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SELF-UNDERSTANDING AND PERSONAL FORMATION

 

The first part of my session with you starts with what Fr. Abesamis has shared with you in his Biblical reflection and which I would like to call integral evangelization, i.e. the theological background on the kind of spirituality which we are in search of. Let me begin with the kind of theology that is coming out in the Philippines today. In Latin America they usually call this as the theology of liberation, but our groups here would like to call it as integral evangelization. Actually what all these refer to is the total salvation theology. Please recall with me the scriptural perspective expounded with you by Fr. Abesamis. He gave you the Israelitic-prophetic-apocalyptic-Christian tradition of total salvation. I shall try to sum up what I am sure he took up with you.  When we take up the meaning of salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we come up with the theological conclusion that: 1) Our God is a God who is interested in all human history or human existence, and 2) that this salvation that this God is proclaiming is a total salvation that is concrete, i.e., salvation not only of the soul but also of the body, not only from fear and death but from everything that dehumanizes man such as exploitation, oppression, poverty, etc.

Working from that understanding, we ask ourselves, if that is our Jewish-Christian tradition, and remember as shown clearly by Fr. Abesamis, Christ did continue this tradition of total salvation, then how come that in Church history, alt of a sudden, salva­tion has become the salvation of the soul? What we are going to do is to make a full circle. Seeing our Judeo-Christian tradition. what happened which caused this deviation or emphasis, or accentuation? And how come the churches today are so zealous in the concept of total salvation?

This needs a brief ecclesiastical history. The early Church, i.e. from the time of St. Paul and after him had to deal with another world different from the Jewish world, i.e. the Graeco-Roman world. This world was the venue of the missionary enterprise of the early Church. It was into this world that the Hebrew concept of salvation has to be translated. The problem of translation meant not only language — from Hebrew to Greek — but the translation of the whole conceptual framework. The Hebrew con­ceptual framework was quite different from that of the Graeco-Roman. And Christianity would die or would live according to how well they would succeed. It was at that mo­ment in history for the Church to have

 

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Hellenized Christianity. For the Church has to go through a historical process in order for it to be relevant; it was when the Hellenistic era has passed by and the Church re­gained in its Hellenistic form that a com­munication gap developed and the matter of relevancy came up. But at that point of history, this was all right. The agony and the ecstacy of the Church is its historicity – this is its strongest and weakest point. Be­cause it is historical, it has to undergo cer­tain historical context and it changes in that context. Now when it came to the Graeco-Roman world, we have to see the culture that prevailed here and we have to see how this culture would influence the features of Christianity. I would say that the dominant cultural thought prevailing then was Platonic philosophy.

The Platonic school that interpreted Plato and his teachings and carried him through the mainstreams of Western historical thought would be the dualistic characteristic of Platonism or Platonic dualism.

Briefly, Platonic dualism asserts that there is a world of ideas and there is a world of senses. The world of ideas is the world of spiritual existence, i.e. absolute Truth, absolute Goodness, absolute Beauty, etc. For them this is the real world. And the world of the senses is the appearance of that real world. It is like looking into a mirror – you actually look at your image on the mirror and you think you are seeing the real YOU but actually, the image is only a reflec­tion of the real you. Therefore, there are two realities: the real reality and a phenomenon called an appearance or reflection of that reality.

By the way, I should give you the social background of this. You know sometimes we think that ideas come by themselves. Actually they do emanate from the Material — the socio – economic – political conditions of the time. From this material base came the philosophical, ideological, theological concepts. Here you have to distinguish the Hebrews. For the Hebrews were a primitive society. They were struggling for survival, so they had no time to analyze. And besides, they were very concrete. When they looked at a person, they looked at him as a whole being. When they talked of salvation, it was very concrete — it meant land, liberty, freedom from oppression, etc. When you come to the Greeks, they were quite a different people. They were not slaves; they were the free men. But the slaves did everything for them — the dirty work. So what did the Greeks do? They went to the public baths - really not to take a bath but to philosophize. They began to analyze reality and they began to put reality into compartments. Analysis is indeed very good, but the danger sometimes is that you analyze things in your mind and you have certain conclusions and you fit reality into your analysis. You feel that if it is theoretically possible, it must fit with reality.

So the Greeks looked at man — concrete man — and analyzed his powers — his physi­cal powers and his spiritual powers. And they came to the conclusion that there are two elements in man: body and soul. More­over, that the body is the prison of the soul. So that if the soul would like to liberate itself, it must liberate itself from the body. They defined soul as the psyche—high power — intellect — knowledge. What is the object of the knowledge of man? They would say man uses his intellect to contemplate the real world — the world of absolute Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc. — and man will have real knowledge. But if he contemplates the world of the senses, mere appearances which are gross stuff and which are mutable, then man will end up with lesser truth.  This is what is called epistemological dualism. I am mentioning this here to show its in­fluence on Christian theology, spirituality and missionary thrust. So what happened during the Graeco-Roman era was that the Greeks tried to summarize the tre­mendous realities present into dogmatic formulations. In theology the Church began to articulate the same kind of dualistic

 

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principles. Like, for example, the teach­ing on the City of God and the City of Man, The Church taught that the whole direc­tion and efforts of Christians should be towards the City of God for this is man's true destiny. The City of Man is not man's real world; this shall pass away. And this was absolutized. So during the 19th century, Karl Marx accused the Church of telling the people to work "for the pie in the sky by and by".

This is the problem of dualism in Christian theology. And the problem is not only of dichotomy but of accentuating one over an­other: the soul is the better element and the body is the instrument of evil. In my own spiritual formation as a nun, we had been taught to negate our sex: we are neither man nor woman. Sin, during a period in Church history specifically referred to sex. Sex is dirty; the body is sinful. This concept propagated by the Church was instilled in the minds of people in general. We can see that this was carried on through the Victor­ian period, which was characterized by extreme prudishness. The sexual licentious­ness in our time is a reaction to the prudish-ness of the bygone era. But even this had the same route: the body and soul dichotomy. The same thing can be said of materialism and idealism. If you separate matter and spirit, you will have people who shall absolutize matter and you will have people who shall absolutize spirit. Thus, we had this kind of idealism, the form of spirituality which prevailed in the Church for many centuries.

You may ask, but why did this thinking stay for such a long time? Ah, there is a political reason behind that. You see the Popes at that time were very powerful. In fact all the ecclesiastical authorities enjoyed tremendous lower and they all wanted to cling to this power. Now what kind of rationalization did they have for staying in power? The principle that spirit and matter are separate and the spirit is over matter. So the distinction between temporal and spiritual authorities. So the Pope had absolute power over the temporal rulers — the kings and the princes and the Lords. It was only during the Renaissance when this concept began to be under – minded.

If we look at the missionary thrust of the Church, we see that the concept lingered on. I looked over some archives containing reports like "5000 souls baptized", souls orders. Invariably I would come across such reports like "5000" souls baptized", souls not persons! What was the most important thing for them was that they were able to snatch 5,000 souls from the clutches of hell. Because the emphasis was on what happened to the soul of a person, the type of salvation preached was quite individualistic.

But the world of thought does not stand still. Contemporary philosophy began to say that there is a wholeness to man. And there is a wholeness to the world. One cannot dichotomize man — body and soul; neither one should separate man from his world — social, political, ecological, etc. So, all these dynamic things were happening in the world. But the Church had surrounded itself with a wall of orthodoxy which was quite im­penetrable. It continued to pontificate — We have the Truth. Outside of the Church, there is no salvation. This Truth we have was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end! And not one iota of this dogmatic truth can be changed. Thus, the Church found it difficult to keep pace with the social-economic-political development happening in the world.

Fortunately, for the Church, there are peopled inside it who refused to be suffocated by their walls and dogmas of the Church. They sought to penetrate some sections of this wall by sucking in the fresher air outside. What happened was that they were branded heretics. I always say the Church goes or because of the heretics within her. And the air of secularism which began to take that world seriously seeped inside the Church. This world which the Greeks considered only a phenomenon. And the Church had to accept, whether she liked it or not, that

 

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her world view basically was in conflict with the scientific view.

And so the Church began to think less and 5 of the City of God and began to take more seriously the City of Man. For the church began to realize that it is this world and this world alone that will be transform­ed into the City of God. They still believed in the City of God but not something outside this world. It was this world undergoing a radical transformation. Even what the Apocalyptic said about the new heaven and the new earth, that too, would happen in this world. For God is not extravagant; He has an economy of creation and salvation. What God created was and is valuable. And what He has created is the raw material which will not develop automatically. People who inhabit His creation have to work for its transformation. So the Church began to talk about the role of the Christian in the modern world and later not only of the Christian but of the whole Church.

The Era of Development came around the fifties. The problem of poverty of the grea­ter number of people in the world was said to have been caused by underdevelopment. So many organizations, institutions and groups plunged into the development game. And for those who were working for deve­lopment of people in the grassroots level came a sudden realization that when one goes into peoples' development, there are a great lot of obstacles. And the most for­midable of them are structural obstacles. You develop people and you come up to a certain point and you cannot go further. Be­cause you suddenly realize that poverty, which you are trying to eradicate is not a spiritual reality. It is to the socio-economic-Political structures.

And then the missionaries confronted these realities. We would like to help the poor, they said. And no one can accuse the religious congregations that they do not care for the poor. The trouble is that they want to help the poor in a manner attuned to their time. Sincerity they do not lack; what they were wanting was analysis. Poverty was taken on the surface. They did not see its connection with other realities and struc­tures. So they continued on doling out some charitable goods and this was their charity work for the poor.

Then the Church said, okay, if you want to really help the poor, help them by teaching them ceramics and handicrafts and in-be­tween, teach and preach the Word. This was pre – evangelization stage. But the missionary should not go further than that.

But in 1970's, this realization became clear to the Church: that you cannot develop people unless you liberate them and your­self from the oppressive and exploitative structures in society. That the minute you take these things seriously, you can never compartmentalize your Christianity. The minute you commit yourself to help people, you commit yourself to total salvation, i.e. salvation from all that dehumanizes man. And the moment you begin, you have to go all the way.

During the decade of the '70's, our Bishops working on the document Justice in the World looked at the signs of the times and saw two things: negative and positive. The negative sign they saw was the presence of a network of domination that obstructs the liberation of people: transnational corpora­tions, media, military, aid, repressive state, etc. And this is present not only in the Philippines but among third world countries. The network is international and operates like an octopus. The positive thing they saw was the growing consciousness and aware­ness among the people. First of all, the consciousness of being dominated. Before many of our people did not even know they were dominated. They accepted their lot of being poor unquestioningly. It was enough that they ate something daily. But now be­ing conscious of their domination, they say that their lot is not a human way of life.

That they should have more and that things should be shared more equally than they are now. And thirdly, they are willing to fight for their liberation. And this spirit is not only present in our country but is shared by all under-developed countries. It has become

 

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an international movement.

So, in the context of this, according to our Bishops anyway, they feel that if you are concerned with salvation today-evangeliza­tion-work for justice and the transformation of the world is a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel. This is a very signifi­cant statement. The preaching of the Word is not complete unless there is work for justice and the transformation of the world. And for me this is the content of the formation and spirituality of people who want to preach the Gospel and who want to serve the people.