The Interaction of Culture, Truth, and Practical Theology
Uesifili: I
spent 1990 in Samoa, in the Theology College for Methodist students
preparing for ministry. In 1991 I decided that to help my thinking
theologically it was best for me to head over to New Zealand to Knox
Theological Hall and [experience of having 0:27] spent two years in
Dunedin doing a Bachelor of Divinity was that it gave me a new and
refreshing approach and perspective to what the God questions might
look like, without having ready-made answers which in some way was
both a blessing and a curse. We Pacifica people like to have
ready-made answers even if they are the wrong answers, but no-one
really cared about the questions. So it was an eye-opener of an
experience, but one that I think gave me a very good foundation for
asking those God questions since. So I like Dunedin very much.
David: What was
bad about living in Dunedin?
Interviewee: Something
to do with the weather. It wasn’t that bad. I actually enjoyed
the fact that I could see snow. I had never seen snow in my life
until I went to Dunedin, and it was wonderful, sitting in the
Lewiston Library, in the warm, heated rooms and looking out and
watching the weather and the snow fall onto the Knox Hall car park.
It was great.
David: That was
in February, wasn’t it?
Uesifili : I
can’t remember the month, it was that cold.
David: One of the
things that John Evans said was that in Australia there was just such
a reaction to what Donald Trump had done to their
democratically-elected leader. A wide-spread feeling in Australia,
that their leader had been insulted, and this was someone that ought
to have taken into account that Australia had been America’s
closest ally since World War II. That feeling that their leader had
been dishonoured, made to be small if you like, was not going to go
away quickly in the Australian scene. I asked John whether there
were many sermons being written about this. He said, well you
probably couldn’t have got a bigger topic in Australian churches
than what had happened to Malcolm Turnbull.
In New Zealand,
at least within the Facebook social media kind of outlets, we didn’t
see that reaction of our closest neighbour. Equally, in New Zealand
we haven’t seen the reaction of say Fiji, Samoa, Tonga to what is
essentially a regime change in America, be it a democratic regime
change or what. So, I think it’s not just a church-related
problem; I suspect it’s a New Zealand-related problem that we are
becoming more and more insular in the very age in which social media
has exploded everything out into a very wide arena. So, Uesifili
have you got any comments about Pacifica or Oceania perspective about
what’s happened in the US?
Uesifili: Yeah,
I think one of the interesting things about the question that’s
been asked - is it reasonable to expect theology to react to world
event; we shouldn’t expect that - it’s a must. We have to
respond - we can’t not respond. I think the issue is it’s the
speed in which we respond. You alluded to the ancient world, David
when a letter was written by St Paul’s and it went out to the
Corinthians and to the Ephesians, and it probably made good time.
Today we’re talking about a totally different cultural,
technological context where the President of the United States is
actually engaging in social media; that’s his mode of
communication. If we look at our own media and information access,
if you click onto the Herald for example, that material is updated
regularly, which means anything that was an hour ago you are not
likely to find it on your feed unless you dig through layers and
layers of other newsfeed.
So, the question
is; is it reasonable? Yes, of course. It’s something we have to
do. It’s the speed in which we do that response that I think
catches us out. That is a total turning upside down of our sense of
relevance and our sense of being important. No-one actually waits
for the church with baited breath to make it be known. Even the poor
Pope doesn’t get to have a say. It’s those who are on the mark
straight away that gets the breaking news. I think that says
something of our understanding of the technological context in which
we operate; our theology is as good as yesterday’s fish and chips
paper.
Unless we find a
new kind of response, it doesn’t matter what fountain of wisdom we
have to offer; it isn’t going to be readily available. I think
that’s part of where we lose our part of the conversation; we’re
just not there. We might be there next year when someone publishes a
book, but we haven’t got the kind of instantaneous theology that
responds to some of these things, remembering that people are
clicking onto Twitter or Instagram in their thousands and in their
millions with the news information being digested and formulated in a
matter of seconds, if not minutes. So our theology in some way has
to be very much like the Jesus way of theology, on your feet type
thing, and it’s the way the world operates.
David: I find
that very helpful. It’s a useful set of commentaries because our
theology somehow has to begin to incorporate a sense of urgency, a
sense of the right moment to speak. This leads us into Max and
Julie’s question; how do we make theology relevant in our
denominations where there’s so much diversity of opinion? That may
occur in parishes or congregations or eve study groups, but I don’t
think that it’s the diversity that’s the key thing here. It’s
the ability to think on one’s feet, and when the President of the
United States accuses CNN, ABC - you name it - did he even accuse
Fox? He might have.
If he didn’t,
they’d be the only one’s he didn’t; of being the fake news
media - this from the president o f a country that believed
ultimately in the freedom of speech. Trump has manipulated I think a
great deal [this concept 9:22] that some media produce fake news, and
that’s true on parts of the political spectrum. Whereas, the
Church is saying, actually we believe we’ve got some truth claims
that aren’t fake news - we think these are truths that are
universal truths; truths of human rights for everyone, irrespective
of creed, colour, religion, nationality - whatever. We’re so far
behind being able to respond on our feet to this kind of criticism.
Any comments, Uesifili?
Uesifili: Well,
I think the American narrative in terms of how Trump is utilising
media is that he sets the agenda for the news. Now, that might be
fake news, or Trump sensationalising the issues, but he’s actually
dictating what information people absorb. He actually directs where
the next bit of information is coming from, whether we agree with it
or not. He is actually determining what news and information we
digest. Now, I agree with you, David; the Church has some eternal
truths that it has to share, but if you’re only sharing that with
pages of books that people have to go and buy, or only on Sundays
when the church congregation meets, those are very limited spheres in
which the truths that the Church says is actually beneficial to
society gets heard or gets accessed.
So, the question
for us is; how do we bring these truths to the modern day sense of
truth? What we might believe to be eternal truths may not
necessarily be - it could be fake news, for example. We have to be
able to find ways in which the news of the day is actually very real,
but real in the sense they actually do have some proven evidence that
these things work. I think it’s that access and the speed in which
we can engage that - make no mistake; these are big challenges for a
church that has been in a sense quite taken by its own sense of
relevance and importance. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that
now, but we’ve got to somehow find how this new technology can
actually provide a platform for us to share some of those things.
David: I think
we’re at a crossroads as far as Church is concerned; it has become
so slow in this kind of political social media race, if you like,
that it no longer has the capacity by and large to self-transform in
the social media sense. Maybe a dozen parishes around New Zealand
have a Facebook page. That’s great, but what they tend to use
their Facebook page for is purely focussed on internal
fellowship-type matters. So, you’ll see photos of the parish
picnic or so n so doing an item or something like that.
That’s fine,
but it ignores that whole spectrum of theology, and that spectrum of
theology always engaged with the political. Now, I don’t know why
we’ve lost that ability. There was a time that you said the Church
was a much bigger organisation; that’s true. There was a time when
we had an international affairs committee, and I can guarantee that
if that still existed there would be 40 or 50 active lay-people and
half a dozen clergy working on the Trump stuff right now. So, I
suspect there’s no longer the will to become involved in the way
that we used to be involved.
Uesifili: Isn’t
that interesting, David; what we do is actually not very interesting.
We haven’t come to grips with the idea that our diminishing
numbers of those who want to take an hour and a half out of their
Sunday morning to come to a close-up room such as the church is no
longer what people prefer to do. They would rather be doing this;
sitting in front of their computer at their own time, engaging with
something that they themselves can control. We haven’t understood
the fact that people have been mesmerised by what technology can now
offer to them, in terms of engagement and thinking, and the diversity
of perspectives.
These are not the
sort of things that we do in church; we go to church with one
particular agenda, and that agenda is the Presbyter’s agenda or
those who control the congregation. I don’t think people are in
that kind of thinking anymore. There are so much more interesting
things happening on Facebook, and I could sit there for hours, but to
say that it’s more interesting to go to church on a Sunday morning
and sit there for an hour and be given a sermon that makes no sense;
I’m not so sure about that.
David: You made
reference to this right at the start; these things about refugee
status impacted directly into every country. We would have had
people employed by Google and Microsoft and so on of Muslim
extraction that would have come directly into that band. What did we
do? We just blinked and some people reacted on Facebook, but
Facebook is not a great way of trying to bring about change. I think
if I’ve read the Facebook stuff on people reacting to Trump
correctly; most people are very concerned, but because we’re not
American’s - because we’re not part of that society, they don’t
have a collective mechanism for expressing their concern. The one
group that ought to have a collective mechanism for expressing the
concern is in fact the Church and all the denominations. I think
probably as...
Uesifili: If I
relate to that; should the Church respond to Donald Trump? Of course
they should. If we look at our own New Zealand experience, the very
people who went to the Dawn Raids, for example of the 1970s are
exactly the people who can speak to that experience of those people
now in America being rounded up, and hopefully not being deported to
where they’ve come from originally - seems to be a whole host of
the things that we have rallied against in New Zealand in the past.
Why are we suddenly silent on what is a very similar situation?
It’s for
political gain, it’s for economic rationale that doesn’t seem to
make much sense; the things that we ourselves experienced here in tea
1970s. Are the fundamental issues different? No, they’re not. Is
there an ethical dilemma for the church here, as it was back in the
1970s? There should be, because these are the very things that we as
Church are supposed to be upholding as the admirable Christian values
we should be upholding. So, why aren’t we responding to Trump?
These are the things that, in our own little context of New Zealand
wasn’t that far away.
David: You’re
absolutely right. I think the Dawn Raids in the Muldoon era just
highlight exactly the same kind of bullying, racism that was
determined to make its mark, if you like, and divide the country
into; this group must leave. Now, today we’ve got that group of
Indian students who through no fault of their own end up facing being
deported. The one place that they can turn to in the whole of New
Zealand society, and think they might have a chance is the sanctuary
of a church.
God help New
Zealand and any country that gives up that kind of cultural heritage
that was developed over centuries and centuries. I do think that
theology has to make its way and make its mark very quickly in the
world all over again, but I also think that the truths of theology
have this relevance that need to be stated; here we stand and can do
no other. I think that was Luther’s famous dictum. If you
consider that your student’s days in theology have borne fruit
later on in life for you, has theology become something that actually
you feel you have to do?
Uesifili: Yeah,
I think so. I think it’s given a backbone to the way you see the
world - the way you act, and the way you advocate for what I have
learned to be the kind of theological questions that don’t
necessarily have the answers. That’s the grappling in the social
context. It’s actually exactly like what the guys have done just
up the road here with the Indian students. It could be legally
wrong, but the question for churches is not to get everything right;
it’s actually to go and do what you think might be right, given the
long history and heritage of the Church always standing up for the
underdog.
Now, to me, that
has been the basis on which theology has enriched and shaped my kind
of thinking, in terms of the questions of our day. It’s not to get
the answers right every time, but actually to grapple with what could
possibly be a dubious answer. I don’t think Jesus was very much
into right answers; I think he was into grappling with dubious
solutions. I think that’s where we ought to be using our theology;
actually being out there and engaged and flying by the seat of your
pants trying to find those answers, because they’re not going to be
readily available. So theology has given me that courage and the
sense of risk to grapple with those on the fly. I don’t think
we’re supposed to know the answers before we actually get down to
the hard work, necessarily.
David: That’s a
great way to end. Thank you very much, Uesifili. Thank you very
much John.
