[OPINION] How theology can be accessible to all

In the meeting of theologians worldwide in Rome on the theme, “The Future of Theology: Legacy and Imagination,” Pope Francis suggested that theology should be interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary, that theology should be accessible to all.

Life is too complex, he says, theology should not simplify it. Otherwise, it would become ideological and can kill people. He says: “Ideology is a simplification that kills reality, it kills thought, it kills community. They flatten everything to a single idea, which they then repeat obsessively and superficially, like parrots.”

The antidote to ideological theology is interdisciplinarity. “This involves letting theological reflection ‘ferment’ in combination with other disciplines: philosophy, literature, the arts, mathematics, physics, history, law, politics, and economics. These disciplines ought to ferment, because, like the senses of the body, each has its own specific function, yet they need each other…”

In 2017, I delivered a talk at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) suggesting how this can be concretely done in context. Our theological thinking is fraught with “illusions,” prejudices, and biases, making us blind, thus also turning our theologies into “ideologies.” The antidote for me is summed up in one word: “reflexivity.”

I suggested then a threefold reflexive program for theology.

1. Biases from one’s social location

The first bias comes from our belonging to a certain class which brings with it perspectives only common to those in our class, making us blind to the worldview of other classes. Similar prejudices appear with the differences of gender, race and ethnicity, linguistic grouping, or religious affiliation. This is the basic belief of all classical sociologies of knowledge, from Marx to Mannheim, from Merton to Goulner: “the situatedness of all thought.” This prejudice coming from individual trajectories and personal social location is quite easy to counter. “They are unlikely to escape the self-interested criticism of those who are driven by other prejudices and convictions.” 

To make theological knowledge production reflexive, it might be good to suggest some structural and political forms to this threefold reflexive program in order to counter our prejudices. If illusion is brought about by one’s social location like economic status, gender, race or religion, an organization and constant meeting of professional theologians from different locations, e.g., First World/Third World; black, white, brown races; different faiths or denominations; and varied gender affiliations or linguistic and ethnic groupings, might be helpful to collectively unmask biases and prejudices one harbors. 

When engaging in mutual critique, those coming from other social locations, gender, race or belief can easily see the loopholes in the other’s perspective. 

What I mentioned above are ideal structural forms to counter the first level bias in theological knowledge production. Let me ask some hard questions to people in the academia. For the above intercultural, interreligious or interlinguistic encounters to be effective, our organizations and conferences need to be places of critical interaction, not merely a meeting of “like-minded people” or mutual admiration societies, politely citing each other’s works or scratching each other’s back in the process of scouting for connections for future research projects. 

How will this mutual critiquing happen when most of our conferences/symposia (at least those that I have attended) become routinary and hurried reading of long texts after another? While sitting on those conference seats, and frustrated that there is no debate, I often wonder why not just send us the texts to read at our convenience? We could have saved on time, money, and energy. 

Furthermore, the more varied the backgrounds of dialogue participants are, the better for reflexive theology. The more open people are to ideas from diverse cultures, different ways of presentation, varied argumentation beyond the Western academic forms, the better for theological dialogue. But such an ideal also needs logistics which may not be easy to come by. 

One venue for this exchange of ideas from different social locations is the refereed journals. But access to these journals is so prohibitive that only rich universities can afford their subscriptions. I am not even talking about people’s access to publication. In the Two-Thirds World context, how can you justify subscribing to one journal for a thousand dollars a year when we could not even afford to pay our professors a meager honorarium? 

2. Biases from being in the theological field

A second and deeper kind of bias in scientific knowledge comes from the theologians’ membership in the theological field itself. We share jargons, taken-for-granted assumptions, ways of argumentation that professionals from other disciplines, no matter how erudite, will never understand. Not that these are bad; they are necessary to elaborate our disciplinary discourse. 

But it also engenders biases that need to be critiqued by other disciplines. In other words, the theologians’ specialized studies and the hair-splitting distinctions in this field — on which someone can dedicate even one’s whole life defending — appear incomprehensible and irrelevant to the non-initiated or so-called “lay people” and those who belong to other fields like engineering, medicine, mathematics, and so on. 

In this level, interdisciplinary exchanges encourage the surfacing of these prejudices, thus leading to more inclusive knowledge production. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary cooperation in research and theory formation with disciplines other than theology can help the development of theological knowledge itself. Theology can employ its professional resources to critique the workings of politics; or economics can lay bare the illusions of the aesthetic field. Just as it does this to others, theology should also welcome criticism of other disciplines. Theology will never be self-sufficient to understand reality as John Milbank would like us to believe. 

What repercussions has this assertion for theological reflexivity? First, this means that theology needs to let go of its self-proclaimed position of having the “last word” vis-à-vis other disciplinary specializations. From the medieval times, it has historically arrogated unto itself the title of the “queen of sciences.” Even as it has its role to critique other fields and their assumptions, it also needs to learn that it is just one voice among many other voices. All disciplines, therefore, need “to open themselves from their conventional rigidities and boundaries and break their chains of scientific and disciplinary illusions.” 

Second, the sub-disciplines in the theological field need to be more intra-disciplinary even within theology itself. We have become so specialized that we do not converse on researches with other departments or we refuse to comment on them. Even as we acknowledge the importance of specialization, it might help us listen to one novelist, Tom Robbins, who said: “To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else.”

3. Biases from belonging to the academe 

The third kind of illusion is the most difficult to deal with: our belongingness to the scientific-academic profession itself. People in this field do precious and necessary jobs. They think of formulas or construct theories but within the special world of skholè (leisure). 

In this situation of leisure, people can discuss and debate about anything in the world without end. And these academic “games” are without direct life and death consequences. This intellectualist or theoreticist bias is most difficult to detect since professionals are always looked up to as providing solutions to the problems confronting the world. 

When a professor is interviewed on television, most often there are shelves of books behind him in order to give authority to his ideas; it gives the impression that what he says is well-researched and scientific. 

A theological reflexive position should take into account this “ethnocentrism of the scientist.” In other words, if we want a reflexive knowledge production process, the world of practice, the rough grounds, should be able to critique the world of scientific production. 

Applying this to theology, reflexivity refers to the position of the theologian in the whole knowledge production process. In order to avoid the illusion of omnipotence or omniscience where the theologian thinks that the “revolution in the order of words” is celebrated as a “revolution in the order of things,” the theologian needs to be confronted by actual situations of suffering people on the ground. 

But no matter how much a theologian, pastor, or community organizer tries to emphatize with the concerns of the farmer, laborer, or fisherfolk, he or she can never approximate any of their experience. 

For years now, we have Vincentian confreres who live with the people near the dumpsite permanently, but their lives will never be the same as those of the dumpsite scavengers and their struggles to get food the next day, look for medicine when the children are sick, or try as much as possible all means so that these children can study and have a good life.

To be personally reflexive about it, at the end of the day, I go home to a safe place, write about my experience in order to give this lecture, teach theology, with nary a worry about my food or shelter. The world of science is not the same as the world of praxis. 

A reflexive theologian thus refuses to say the last word; that privilege is to be given to the people on the rough grounds whose voices he or she can only try to fully appropriate but could not. 

Or, better still, this “last word” should be given to the Totally Other, the Word, whose message the theologian tries so much to discern. This means a double immersion, that is, in the lives of grassroots communities and in the world of the Spirit. The theological stance is always to listen, to check if one’s voice is faithful to theirs or to God, and be silent in front of such a great mystery, in short, to be reflexive. 

On this theme of reflexivity, I remember here Saint Thomas Aquinas who, on 6th of December 1273, “hung up his instruments of writing in the Third Part of the Summa.” After producing volumes, he told Friar Reginald: “Reginald, I cannot because all that I have written seems like straw to me.” – Rappler.com

Father Daniel Franklin Pilario is the seventh president and third alumnus president of Adamson University in Manila. Born in Hagdan, Oslob, Cebu, Pilario belongs to the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) in the Philippines.