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, or Chalcedon, were struggling to make sense of the meaning of terminologies alien to or having opposite meanings to their linguistic or cultural contexts (Murphy 1960, pp. 33–35). Yet, the councils held together the different positions espoused by the different schools of thought. On one hand, the divinity of Jesus was proclaimed as full, distinct, and without change, even in terms of the hypostatic union with the complete, distinct, unchangeable, and full humanity. Both natures were considered inseparable and united under the hypostasis of the Second Person of the Trinity, since the union occurred through the fiat of Mary. This conclusion, reached by the early church councils, showcases the relevance of a hermeneutic compromise that comes to be when there is deep listening and when the way in which context shapes how people process ideas and articulate meaning is recognized. I am not saying that hermeneutic compromise is needed to validate anything one encounters. Rather, I am stating here that hermeneutic compromise allows one to not rush to judgment too quickly when one is experiencing or encountering that which is alien to the context one knows. Cyril was as orthodox as one could get, even though his usage of terminologies was unfamiliar with those outside of the Church of Alexandria. However, by listening and negotiating the epistemic gap that exists between what is spoken and how it is understood, others came to appreciate his stance as within the boundaries of Christological orthodoxy (Murphy 1960, p. 55).

Does hermeneutic compromise mean then that anything is permissible in the process of receiving what is being proclaimed? To address this question, it is important that I make a brief connection between the Petrine Office and the sensus fidelium (sense of the faithful) that plays out within the Catholic Church in matters dealing with the infallibility of the teaching office of the Bishop of Rome (Petrine Office) and the Catholic Church in general (ecclesial infallibility).

The justification of revelation or, in this case, the infallibleness of the Petrine Office of the Church, is grounded not in an abstract understanding of ecclesial infallibility. Rather, ecclesial infallibility is expressed through the sensus fidelium in such a way that the Petrine Office becomes a tool for serving and making visible the koinonia (fellowship) of churches that revelation invokes in the followers of Christ, but which must also be contextualized. In other words, the contextualization of revelation is what brings about the koinonia of the churches and the witness to the living nature of God’s revelation that offers contextual responses to the needs of a particular church. The Petrine Office is not intended to blur the contextual nuances playing out in each epoch or context. This, again, is at the heart of the debate between those who argue that dogma must be understood as having one meaning in a literal sense, and those who argue that dogma is but an attempt to shed light on the vast boundaries in which the nuances of the hermeneutic reception of truth play out and are received.

The Petrine Office, in its infallible role in matters dealing with faith and morals, does not invent dogmas or truths. Rather, its teachings originate organically from the praxis of truths playing out already in the Church by the faithful; here, the sense of the faithful within the Church is the fountain from which the Petrine Office draws its insights. In other words, the Petrine Office does not turn its gaze away from the sensus fidelium when it is articulating a dogmatic teaching; rather, it turns its gaze to the sensus fidelium, because it is there that it (Petrine Office) finds its validation, purpose, relevance, and the content of what it teaches definitively. The term, definitively, is not to be understood as meaning always the same (semper idem). It simply means that light has been shown on an issue to allow people to see the nuanced boundaries that shape the issue.

Furthermore, the sensus fidelium is itself constituted by nuances and differences that become sources of filiality among the faithful and their respective episcopal expressions of the One Church. Since the sensus fidelium is constituted by difference, then the Petrine Office is itself oriented to hold in place the nuances and differences that constitute the Church that is both one and many. When the Petrine Office ignores these two movements in the Church—one and many—one sees problems in the Church. A case in hand is how the early church addressed the Christological debates by holding in place the perspectives of the Church of Alexandria and the perspectives of the Church of Antioch (Murphy 1960, p. 55).

Stressing the hermeneutic compromise that is inherent in the Christological conclusions reached by the early church, one notices that the divine–human hypostatic union serves as God’s deliberate embrace of the human condition, and which also offers humanity the opportunity to experience the wholeness of which sin has deprived it. With this in mind, one can say that any attempt to proclaim the truth of the divine-human hypostatic union to others must always instantiate the centrality of social justice in a manner that allows all to experience the dignity of new life in the God–human Christ (Phil. 2:1–11). The content of such a proclamation involves a reflective commitment to Christ and an acknowledgement of the realities that define the context in which the proclamation is taking place. Such an acknowledgement of the factors shaping the context must necessarily allow for the restoration, affirmation, and promotion of the wellbeing and dignity of those who call such a context their home. Jürgen Moltmann captures this social justice component of proclamation well when he writes the following:

The coming lordship of the risen Christ cannot be merely hoped for and awaited. This hope and expectation also sets its stamp on life, action and suffering in the history of society. Hence mission means not merely propagation of faith and hope, but also historic transformation of life. The life of the body, including also social and public life, expected as a sacrifice in day-to-day obedience (The New American Bible 1998: Romans 12.1ff.). Not to be conformed to this world does not mean merely to be transformed in oneself, but to transform in opposition and creative expectation the face of the world in the midst of which one believes, hopes and loves. The hope of the gospel has a polemic and liberating relation not only to the religions and ideologies of men, but still more to the factual, practical life of men and to the relationships in which this life is lived. ...

(Moltmann 1993, pp. 329–30).

Following Moltmann’s argument, one can conclude that soteriology is saturated with bias, and proclamation is the Christian response to the invitation that is within the venture of soteriology. Such a response demands to be queried in a manner that reveals the nature of bias at play. This becomes necessary when one offers a critique of how Christians have embraced proclamation over the centuries. This query is needed when one studies the role Christianity has played in shaping the destinies of many communities and cultures around the world.

The query that proclamation ought to go through is at the heart of what the World Council of Churches attempts to do in the following public confession: “We confess our unfulfilled responsibilities to protect and lift up those whose God-given dignity and worth is not respected, including women who still struggle in many contexts for their rightful equality with men, and the children and young people who have been silenced or disregarded, the Indigenous Peoples whose very identity has been denied them, and all those who suffer victimization, oppression and discrimination” (World Council of Churches Executive Committee 2022). To buttress this public confession made by the World Council of Churches, one has to become conscious of the role of Christians and their respective churches in perpetuating cultural, religious, and epistemic anti-Semitism for centuries, which eventually found its ultimate validation in the Holocaust (Nicholls 1993). An entire people were accused of deicide and systematically were deprived of basic human dignities by those who claimed to follow Christ. Liturgies that validated anti-Semitism were celebrated without an attempt to call into question the moral bankruptcy inherent in such liturgical celebrations (Lefkovits 2007; Joslyn-Siemiatkoski 2019).

Countless other evils were performed in the name of the proclamation of the gospel. For example, cultural biases for patriarchy shaped the way that the proclamation of the gospel was introduced into matrilineal cultures and societies. One of such instances is the destruction of the matrilineal culture of the Pueblo Indians and their ways of governance by the Spanish missionaries and conquistadors (Higham 2016, pp. 2–3). The Spaniards systematically erased the way of life of the Pueblo Indians by insisting that the correct way to run society and to worship God was that known to them, as practiced in their home country, Spain.

In the continent of Africa, another example of how imperialism and colonialism was couched under the guise of evangelization and the proclamation of the gospel to the Africans plays out in the agenda of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, who wanted to enrich himself and his family during the European scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century. In the name of bringing Christ to sub-Saharan Africa, Leopold II carried out a genocide against the people of Central Africa. The impact of his policies of exploitation can still be felt to this day in that part of Africa. His European mercenaries did not hesitate to kill Africans they deemed unable to carry out their orders when extracting resources from the African continent. Many Africans suffered the forced amputation of limbs in the hands of Leopold II’s mercenaries. Belgian Christian missionaries served as the validating presence of the colonial and imperialistic agents of Leopold II (Reader 1997, pp. 525–49).

Neither the Spaniards in the Americas nor the Belgians in Central Africa made any attempt to understand how the sacred was mediated and instantiated in the cultural worldviews of the Pueblo Indians and the Africans. Such an attempt on their part would make valid the question that the Pueblo Indians and the Africans had the right to ask: Why are you here if our way of life is legitimate before God? This is a question that cannot be addressed authentically by the imperialists and missionaries if one understands the logic behind colonialism and imperialism. The expected response of these European imperialists and missionaries is one of silence and pretentious forgetfulness regarding the real intentions and agenda that brought them to the cultural spaces they now occupy.

In his work, King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild calls attention to a type of silence that is truly disturbing when it comes to the atrocities performed through the marriage of the civilizing and evangelizing of peoples and cultures by European agents of empire and colonizing Christianity. His words can best help to address a point that I intend to take up in the next section of this work. While describing the content of the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, Hochschild writes the following:

One temporary exhibit shows a remarkable type of sculpture from the lower part of the Congo River three-foot-high wooden statues, the chest and neck of each one studded with hundreds of nails, spikes, and tiny razorlike blades. The statues look like bristling, tortured dwarfs. A sign explains that each is an nkondi, a fetish to combat witches and other evildoers. Every nail and blade stands for an oath or an appeal for retaliation against injustice. But of any larger injustice in the Congo, there is no sign whatever. For in none of the museum’s galleries is there the slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatural deaths.

There is no hint of these deaths anywhere in Brussels. … On another side of the palace, a larger-than-life statue of Leopold on horseback stares metallically out at a freeway underpass. And yet the blood spilled in the Congo, the stolen land, the severed hands, the shattered families and orphaned children, underlie much that meets the eye. … Brussels is not unique. In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Herreros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in – its division and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence – is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history. … ‘I will give them my Congo,’ … ‘but they have no right to know what I did there. …

(Hochschild 1998, pp. 293–96).

Silence and intentional forgetfulness serve a particular purpose; they allow for the validation of the evil systems put in place to benefit those who embrace the culture of silence and deliberate forgetfulness. It is on that note that I return again to the comments made by a presenter at the conference that took place at Walsh University in 2012. The theologian who saw Western missionary ventures in other parts of the world as something to be celebrated may have been conditioned by this culture of forgetfulness that has defined the memories of those who reside in the societies that perpetuated these atrocities all in God’s name towards other peoples and cultures. Without denying the validity of the concept of Christ bringing good news to the world, the content bearer must always be aware of their own baggage, whether epistemic, cultural, political, linguistic, intellectual, or economic. This is why the question must always be asked, who is doing the proclamation and what is the content of what they are proclaiming? A further engagement with this question will be explored in the next section of this work.

3. Proclamation as an Invitation to Embrace a Decolonial Consciousness: A Gift from the Peripheries of Christianity

The querying of proclamation to ensure that the inherent biases, positive or negative, are validated by the one proclaiming, is itself a pathway for a decolonial critique of proclamation. By decolonial critique, I mean an intentional evaluation of the hermeneutic and epistemic world from which the bearer and content of proclamation operate. Decolonial critique allows for the realization of diverse epistemic traditions to be encountered and received by the audience. It invalidates the hegemony of universalism and normativity that a single vision and experience tends to perpetuate. That said, a decolonial critique of proclamation most often plays out in the peripheries of the world that are created and sustained by a single hegemonic narrative which occupies the center of the epistemic world it creates for itself and its audience, whose imaginations it has held captive. Too often, contemporary society has been conditioned to see the world through a single lens and to interpret all that plays out in the world through a hegemonic hermeneutic process that validates and gives credence to the familiar. Even when one speaks of the proclamation of Christ, there is the tendency to want to understand Christ through a single matrix that validates the familiar. A decolonial approach helps to frustrate this tendency from being the norm. A turn to decoloniality in understanding proclamation and the content of Christ allows for a polyphonic discourse and the consideration of diverse experiences that are mediated by the experiences and realities that play out in one’s context. The Christ proclaimed is always a hermeneutically mediated Christ. There is no Christ received or proclaimed that is not first hermeneutically mediated. What do I mean by this? The fact that God became one with creation speaks to this primordial mediation that allows for a praxis-oriented interpretation that speaks to one’s context (hermeneutics). Consequently, to proclaim that which has already packaged itself through a mediated process, one also must first enter into the world of hermeneutic mediation (reception) before then proclaiming what has been received. Thus, proclamation involves layers and layers of hermeneutic mediations. A decolonial approach recognizes these layers and also makes room for a pushback on any of the layered hermeneutic mediations that do not speak to one’s cultural context.

The one who proclaims must not end with the question of proclamation and its inherent biases. The proclaimer ought to continue the probe into the content of Christ as they understand it. A story is pertinent here that can help unpack the point I am making. In 2017, I was visiting one of the Catholic churches in Nigeria, precisely, the Cathedral Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity in the Archdiocese of Onitsha. Seeing the human-size statues of apostles and other saintly figures, I turned to my guide, who is a priest, and asked him the following question: “why is it that none of these statues look like any of us?” He looked at me with a puzzled face and replied, “Jesus and his apostles were all white. They were not black”. I realized that it may be difficult on my part to show him how these representations of holy figures cause both existential and spiritual fragmentation in the psyches of those who view them, especially Africans who come to pray before them and who have been conditioned through the intrigues inherent to colonialism that their cultural and religious heritages are devoid of anything holy. It ought to be stated succinctly that Jesus and his followers were not white, but that is not the point. The point is this; any representation of the holy, whether through proclamation or through art, ought to speak to the context of the people.

Prior to my own experience in 2005, I would have not critiqued the response of the priest with whom I had the conversation in Nigeria. In fact, the initial question would not have been posed. In 2005, I was working at a parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, California. One day, as we were proceeding into the church during one of the celebrations, my pastor informed me that he had placed an icon of Christ represented as a black man on the altar. I looked up at the icon and uttered the following alienating words: “that is not Jesus. Jesus is not black!” (Aihiokhai 2020, pp. 24–31). Here was I about to be ordained a priest, having worked for over nineteen years catechizing converts to the faith and having been a missionary for many years; yet, I did not ask myself once the following question: what is the content of the Christian faith that I have been proclaiming? This experience led me to begin to take seriously the place and relevance of a decolonial critique of both the praxis of proclamation, and the content of what is being proclaimed.

As I noted earlier in this work, proclamation embodies the political, because all hermeneutic mediations simply mean the negotiation of meaning(s) within the matrix of socially constructed boundaries that speak to what is useful or not useful to one’s context. With this in mind, when encountering another context, the one who proclaims ought to further deconstruct their own hermeneutic frameworks in order to allow for the new context to redefine the tools used for such proclamation. This is why proclamation, when performed correctly, must necessarily begin with a critique of the self, one’s worldview, the content of what is proclaimed, and modes for such proclamation. A sense of history must always prevail. By this sense, I mean that an understanding of the politics shaping the development of doctrines and the politics of memory that play out in and through the world where doctrines are developed, received, and passed on is necessary. Hochschild’s point must be taken seriously if one does not want to repeat the harm caused in the name of Christ to other peoples and cultures by the Spaniards and the Belgians in the Americas and Central Africa, respectively.

It is also worth noting that even though, as Hochschild pointed out, silence and intentional forgetfulness tend to shape the western memory of the past in terms of Europe’s contact and interaction with other societies and cultures as it attempted to introduce into such societies and cultures its own civilization and expressions of Christianity, a decolonial response to the western hegemonic agenda in such societies and cultures is today found in the dynamic ways that Christianity is being expressed by such communities and persons who live at the peripheries of the Christian world. In contemporary times, the so-called Christian center that is defined by the hermeneutic boundaries of orthodoxy, as understood by those at that center, is being challenged by the dynamism present at the peripheries. As the center suffers from its own aridity based on the many factors challenging its hold on the imaginations of its adherents, the peripheries are experiencing a vibrancy of life as they welcome all into their spaces, in a radical acceptance of difference and creativity. Some of the factors that shape the shift and movement to the peripheries by some Christians include the refusal to be defined by a law-based Christianity. A 2019 report on the state of Christianity in the United States showed that there has been a rapid decline in the number of Americans who identify as Christians, whether as Protestants or as Catholics (Smith et al. 2019). Thomas Reese, while attempting to explain the current decline in the Catholic churches in the western world, calls attention to the place of experience (Reese 2022). Many are leaving the Church because it has failed to speak to their experiences in a manner in which they can experience the fullness of life. Too often, the Church has been held captive by a stale theology that speaks to the taste and expectations of the few at the expense of the many who live at the peripheries. Attempts made to change this trend are usually met by forceful resistance and the use of the juridical tools of excommunication, interdiction, and persecution, as though these changes have come from the devil. When people feel that they do not belong, they usually leave the Church for good, or go to the peripheries to find a new home.

At this point of this work, it is important that I shed light on how intentional forgetfulness is being addressed by those who proclaim Christ at the peripheries of Christianity. To do this effectively, I will appropriate the ways that two communities have responded to experiences of exclusion in the Catholic Church. The first community is that of women in the Church in general, who feel excluded from the fullness of life in the Church due to the prohibition on women’s ordination. The second is members of the LGBTQIA+ community, who feel excluded from the full sacramental life of the Church as a result of the Church’s prohibition of gay lifestyles, especially as it pertains to marriage and sexual intimacy. More focus is given to such communities in the African continent, where state-sponsored, and religiously and culturally motivated homophobia are on the rise, and where members of the community do not have recourse to the protections of the law (Long and Cooper 2003). However, before I do this, I want to make a categorical statement. What happens at the peripheries of the world, be it at the peripheries of religions, politics, cultures, societies, institutions of learning, and so on, is always a response to the erasing tendencies that play out at the center. Dismissing what is happening at the peripheries quickly, without attempting to understand how they mirror what needs to be addressed at the center, reflects the failure to read the signs of the times accurately. The peripheries are thus the conscience of those at the center. They can serve as the call to renewal for those at the center, whose imaginations and visions have been held captive by the monolithic and predictable approaches to issues that are playing out at the center. Simply put, the peripheries are where the Spirit is saturated in its expression of freedom and in its summons for all to embrace a vibrant imagination.

Attempts in recent decades by some members of the Catholic Church to revive or embrace the ministerial role of women in the Church as ordained ministers have been met with outright resistance by the Church’s magisterium. A problematic theology that attempts to show why women cannot be ordained has been embraced. The arguments themselves reveal a poor understanding of theological anthropology and by extension, a poor understanding of soteriology. To argue that women lack in their being the representation of the embodied Christ and that they thus cannot serve as the alter Christus (another Christ), in the same capacity as ordained ministers, points to a question that must be answered: What does a woman not have that the incarnate Word has (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1976; John Paul II 1988; Caldwell 2022)? Men have penises and women have vaginas. If women do not have penises, then one must ask the next question, was it the penis of Jesus Christ that brought about human salvation? This question sheds light on the problematic theology being paraded as the rationale behind not ordaining women. If soteriology is impeded by the lack of one not having a penis, then the anthropology that the Incarnate Christ has gifted humanity with is simply a phallocentric anthropology. The incarnation goes beyond having sexual organs. It is creation-centered. It encapsulates the assumption that all that God created and declared to be good and worthy is in the gift of God-creation, encountered in and through the Incarnate Christ.

Rita Nakashima Brock makes an insightful observation worth citing here:

Christianity, according to feminist analysis, has not understood fully the human condition because it has not understood the extent to which it is involved in patriarchy. It has instead, in much of its theology, been characteristically patriarchal. Until Christianity fully faces its reinforcement of patriarchy, its analysis of the human condition will not be adequate to provide a vision of salvation for both women and men. Hence a thorough understanding of patriarchy is crucial to the development of minimally adequate theological ideas

(Nakashima Brock 2008, p. 2).

Furthermore, the argument being made by the Catholic magisterium is that the priesthood comes from the action of Christ calling the twelve and sending them forth to evangelize; consequently, the fact that no woman was among the list of the twelve ought to be critiqued. Christianity is about being called to embrace the resurrected Christ. The power of the validity of Christianity lays in the fact that the one who was killed rose from the dead and has conquered creation’s common enemy—death. If this central motif in Christianity is to be taken seriously, then women stand as the first witnesses to this truth. The gift of bearing witness to the kerygma on the resurrection was given to a woman, Mary of Magdala. Her witness account to the immediate followers of Christ is the first testament to the risen Christ. What she witnessed is what Christ confirmed in Christ’s subsequent appearance to Christ’s followers. Therefore, if the magisterium is to be faithful to the example of Christ, women ought to be ordained ministers who perform the ministerial role of being witnesses to the faith by carrying out such duties and functions reserved for ordained ministers. All ministries, and even membership in the Church, are geared towards one purpose only—being witness to the faith that Christ has conquered death and is risen!

On the website of Catholic Women Preach, one finds the following mission statement:

Catholic Women Preach is an innovative project designed to address some of the most pressing challenges facing the Church today by responding to Pope Francis’ call for broader and more active engagement of the baptized in the preaching mission of the Church. This project is a deeply faithful, hopeful and joyful initiative intended to build up the Church.

CWP offers the theologically informed perspectives of Catholic women:

• to serve as an inspirational, theologically based resource for ordained priests, deacons, catechists, and all involved in the ministry of the word in the Catholic Church
• to encourage Catholics, especially younger adult Catholics, with messages of hope that renew faith, strengthen us and encourage active engagement in the life of the Church for our work in the world
• to provide a global platform for women’s voices and faith reflections so that the fullness of our Catholics giftedness can be accessed by all Catholics (Catholic Women Preach n.d.).

The fact that women in the Catholic Church are coming together to create a platform to preach and proclaim Christ in such a manner that gives voice to their experiences in the world and the Church, points to a decolonial response to the realities that are playing out in the liturgical and evangelical structures of the Church. Rather than attempt to invalidate this decolonial response, the Church ought to embrace a prophetic approach that attempts to address the following question: what is the Catholic Church doing in its expressions of the proclamation of Christ that makes its female members not be able to see themselves and their experiences in such a process? The actions of the women, performed to embrace their ministerial calling in order to minister in a manner that speaks to their own agency as women, reflects a decolonial approach to proclamation that comes from the peripheries of the church, in this case, the Catholic Church. Should the Church engage with its reality playing out at its peripheries, it will lead to new insights and discourses on ways to reimagine ways in which ministry in the Church is to be viewed and practiced so that it is more inclusive of women.

On another note, sexuality has been a hot button issue in Christianity since its beginnings, especially sexual identities and expressions outside of how dominant Christianity has defined it to be. Heteronormativity reigns supreme in Christianity. Attempts at nuancing the various ways that humans experience their sexuality beyond the male–female binaries have been condemned by some in Christianity, especially by such ecclesial institutions as the Catholic Church. Attempts by scholars to shed light on these nuances at play have not always been welcomed by the magisterium of the Catholic Church (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1979). The starting point of the argument of the Church’s magisterium is to paint those who embrace either a homosexual or queer identity as having a “pathological condition” or a sexual identity “anomaly” (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1975; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1986). Such a portrayal already stifles any credible attempt to understand the lives and experiences of such persons and how they experience themselves as embodied sexualized creatures.

Interestingly, the magisterium of the Catholic Church saw the need to write a response to issues dealing with legislative rulings protecting the rights of homosexual persons to such things as housing, because it judged it to be a pathway to the legitimization of homosexual unions against what it termed “genuine families” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1992). The current official position of the Catholic Church on the sacramental validity of same-sex unions is in the negative. The Church argues that through natural law, human sexuality is itself a complimentary reality that is expressed between a man and a woman; this is one that same-sex relationships cannot meet. Because of this, same-sex unions are intrinsically disordered (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2003). Furthermore, the Church argues that though persons who are in a same-sex union may want to embrace a sacramental life by seeking the blessings of the Church, even if it is on the level of a blessing, such a union cannot be blessed; this is because “it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex” (Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2021).

However, the question that demands a response is this: how have the teachings of the Catholic Church, or of churches that have similar positions to those of the Catholic Church in matters related to LGBTQIA+ persons, been shaped by an actual engagement with such persons to help understand their embodied experiences as sexualized beings? To avoid this question is to articulate a theology that operates at the center, while invalidating and pushing those whose experiences are not addressed to the peripheries of Christianity. If Christianity is to be understood for its political and existential response to the order of the day that its founder lived in, it is that Christianity is a religion that makes a deliberate choice to affirm and embrace those at the peripheries of the world. Hence, the Lucan account of the life and ministry of Jesus defines Jesus in relation to his mission on earth as one who has become an instrument of abundant life for all (The New American Bible 1998: Luke 4:18–19). It is on this note that one has to pay close attention to how Christian members of the LGBTQIA+ communities in Africa are defining their own realities and proclaiming Christ to society and church.

On the website of Gay Christian Africa, one reads the following about their mission:

GayChristian Africa is a website aiming to show and share the daily life of homosexual Christians in their communities and churches in different part[s] of Africa. We are a group of volunteers from different countries working together to make this platform become a home for LGBTBI+ Christians and non[-]Christians. Through stories, testimonies and News we want to show you that you are not alone and we are hoping that these stories will help the African societies, cultures and churches to be more tolera[n]t and [more welcom[ing] for homosexual people

(Gay Christian Africa n.d.).

The importance of listening to the stories and experiences of people as a fundamental aspect of proclaiming Christ is not lost to this Christian organization catering to LGBTQIA+ Christians and non-Christians in Africa. Rather than employ a natural law argument against non-heterosexual persons and their sexuality, the work of the proclamation of Christ by this group is a prophetic summons to those at the center of the Church to take seriously the following question: how is Christ being proclaimed today by those at the center that makes it necessary for such proclamations at the peripheries to exist? In fact, the response to this question ought to call attention to the fact that the existence of the peripheries always points to the reality that there is something erasing occurring at the center. The peripheries allow for those at the center to embrace a decolonial consciousness. Such a type of consciousness is intended to query the claims being made at the center, and to move the focus from the center to other places of existence where people also find a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, and in their relationship with Christ. While the center tends to have a bias for clarity and definitive claims, the peripheries call for an embrace of wonder and unhindered imagination. Wonder and imagination are elements that speak to freedom; freedom that is rooted in courage to think of new ways of making Christ relevant to those who do not fit the norm playing out at the center where conformity reigns supreme.

4. Conclusions

As Christians attempt to make sense of the relevance of Christianity in contemporary society, the realities shaping those living in the diverse societies that make up this era of history cannot be ignored. The next generation that is soon to become adults, Gen. Z, is becoming less Christian. Rather than attempting to put the blame on the secularization of contemporary societies, Christians who embrace the call to discipleship must necessarily work on building bridges with others. As the Pew Research Center observed, while American teens tend to observe the performative rituals of Christianity by following their parents to church, they do not apply such Christian tenets to their private lives. Why is this the case? The common explanation one tends to get from members of Gen. Z as to why they do not want to practice their faith while in college, is that their parents “dragged them to church against their will, and they had to conform in order to have peace of mind”. Such a response is telling.

The proclamation of Christ should always begin with encounters that mediate life for all, and also foster a culture that validates the relevance of one’s context as the place in which the drama of salvation is wrought. The fact that God entered into human society and became one with humanity without negating human context speaks to the relevance of context, as the place in which God meets humanity in order to bring about their salvation through that same context.

The ecclesial structures that are used to promote Christianity seem sometimes to be stuck in a particular vision of the world that does not take seriously the task of reading the signs of the times closely in order to understand how and where the Spirit is calling Christians to as they proclaim Christ to themselves and to others. To read the signs of the times is to embrace a decolonial positionality that allows one to practice the virtue of epoché (suspension of judgement) as one encounters the unfamiliar, whether in cultural expressions, sexual identities, or even linguistic affiliations. The Spirit of Pentecost gives voice and visibility to all, whether homosexuals, women, the poor, the dalits of India, or the minjuns of the two Koreas.

Any proclamation of Christ that is performed by the promptings of the Spirit must necessarily make space for the recognition of the experiences of those at the peripheries of Christianity and the world in general. To understand the Christ being proclaimed, one ought to turn to and acknowledge what is happening at such peripheries. To do this correctly, it means then that one must then bring what one has learned from such peripheries to the center. The peripheries remind the center of Christianity that what is mediated through proclamation is always about decentering the centers of power, where marginality is given validation (The New American Bible 1998: Luke 12:49–53).

Reading the signs of the times as a proper way to address the realities playing out in each cultural context, the task of the Church today, as it works actively to shed light on the inherent structures of marginality playing out in the world, is to critique its own vision of the world. This task is relevant when one takes seriously the observations made by Mary L. Hobgood on the vision of the human person embraced by the Church, and how it validates the hierarchical vision of the human person embraced by western capitalism. In her words, “capitalism operates structurally according to a preferential option for the rich. Contrary to the assumptions of liberal reform proposals, the small inner circle of people who manage both corporate structures and the state will not sacrifice their power, any more than the marginalized will receive power as a gift from them” (Hobgood 1991, p. 242). Hobgood concludes that “embracing a coherent economic analysis will be difficult for the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church because it will necessitate addressing why the Church has remained committed to an organic social theory that justifies hierarchy and enables it to ignore the radical implications of its own analysis when it comes to social policy prescriptions” (Hobgood 1991, p. 243).

While I agree with Hobgood that the Church’s vision of the human person must be critiqued to allow for more visions of the human to be embraced and validated by its theological anthropology, I am of the opinion that embracing a decolonial approach that allows for an embrace of other economic systems that are outside of the capitalist model could be a way for the Church to center the social and cultural distinctness of non-western societies, especially those that have not been influenced radically by the western bias for the enlightenment tradition. Doing this is being faithful to the demands of reading the signs of the times. Economic systems that bring about the flourishing of human life are also part of what the proclamation of Christ is all about. Afterall, Jesus’ ministerial mandate was that he was sent to be the source of abundant life for all (John 10:10). Economic systems that work for one society may not work for another. Being aware of this fact means taking seriously the demands of context, as it is the locus of the encounter with the divine.