“Poverty in India is not just an economic category, it is a religious value as well. Caste, even in its most degrading form of untouchability, is legitimized by India’s dominant religion and tolerated by others, Christianity included!” (Soares-Prabhu, “Interpreting the Bible in India Today,” CWG 4, 6.)
Indian Jesuit priest (1929–1995)
George M. Soares-Prabhu (1929-11-17 - 1995-07-22) is a well-known Biblical scholar, exegete, liberation theologian and Jesuit priest from India. Four volumes of the collected works of Prof George Soares-Prabhu have been published and the quotes are from these volumes.
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Indeed commitment to the poor is demanded of the Indian exegete, not only by his Third World situation of overwhelming poverty which is the true context of his interpretation (however much he may try to isolate himself from it), but also by the thrust of the Bible itself. For the Bible, in spite of all the efforts of Western exegesis to domesticate of remains a revolutionary text proclaiming ‘good news to the poor’
Liberation is an experience of unconditioned freedom resulting from an experiential realization of the radical relativity of the empirical world, a state of absolute freedom from psychological and sociological bondage, which finds its concrete, institutionalized expression in the Buddhist monk (bhikku) or the Hindu wandering ascetic. Liberation for the Asian psyche is liberation which leads to that poverty which is freedom from illusion, attachment and greed.
The world of today is full of refugees. We live among thousands of "guest-workers" driven by need to work as unwanted aliens in the affluent Egypts of the Western world. We hear of tens of thousands of political refugees hunted out of their homes, to sit hopeless and forgotten, by the rivers of dingy Babylons in the vast refugee camps of Palestine or Cambodia. We know of the many million victims of caste or race discrimination, who suffer as harassed aliens in their own land, living a constantly threatened life in the "harijan" (ex-untouchables) quarters of half a million villages in India, or the segregated black townships of South African cities. We rub shoulders with hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, denied access to the "land", eking out a precarious existence on the margins of their society in the endlessly sprawling shanty towns of the Third Word or the squalid "inner cities" of the West. For all of them, and for us living among them, the story of Jesus in Egypt read in this way may cease to be just another Christmas story and become a Christmas gospel of challenge and of hope.
“It is along the lines of such a hermeneutical conversation between text and reader, where each is open to and respects the claims of the other, that an Indian reading of the Bible is to be attempted. An Indian Christian reading will be a reading of the Bible by an interpreter sensitive to the Indian situation and true to the biblical text. It will be, that is, a true-to-the-text reading made with an Indian pre-understanding and responsive to Indian concerns.” **(Soares-Prabhu, “Interpreting the Bible in India Today,” CWG 4, 28)
Jesus did not come to rescue a few individuals from a condemned mass; but to open up a new future for man, thematized by him as the New Israel, this is as a universal community of love, leavened by the values of freedom fellowship, and justice. Such a community is possible only when the oppressive structures that hinder its growth are overthrown. His miracles are complemented by his controversies in which he stands up against the established structures of institutional oppression: the law, the cult, priesthood, and the Temple.
The radical commitment to the poor which is the starting point of any genuine Indian hermeneutic in India must be made within the distinctive under¬standing of humankind and its world, which constitutes the Indian world-view, and gives particular shape and colour to its Third Worldness. An Indian hermeneutic will respect the specific sensibility shaped by the Indian world-view - or, more accurately perhaps, world-views.
A growing awareness of the massive social evils that plague our land (in which eighty percent of the people are below, on, or just above the poverty line, and fully seventy percent are totally illiterate; where just ten percent of the rural rich own more than sixty percent of all the cultivable land, and ninety percent of private-owned industry is producing consumer goods for less than fifteen percent of the population) is having its impact on Indian theology - particularly among Indian theologians who have been exposed to a social analysis which points, correctly, to institutional structures rather than personal ill will as the source of social ills.
In places like India Jesus brings something radically new. A new experience of God, which allows him to rename Yhwh as ABBA. God is experienced not so much as 'holy' but as gracious and compassionate; and people are not just members of an exclusive tribe or a separated 'clean' caste, but as members of an open family, marked by freedom from consumerism and an attitude of radical service.
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What makes a person a Christian is not professing certain beliefs, nor practising particular rituals, nor undergoing an initiation rite, nor belonging to a recognizable social group, nor even confessing the name Jesus, though these are inevitable stages in the evolution of a religious tradition. To be disciple of Jesus means to experience God the way that Jesus experienced God.
When the revelation of God's love (the Kingdom) meets its appropriate response in man's acceptance of this love (repentance), there begins a mighty movement of personal and societal liberation which sweeps through human history. The movement brings freedom inasmuch it liberates each individual from the inadequacies and obsessions that shackle him. It fosters fellowship, because it empowers free individuals to exercise their concern for each other in genuine community. And it leads on to justice, because it impels every true community to adopt just societal structures which alone make freedom and fellowship possible. Freedom, fellowship and justice are thus the parameters of the Kingdom's thrust towards the liberation of man.