SOME THOUGHTS ON FILIPINO THEOLOGY

What might be called “Filipino theology”? What were and are its concerns? What is its reality? Whither is it now bound?

I. Perhaps we can begin this way: By common agreement, I think, more than any other single event in the past century of the history of Christianity, the Second Vatican Council was the most meaningful, even the most earth-shaking of all. Three of the greatest Catholic theologians of the century, asked to assess the Council some 25 years after its ending, gave remarkably converging interpretations of what its “bottom-line” significance was for the Church of our time.

The German Jesuit Karl Rahner said, that it marked the actual (if only inchoate) coming-to-be of a truly world Church: no longer a Church exported from Europe to other peoples, but a Church in truth becoming a Church within each people, truly of each people.

The French Dominican ecclesiologist Yves Congar saw the Council signaling the emergence of the local churches as subjects of their own histories, within the catholica unitas; the arrival [so he called it] of the “time of the heirs”.

The Canadian Bernard Lonergan judged it, perhaps most incisively, as the Church’s recognition or acknowledgment of history, a coming-to-terms with a Church within history, a Church with history at work within itself.

Others would say in a similar vein: the realization that world and history do not revolve around the Church, but that the Church circles around world and history instead (M. D. Chenu, O.P.). The world and history do not “define” the Church, but yet the Church “realizes” itself in the world, constitutes itself within history.

The Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx would put the same insight, in more deliberately provocative terms. Not, he says, extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church, there is no salvation), but extramundum nulla salus (outside the world, outside history, no salvation takes place). Christ did not come to take us out of history and save us out of this world. He came to redeem history itself to save the world itself (John 3,16: “It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world may be saved.”)

The martyred Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero said, — more pastorally (if you will) — in one of his homilies, “The mission of the Church in a given time and place is to strive to transform the history of a people into salvation history.”

Finally, let me put all this into something of a definition, borrowed from Joseph Komonchak of the Catholic University of America:

Theology is at the service of Christ’s redemptive presence and role in the world. It arises from within a community convinced that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, and the event and message on which it reflects is meant to have an effect upon the course of human history. Theology is thus one of many ways in which the Church seeks to be the sign and instrument by which Christ continues to be historically effective. This is a point which perhaps especially needs stressing today. (Joseph A. Komonchak, “Theologians in the Church,” In Church and Theology, Essays In memory of Carl J. Peter, edited by Peter C. Phan (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995) 83-87.)

Thus far, something of a definition. Now,a mandatory parenthesis. Before we move on, there is one absolutely necessary clarification to be made. Also in accordance with the “total ecclesiology” of Vatican II, what we mean by Church here is all of us who are baptized, laity as much as clergy, all who profess to be members of the Christian community, and followers of Jesus; all who make up what St. Paul calls the Body of Christ in the world. This is fundamental for what we are saying here.

Tying things together, then. For the theologian today, involvement in the Church’s responsibility in, and for, ongoing history, are mandatory, not optional. Involvement in the Church’s life, its engagement in changing society, its transformative praxis, — all have become part of “doing theology”. And if, as has been many times said, more has changed in our part of the globe and its history, — more has changed in the past fifty years than in the preceding five hundred, then theology and the theologian have to come to terms with these large evolutions and their meanings, with what we have come to name “signs of the times.” This kind of theology is a theology of “acompañar,” of “being with,” of “walking with”. This kind of theology has to interface Gospel and Church with a world in transition, in process, and help point it to its destination and its destiny, a theology that strives to transform a people’s journey into a pilgrimage towards what Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

II. To turn now to “Filipino theology,” then, of the last forty years. Its endeavor has been to ensure that the Church in our country bears a word, bears the Gospel of Christ, precisely as it encounters what-is-going-forward in our common journey as a people, going forward towards building a nation (In the words of Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in terris) “grounded on truth, guided by justice, motivated by love, realized in freedom, and flowering in peace.” It has to be a theology in continual discernment, under the leading of the Spirit. It is a theology whose agent, whose real subject, is “the whole Church.”

To go into some detail, without trying to be exhaustive: I believe “Filipino theology” has made its journey with gradually increasing self-awareness since — to give a convenient date as peg — Pope Paul VI’s Populorumprogressio, his great 1967 encyclical on the progress of peoples, and that these were some of the milestones along the way:

• the concern for the human and faith meanings of social and economic development, from the sixties onward;

• the emergence of basic Christian communities, later “Basic Ecclesial Communities” or BEC’s, the Church coming-to-be at the grassroots;

• the growing struggle for social justice and human rights, and de facto, even before that label was imported, the “option for the poor”;

• our own home-grown reflection on liberation, born and bred no doubt in syntony with Marxist- Maoist ideological influences in the 70’s, helped much by interfusion with Latin American liberation theology, but shaped in substance by local events, especially by the growing resistance to the Marcos martial law and its oppressions;

• this resistance to the “ruinous dictatorship” in time gathered its disparate forces to a head, and moved — we believe, not without the guiding and saving hand of the Lord, toward those four fateful days which made EDSA and “the People Power” uprising a “miracle,” a gift bestowed, a task begun. Perhaps, we might add, in sorrow — later betrayed by our own lack of unity, of courage and political will.

• After EDSA, within the space created by our uneasily restored democracy, the urong-sulong moves to give some consistent embodiment to the historic presence and responsibility of the Church in our society.

• The work of interreligious dialogue, so necessary for the Church in Asia, has been something of a latecomer in the consciousness of many in our country, but henceforth it has to move to front and center, in the decades to come.

The Second Plenary Council of the Philippines (PCP-II, 1991) was a summative moment, a remarkable effort at definition of the Church’s mission, explicitly formulated and articulated, as official in character as we could want it. It proposed a vision, rooted in the Gospel, discerned in and through the long historic process of“evangelization.” PCP-II set out upon a renewal of the Church, a renewal itself in service to this vision, with clergy and laity-meant to work together at the daunting task it named as the “building of the Church of thepoor.”

III. This “Filipino theology” could not have been the work of theologians in any real isolation from the crises and currents around us. It had to find expression in the midst of the movements and inter-crossings of the most diverse sectors of a Church at the heart of ‘history itself in the making’. A theology of bits-and-pieces gathered and scotch-taped together in hours of doing and suffering, in dialogue and confrontation, in reflection and prayer, in emptiness, in confusion and paralysis, — in all the times and seasons of Qoheleth, it would seem! — in struggle, sometimes in anguish and despair, sometimes with the shedding of real blood and tears. This “Filipino theology” has been the creation of an entire Church, and all these things — and more — were part of its story.

That is why I believe it can be argued that our bishops’ pastoral letters, coming to a focused term in the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines, — documents which are a far cry from the magnificent summaeof the middle ages, texts which only poorly resemble the much-labored-over constitutions of Vatican II — these documents are yet the substantive Filipino theological texts of our generation.

May I submit that they can bear the weight of the name “theology”. They are pastoral and missionary reflections and directives, true, yet roughly articulating a developed practical ecclesiology in the line of what has been called “an ecclesiology of transformative praxis in history.” May I submit that they represent, despite obvious deficiencies, the FAITH and HOPE of the Filipino Catholic community seeking to understand itself and its mission today. And expressing its LOVE, in the Spirit, — a love seeking to name its imperatives and number its deeds. Is this not itself authentic theological endeavor? Even a prophetic theological word? You might even call it, the theology of our patristic age. For it is a true theological search to understand and live out the Gospel of Jesus and make it effectively redemptive in our history.

And thus is it not expected that the Filipino theologian of the present will continue to work this vein in years to come, laboring “from below,” in the urgent service of the Church’s mission in our time and place? But all the while, for this is the deeper consequence, constructing a local Church on mission in response to thekairos that is upon us? And not incidentally, this is the most concrete meaning of inculturation and its theology. For inculturation is at base the task of a local church in the process of its self-realization in history. (Cf. Theses on the Local Church. A Theological Reflection in the Asian Context. Theological Advisory Commission of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (TAC/FABC). Published as #60 of the FABCPapers, FABC Secretary General’s Office, 18 Caine Road, Hong Kong, January 1991.)

Litmus-paper test: Name all the Filipino theologians who are present on the scene today and, to your mind, making something of a difference, and you will see that (I believe without exception) this is where they are, and what they are doing. For this is what the Church in the Philippines today asks of them.

Other theological tasks, of course, accompany this work; we might call them maintenance tasks: some of them foundational and essential (grounding for worship, preaching, catechesis, pastoral practice), needful and useful concerns, which at all times and in all places must go on in the Church. We do not set them aside; none is to be omitted or belittled. Let them go forward, for what is and will be needed, now and in time to come.

So much for the Filipino theology of the recent past and the present.

IV. And what may be said of the future? An educated guess only is what may be offered. In the journey of post-Vatican II theology, 20th century ecclesiology has led, by inner nisus, to christological search. Already Pope Paul VI foresaw it: the deeper knowledge of the Church would take us to a renewed turning to Jesus. The “Council of the Church” which was Vatican II, was ultimately a re-centering on Christ. John Paul II, beginning his magisterium with Redemptor hominis, Christ as redeemer of humanity, has brought us, more explicitly than any Pope before him, to the crucified and risen Lord, and in and through him, to the Trinity and trinitarian labor in our world.

Thus the future search of our theology will center, I believe and I hope, on Jesus the Christ. And, repeating only what many outstanding theologians today are saying, it will be a theology constantly renewed by a personal and an ecclesial experience of Christ. The Holy Father said, in the United States in 1993, “Sometimes even we Catholics have lost or maybe never had the chance to experience Christ personally; not Christ as mere ‘paradigm’ or ‘value’, but Christ experienced as the living Lord: he who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Pages can be filled with similar statements from the most influential of contemporary theologians. And most recently and resoundingly, from the Asian bishops in this year’s Synod, in personal interventions and in their final message.

In the years ahead, I believe we will see a rediscovery of Jesus Christ in our Asian theology, and even within an acknowledged context of religious pluralism in Asia, we will see emerging — maybe for the first time, maybe in unexpected depth and splendor, and with wonderment, — the “Asian face of Christ.” In a truesense, the history of theology in Asia, in the Philippines, has not yet really begun in earnest. Rightly it will begin, in the deep mind and heart, with an encounter with Jesus Christ.

As I was writing these reflections, I re-read one of the last essays our Father Horacio de la Costa wrote before he went off to Rome to be one of Fr. Pedro Arrupe’s General Assistants. It is a paper written with the grace and originality we always expected of him, and bears the title, “The Eastern Face of Christ.” (Horaciode la Costa, “The Eastern Face of Christ,” in Asia and the Philippines. Collected Essays by H. de la Costa(Manila: Solidaridad Publishing), 1967, 162-169.) Without preaching, he suggests what the Asian Bishops on their own have repeated for years now, almost as refrain: that the “Asian face of Christ” will only emerge when we, with Asian faces, in a Church itself with an Asian face and voice, will incarnate anew to the 97% of Asians who are not of our faith and not of our Church, the One who, being the Way, the Truth and the Life, is “yesterday, today, and the same forever.” Now especially that the Asian Synod has sounded the call toinculturation with both insistence and authority, it gains added relevance for us, speaking as it does of Christ and his Gospel in whom all the deepest Asian aspirations will find fulfillment.

If I may cite Fr. de la Costa’s concluding paragraph also that I may pay this afternoon a tribute to his memory:

It cannot be without significance that the country which stands almost at the geographical center of the Far East, the Philippines, should also be that in which Christianity has taken the deepest root. There is a Providence that guides the course of human affairs, a Providence whose high purposes we can glimpse even if we cannot completely grasp them.

Surely, it is not presumptuous to see in this providential disposition the destiny to which we are called, weak and unworthy though we are: that of being a spiritual as well as a geographical center, a vital center, in which all Asia may find that which it has long sought but has not yet found: itself, its own mind and heart, not changed but transfigured and made whole in the mind and heart of Christ. Such, I suggest, might be our destiny as a people. (de la Costa, 169.)

V. One last point: Pope Paul VI said, many years ago, that the contemporary world, surfeited with words, pays little heed to teachers, who are after all mainly purveyors of words. (Include in this category, practitioners of theology).  If the world listens to teachers, Paul VI said, it is only because they are witnesses first of all. This is also what the Asian bishops said, in their recent Synod. (Cf. Synod for Asia, “Message to the People of God,” In Origins (28 May 1998)) This has become mandatory, they insist, for those of us who do theology as our métier, to live as witnesses, if there will be a rightful and honored place for us in the Church of Asia tomorrow.

- Catalino G. Arevalo, SJ