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Keynote Address by Dr. F. Ross Kinsler

Theological Education by Extension and the New Technology

Some of us started to think about this consultation in 1994, and most of us brought stuff along to read on the way. It just happens that a couple of weeks before leaving, I came across an issue of The Other Side, which had as its main theme "Wired to the Future: Keeping Faith in the Electronic Age." It had pretty far reaching critiques and also some rather provocative statements about what we're into. I'm sure you've read this kind of thing before. Let me share a few of these ideas:

An article called "Faith and the Future" states that we are living in the midst of a cultural, economic and spiritual earthquake. We have entered the electronic age, and as the tectonic plates of our societies shift, we are seeing dramatic changes in our economic and cultural landscape. Some suggest that humans have experienced such revolutionary societal change only twice before. The first was when we moved from economics based on hunting and gathering and settled in sedentary agricultural communities, about 10,000 years ago. The second transformation began only a few hundred years ago with the onset of the industrial revolution, which gave us previously unimaginable power to exploit the resources of the earth. The electronic revolution of our era is, they say, more dramatic that either of those two previous transformations. So it is not surprising that many of us in the church and the larger society find the times we are living in awfully confusing. To find our way along the paths that are life- giving, we will need to tap into the wellsprings of our God-given creativity, and we'll need to pay attention to the new forms of cultural and spiritual energy only now being born.

A colleague at our seminary passed on an article about college and university programs now available on Internet. Interested persons are now able to plug into the information and tuition fees for more than 700 on-line courses. Some 30 accredited colleges and universities provide college level courses via the Internet. Similarly World Lecture Hall features links to hundreds of web-based courses taught by faculty across the world complete with syllabi and lecture notes. What does this say to us who are concerned about decentralized theological education?

On one of the flights on my way to Vancouver I came across an article by David Shenk entitled "Daytime Smog." It's a warning to people who are locked into electronic information systems. For example, the typical business manager is said to read one million words per week because of this smog of information. There's a flip side to what we commonly refer to as our wealth of information. Information used to be as rare and precious as gold. Now it's so inexpensive and plentiful that most of it is now being remaindered and shredded as if it is worthless garbage. Here's a quote: "E-mail is an open duct into your central nervous system. It ossifies the brain and reduces the productivity." Another: "Executives and office managers now face an entirely new challenge for the next decade, to soften the rough edges of modern working efficiency with a new humanity that makes workers happier, less stressed and better able to concentrate." They actually warn people who are electronically connected, some 24 hours a day, to the cellphone, fax, beeper, computer and all the rest, that they simply will have to regulate and limit the stream of information they receive. "Until they radically upgrade our nervous systems, we may simply have no choice."

We came to Vancouver to discuss Theological Education by Extension and the new information technology. Obviously we need to go on and discuss TEE and Technology for what? We might even consider Theological Education by Extension itself as a revolutionary technology, or even the whole business of theological education and ministerial formation as technology. We need to think about the future of theological education as an appropriate technology for human transformation. I propose that we consider this challenge out of our own experiences, not as an abstraction, so I share what follows out of experiences in Latin America. I propose for our thinking three points:

A Vision Of Our World: A World Where There Is Room For All

On this first point, a vision of our world, we've been using a lot in Latin America recently, a phrase that comes to us from the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas, Mexico. They propose, for themselves and for all peoples, that we struggle to make a world where there is room for all (un mundo donde quepan todos). Perhaps the dominant reality of our time is exclusion, a world where increasing numbers of people are expendable.

In Central America, I suppose similarly in South America, we all had certain expectations that the end of the wars of repression would lead to a time of amelioration of suffering, economic progress, human development overall. But when the reality of the violent wars was pulled aside, what was exposed was what someone called "the war against the poor," which is the silent death in the world today of millions, the silent suffering of billions of people due to extreme poverty. This so-called new world economic order proudly announced by President George Bush at the collapse of the soviet socialist regimes and the end of the Cold War.

It was on January 1, 1994, the day when the North American Free Trade Association was launched, that the Zapatista movement, made up primarily of Mayan Indians, the poorest of Mexico's poor, which had been hidden underground in Chiapas, rose up in violent protest. It was a surprise for most of us, because we thought that the violent undermining of the experiment for social change in Nicaragua and the Peace Accords in El Salvador and Guatemala and elsewhere meant that there was really no option for violent resistance and revolutionary change. What was even more surprising was the massive outpouring of support for the Zapatistas all over Mexico in all social sectors and also from around the world. There seemed to be a sense that this new world order, promoting free trade zones and the globalization of markets, was impoverishing and marginalizing people more than at any previous period in history. And so the Zapatistas launched their slogan, their vision, their demand for "a world in which there will be room for all."

This cry was taken up as a particular challenge by many religious movements, solidarity movements, and Latin American theology because the Zapatistas did not define their position either as a political party or as an ideological movement. They simply called all of us join together to create a different social order, a world in which all have their place. Another expression of their motto, ideal, or commitment, is "a world in which there is room for many worlds," not just individuals but cultures, peoples, races. And so, many Latin Americans have been discussing the possibility of bringing together diverse ideological, civil, religious, and popular movements to join in this common effort to change our world, a world where there is so much poverty and exclusion, into a world where all may have a place.

As we consider this vision, we turn to the Bible to see how it deals with exclusion and domination. We ask ourselves, What was Jesus' understanding of his world? I've been using some of those texts in which Jesus uses the world "world" or "cosmos." In the gospel of John, for example, it seems as if Jesus rejects this world and affirms another world. He says to his brothers, "The world cannot hate you, but it hates me, because I testify against it, and its works are evil" (John 7:7). He says to the Pharisees, "You are from below. I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world" (John 8:23). Then at his trial before the high priest, who was the supreme representative of religious, social and economic and political power at that time, Jesus says, "I have spoken openly to the world," followed by a phrase which is fascinating, "I have always taught in synagogues and the Temple" (John 18:20). And when he is taken before Pilate, Jesus says, "My kingdom is not from this world" (John 18:36). I suggest these texts because they represent one of the problems that many of our people have in understanding how Jesus dealt with this world. Walter Wink's research on the "principalities and powers" is very helpful here. After some 15 years of work on this subject, he came to the conclusion that in these particular texts, not in some other texts, the word "world" should be interpreted or translated "the domination system," which he defines as "the human sociological realm that exists in estrangement from God." (Engaging the Powers, p. 51). So let's go back and reread those texts. "The world, domination system, cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil." "You are from below. I am from above. You are of this domination system. I am not of this domination system." Then before the high priest, "I have spoken openly to the domination system; I have always taught in synagogues and the Temple." And before Pilate, "My kingdom is not from this domination system." Jesus' disciples likewise are to reject the domination system, for "those who hate their life in the domination system will keep it for eternal life" (John 12:25). "The domination system and its desires are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever" (1 John 2:17).

The world (cosmos) created by God is, of course, very good (Genesis 1:31), but the domination system (cosmos) is evil. Wink suggests that the United States has succumbed to the domination system institutionally and individually. This is expressed externally through excessive militarism and economic imperialism and internally through sexism and racism. He even affirms that this domination system is our primary religion in the United States, whatever our diverse secondary religious beliefs and church affiliations may be. So the struggle for liberation from the domination system in the U.S. and the world centers in ourselves, individually and collectively, and it must challenge our understanding of biblical faith, our theology, and our practice of mission in our churches and our various denominations. The struggle for liberation is of course the struggle for world in which there is room for all. About four years ago, in the city of Limon, which is on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, a small group of Baptists formed the Baptist Theological Center of the Caribbean. They were ecumenically oriented, but their first task was to gather support among the diverse Baptist churches in the area. Limon represents the most neglected, poorest part of Costa Rica, probably because of its concentration of Black and Native peoples, but it is also the region that produces the greatest income through the major port and production of bananas, coffee, and other agricultural products. The theological center in Limon has been linked to our seminary in several ways, though it represents very conservative churches. They had had a history of the loss of ministerial candidates who went away to study. So they decided to form a theological center in consultation with the Seminario Biblico Latinamericano. Not long ago they offered a course that had to do with understanding the context for doing theological studies. Toward the end of the course, the students all had to do some kind of research project in their community - on what was happening in Limon with regard to the ecological question, economics, women, etc. Those who chose economics looked into what was happening on docks with the stevedores, because Costa Rica had been going through a process of structural adjustment in compliance with policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. And so the government was trying to privatize and mechanize the docks by bringing in a Japanese company, which would reduce from 600 down to 90 the number of dock workers. Already salaries were dropping dramatically, some say as much as 90%. As these beginning and very basic level theological students began to talk with the dock workers, they realized that something very serious was going on. So with the pastor they invited several pastors in the city to be with the dock workers to hear their story, with little idea where that might lead them. The dock workers themselves were very suspicious and uncertain about going to the Baptist church and talking to a bunch of pastors, but the dialogue opened up real communication. The churches began to vocalize support for these dock workers. Other organizations in the community awakened, not only to what was happening but to the possibility of resisting. Before long there were more than 50 organizations coming together in what was called "Limon en Lucha," "the Struggle of Limon." There were demonstrations, then police repression and eventually the whole matter had to be resolved in the office of the President in San Jose. Thus a beginning experience in very peripheral institution led those theological students to realize that the gospel has to do very fundamentally with the problem of exclusion and domination, something I am sure they will never forget.

A Vision Of Biblical Faith: The Reign of God and God's Justice

One of the great questions in my mind and perhaps in your minds is, What is happening to popular Christianity today? In the north, and to some degree also in the south, we see what might be called the demise of the traditional churches and the upsurge of more attractive alternatives. We find that the Pentecostal movement represents perhaps 75 - 80% of the Protestant movement in Latin America. But beyond that we have been somewhat concerned about the rise of the mega church, the media, religion that as big business or even as show business. One of the most famous cases is the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. In Brazil that church has been growing by leaps and bounds. It already has a TV channel that competes with the strongest channel in Rio, plus newspapers and other media and institutions. The churches have services four times a day, seven days a week. Something obviously is going on. The question always is, what is the gospel message? What is the vision of biblical faith? Are we clear about our vision in our churches today?

I would like to refer to the biblical "Jubilee" as a point of entry into the whole Gospel story, the whole of the Scriptures. I am constantly surprised by the degree to which we have neglected or lost what some call "sabbath economics." The Old Testament explains what happened in rural societies, where everyone lived on the land, and the land was fundamental for the people's identity, the basis of social, cultural and spiritual life, the primary gift of God for the sustaining of human life. The simple economic realities that happened then, happen today in more sophisticated ways. When there were crop failures, for whatever reason, these families had to borrow from those that had more, and if they couldn't meet the payments, especially if interest was high, they lost their land and became share croppers, day laborers, or slaves. This could lead to extreme poverty, malnutrition, illness and death. The Sabbath-Jubilee mandates were to deter and reverse these eventualities; they provided a basis for social and economic security. The theological foundation was the liberation of their Hebrew ancestors from slavery in Egypt and the gift of the Promised Land, where they were to create an alternative soci- economic way of life. The Lord told them again and again to remember their covenant obligations as people of Yahweh. They were not to practise the very abuses from which they had been saved. Rather they were to cancel all debts and free any slaves every 7 years, at the Sabbath Year, and they were to give back the land to all the families of Israel every 50 years, at the Jubilee year, the Super Sabbath. And the land and all who worked the land, even the animals, must have rest the 7th day, during the 7th year, and during the 50th year. This was one way of confronting the marginalization, impoverishment, and exclusion, and it is a thread running throughout the Old Testament. It became, according to Luke, the central theme and aim of Jesus' ministry.

In Luke 4 when Jesus initiates his ministry at the Nazareth synagogue, he reads from Isaiah 61:1-2a and adds a phrase from Isaiah 58:6:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

At the end of this first section of Luke's record of Jesus' ministry, this message is identified as the Reign of God (Luke 4:43), which corresponds to Mark's and Matthew's presentation of Jesus' central theme at the beginning of his ministry (Mark 1:15, Matthew 4:17). So Jesus came to proclaim the coming of God's Reign as the year of the Lord's favor, the Jubilee. He called his followers to a faith that would liberate from poverty and oppression. In the Nazareth sermon he went on the give two examples of God's intervention in the life of the people: the widow of Sidon and the leper of Syria. Two persons, two examples of people who were doubly or triply excluded. The first was a woman, a widow, and an alien, and of course the other was a leper and an alien. Again and again Jesus showed this option for the excluded, the oppressed-poor, women, the sick and impure, children, demon possessed. In Luke 14 her gave two parables about feasts for which the invitation is for the poor, the cripple, the lame, and the blind, and of course in Chapter 15 we find the option for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. The message of these stories, again and again, is about inclusion. God's Reign comes as a challenge to repent, to turn around, to bring good news and liberation to those whom the domination system excludes because that is what God's Justice means. And so Jesus had to challenge his disciples constantly to be servants, not like the leaders of the domination system, to be last, not first, if need be to give their lives.

Some people think that the Pentecostals are other worldly, pietistic, and uninvolved in social concerns. One of the churches with which we had ties for a long time, is the Venezuelan Evangelical Pentecostal Union. One of our professors was for many years their theological advisor, and the present bishop is a graduate of the seminary. He and others formed an extension center of our seminary at Maracaibo in Venezuela called PACTO, which is an abbreviation for "program of open theological education." On August 31st last year thousands of people gathered at Guanare for the assembly of this church, and they put out the following declaration in response to what the Venezuelan people are going through at this time.

We pastors, delegates of churches, youth organizations, women's societies, children, rural and indigenous sectors, participants at the 37th convention of the Union Evangelica Pentecostal Venezolana, meeting in the city of Guanare, August 28 to September 11, 1996, wish to share with the people of Venezuela our concerns, hopes, reflections and proposals. We have been called together under the theme "Jubilee, Festival of the Spirit," a theme we consider to be of great relevance for the present reality of Venezuela. The Jubilee refers to the festivity celebrated by the Hebrew people and designed to value the land as a community possession, to proclaim the freedom of the slaves, to restore mortgaged lands, to forgive unpayable debts and reduce to a minimum the economic and social differences accumulated among the people.

Recognizing the distance of time, space and historic development, we affirm that the ethical principles that gave origin to these norms remain in force and constitute a biblical paradigm capable of calling us to the commitment to build a form of social relation founded on justice, solidarity and peace.

As a church close to the sufferings of the people, we are concerned that the deepening poverty that is occurring as a result of the economic measures that are being applied for our people, and that, among other things, manifest our dependence with respect to the centers of world power. We have reflected on the weight that the external debt has on the process of impoverishment of our people. Precisely, the biblical paradigm of the Jubilee calls us to pray and work so that the unpayable debts are not transformed into perverse mechanisms that enslave and sacrifice our people on the altars of the creditors.

We call on our government to be honest with the people. They should know that the major part of the money gathered through fiscal measures goes directly into the hands of the international bank. In Venezuela we have paid in the last ten years $40 billion in service to the debt, and the debt, instead of diminishing has grown, reaching for 1996 $42 billion. This is translated into the increase in the level of unemployment, the collapse of health services, the raising of prices of basic goods and services, and the general deterioration of the quality of life for our people.

We join the voices of the churches and sectors of the people that call for the realization of an ecumenical Jubilee that will lead to a profound revision of the debt and a remission of the same for the countries that are not able to pay, taking into account that this debt is immoral because it was contracted illegally and behind the backs of the people, who are ultimately the ones who suffer the consequences.

So that this may become a reality, we exhort the people and governments of Latin America to work together in the search for more than just international economic order.

Likewise, we also call upon the churches and Christians in general to understand the clamor for justice for the weak has reached the ears of God. It is necessary that we announce before the world the proclamation of the Year of Grace that Jesus inaugurated at the beginning of his messianic ministry (Luke 4:18-21). That together we bring hope to the people and commit ourselves to pray, work and orient our people so that we become involved in concrete actions, that they not reduce the Jubilee proposal to mere celebrations and declarations, but that they become effective in the establishment of a greater degree of justice for our people at the door to the Third Millennium.

Guanare, August 31, 1996

A Vision Of Mission: The Option For and From the Excluded Ones

A vision of our world, a vision of our biblical faith, and finally a vision of theological education. An option for the poor, or an option for and from the excluded ones. One of the great hopes of our time, I believe, is the widespread demand for inclusion or integration across the great frontiers of class, race and gender, and now increasingly across many other frontiers such as age, physical ability, cultures, and nationalities. The 500th anniversary of the so-called discovery of the Americas was a time of opportunity, of awakening, of repentance, perhaps of reparation, Apparently very little happened in North America, but throughout Latin America, there were major mobilizations of indigenous peoples, to some extent of African Americans. In fact there were attempts to form a coalition of the poor, indigenous and African Latin Americans and what they called the Peoples' Congress. Many of our churches and institutions work very specifically across cultural lines for the disadvantaged and marginalized. But what is emerging is, I think, the discovery of the potential, precisely of the marginalized, the privileged carriers of the good news.

Pablo Richard, a Chilean priest who has been in Costa Rica for many years, is a member of our faculty and the director of the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones. He expresses the challenge in these terms in an article called (in Spanish) "Biblical Interpretation from the Indigenous Cultures" (Pasos, No. 66, July-August 1996). Over the last ten years he has often worked among the various indigenous people of Latin America. He notes that the Bible, as we all know, was utilized to legitimate the conquest and the destruction of the culture and religion of indigenous peoples. And he analyzes the imposition of the dominant culture even today, not only among indigenous peoples, but also among other vulnerable sectors. He refers back to the rationalization for the conquest of the New World by referring to the well know words of Juan Gines de Sepulveda in the 16th century. These are outlandish statements, but I think it is important to see how this mentality has been passed on for over 500 years to our own time.

... with perfect right the Spaniards rule over the barbarians of the New World and adjacent islands, who in terms of prudence, ingenuity, virtue and humanity are as inferior to the Spaniards as are children to adults and women to men, having among them such difference as that which is found between wild and cruel people and very clement people. and I might say monkeys and humans.

... being by nature servants, the barbarians, uncultured and inhuman fail to admit the domination of those who are more prudent, powerful and perfect than they, domination that would bring them most wonderful utilities, being furthermore a just thing, by natural right, that matter obey form, body the soul, appetite reason, brutes humans, women their husbands, children their parents, imperfection perfection, worse better, for the universal good of all things.

Richard expresses the challeng that rises with the globalization of this culture, which now has gone through 500 years of history, specifically in terms of evangelization and the interpretation of the Bible, which I think is used to legitimate this imperialism. At issue is not only the cultural and religious autonomy of indigenous peoples and the humanization of dominant peoples but the recuperation of the integral and liberating message of the Bible itself. And this in turn has important implications for the other dimensions of domination that Juan Gines de Sepulveda defends. Thus Richard affirms:

An interpretation of the Bible from the perspective of Indians, women, the body is therefore a spiritual interpretation carried out with the Spirit with whom it was originally written. The Occidental and colonial reading of the Bible, carried out its Indians, women, the body is an interpretation that perverts the spiritual sense of the Bible. The Bible was not written with a colonial, patriarchal and anti-corporal spirit but with the spirit of the poor and oppressed. Therefore only a hermeneutic of liberation can be an hermeneutic of the spirit, which is the hermeneutic with which the Bible was written.

Therefore indigenous peoples, and other racial and cultural sectors, women and popular movements have the right and the necessity to resist the impositions of Christendom and to affirm their own spiritual roots. Only in this way will they be able to discover the true message of the Bible and to help us all to reconstruct a true spirituality. Thus indigenous people, African Americans, women and other excluded sectors will play a central role in the recuperation of the Bible as foundation for mission for and from the excluded. Richard writes:

The Bible is read and interpreted in the bosom of movements of indigenous and African American peoples, workers and peasants, women, ecologists and youth. The word of God is read with the Spirit that becomes visible and active in these movements in relation to the body, culture, women, nature, youth. The experience of the spirit is not found in the soul over against the body but in affirmation of life over and against death. Life is affirmed clearly as fullness of life of the body, the life of the poor, the Indian, the Black, women, youth, nature. The space of the Spirit is the world defined as the relation body-culture-gender-work-nature. An interpretation of the Bible from the body, culture, women, work, nature is a requirement of the Spirit itself. In the popular reading of the Bible the experience of the Spirit occupies a new social place in history.

I remember being in Vancouver, on the campus of the University of British Columbia, in the summer of 1983 for the Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Some of you were probably here for the plenary session when the Chief of the Nation that used to hold all this land gave a very eloquent challenge. He told of the way in which the Europeans had difficulty seeing that his people are human beings, but also how the his people had difficulty understanding how human beings could be so arrogant as to behave the way those Europeans did, presuming to take the land as their right of conquest. Later in the Assembly, there were many side-shows, and I attended a workshop led by Canadian theologians in which they shared their experience in progressive stages of working with native peoples. First they tried to help the Native Canadians in their needs; later they joined them in their struggle for justice; and finally they took an even more significant step. They began to realize that the native peoples of Canada present a mirror that can enable all Canadians to see themselves and what they are doing to themselves as well as to the native peoples - destroying the environment, community, family values, life itself. These theologians began to realize that this reflection of native peoples could provide insight into the most fundamental needs of all of us in relation to ourselves, our families, our communities, our culture, the land, nature, and God. We all know how much the people we have worked with have affected our lives.

The challenge for the future of theological education, whatever the technologies, comes down to this: to rediscover and renew our vision of the world, a world where there is room for all; our vision of biblical faith, God's Reign and God's Justice; our vision of theological education, the option for and from the excluded ones.

Gary Kush, TEENET Website  Director
email:garykushmail@aol.com

Megan Norgate, TEE College of South Africa
Steering Committee Chairperson
email:meg@tee.co.za