George Soares-Prabhu Quotes

Jesus opted for a radicalism which sought to realize as perfectly as possible, the spirit of the Law, which he saw embodied in love (agape), that is in interhuman concern.

CWG 2: Soares-Prabhu, George M. (1999). Biblical Theology for India, Collected Writings of George M. Soares-Prabhu, S.J., Vol.2,Kuthirakkattel, Scaria (ed.), Pune: Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth Theology Series.

Jesus appears in the Gospels as non-clerical, even as a somewhat anti-clerical figure. He is not a priest, for he does not belong to a priestly family; and he is shown in continuing conflict with the priestly establishment which ultimately arranges for his death.

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.

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.

CWG 3: Soares-Prabhu, George M. (2003). Biblical Spirituality of Liberative Action, Collected Writings of George M. Soares-Prabhu, S.J., Vol.3. Kuthirakkattel, Scaria. (ed.), Pune: Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth Theology Series.

“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)

In the universe of Indian exegesis there is room for a wide variety of methods - historical criticism to determine the origin and the transmission of a text, literary criticism to analyse its literary and linguistic structures, canonical criticism to find out what function the text had in successive believing communities. But all these must be completed, if the interpretation is not to remain barren, with a hermeneutical reading which will determine the significance of the text for the reader here and how, by engaging text and reader in a critical conversation, that respects not only the meaning trajectory of the text but the new Indian context in which the text is now read.

An Indian reading of the Bible is a reading from an Indian point of view: a reading guided by a sensibility shaped by Indian culture, and provoked by questions emerging from the Indian situation.

“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.)

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.

The Christian response cannot be that of a spectator, exhorting from the side lines. It must be the response of the committed participant, involved in the struggle for justice and identified with his struggling brothers and sisters - even as God is involved in his history, and as Jesus has identified himself with humankind. An incarnational response will thus always be an active and an involved response.

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.

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’