This article poses two central questions: why and how does Christian Love matter as radical critique of neoliberal multiculturalism? We strongly argue that contemporary reappraisal of love as theo-political virtue produces more refreshing hermeneutics of love out of which political theology can engage multicultural problems in both critical and constructive ways.
To pursue this agenda, we proceed with three interrelated undertakings. First, exposing and discussing essentialism that lurks beneath neoliberal multiculturalism project and the extent to which Christianity has been complicit in the project. Second, exploring possibility of Christian love as a radical critique of neoliberal multiculturalism building upon current development and debate in political theology relating to biblical interpretation. Third, briefly proposing the urgency of such critique in two strategic fronts of contemporary politics: creation of democratic agency and building cross-identity alliance for justice and equality.
Introduction
Global phenomenon of ‘religious fundamentalism’ and inter-religious conflicts today poses new challenges to Christianity. It confronts religious community in twofold front, first how to engage effectively with the situation and second, how to read the Bible in the lights of contemporary problems.
This twofold challenge becomes more demanding considering the fact that Christianity, in either direct or indirect ways, has been taking part or implicated in such events. Community of believers assigned with the task and to locate its response within the intricate relation between religion and political-economic forces.
It also means to rethink our self-actualization and reclamation as both community of faith and citizens of nation-state and global world. Such conflicts reflect the tension of being faithful to religious commandments and being part of broader multicultural world. Among other ways, the tension opens new space for rethinking, acting out and reflecting our presence with others in this changing world.
This is not an easy task. We live in interconnected world where multiple forces play their varying degree of influence on religion. One of the central discourses is multiculturalism as global governance of cultural difference. It is not a free-value discourse, but, as increasingly apparent, multiculturalism has laden with political orientation and implication that serves the interests of certain power structure.
As any other discourses, it effects how religion make sense of state-society relation, multicultural encounter, and what role it should play to make the world more peaceful, cohesive, and prosperous in compliance with secularist prescriptions. It even goes further in identifying and classifying which religion is compatible, or incompatible, with democracy, human rights and contemporary political order.
If we look more closely, the integration of religion, better say subjugation, into the discourse unveils power-relation, that is, strategies, tactics and mechanisms to reshape theological pedagogy and religious subject-agency. In short, multiculturalism has invested its stake, and currently more deeply rooted, in the construction of political theology.
Precisely at this critical juncture, Christianity should first of all ask reflective questions on its relation with multiculturalism, what we coin as neoliberal discourse. It may appear at surface that this globalist project flourishes from grand narrative of modernity and latest phase of Enlightenment. It is also perceived as having great relevance in responding to the ongoing tension between nationality and transnationality for multicultural citizenship formation. Equally important is its effort at celebrating and promoting cultural difference and dialogue in public sphere of a nation-state where religion is deeply affected.
However, looking at tolerance, its ultimate technology of power, this promotion-protection of cultural difference serves twofold objective of neoliberalism. First objective is to depoliticize religion as it is confined into cultural talk, and second objective is to render unlikely the formation of religious subjects capable of exercising political theology in their public engagement as citizens. Behind this culturalization of religion and incapacitation of critical citizenship stands out its central concern to emphasize religion’s particularizing tendency instead of its universalizing possibility and make it incapable of doing politics and launching radical critique against contemporary hegemony of neoliberalism.
It should also be noted that critical reading of religion-multiculturalism nexus turns out to be more demanding as we take two contrasting narratives of theological response to neoliberalism. First response is what is called ‘religious fundamentalism’. This is not only privilege of Islam, but also Christianity throughout its history, a tendency to religious purification and withdrawal from productive conversation with the other and the broader world. This particularizing tendency comes out of supremacist narrative that his or her religion is ultimate truth holder while others are lacking of direct access to the Truth. This situation more than often results in deadlock of interreligious interaction and degenerate society into social tension and collective violence.
While at the same time, we are witnessing the rise of theological praxis emanating from different strands of political theology. Starting from Liberation Theology to the most update Insurrectionist Theology, hermeneutics of the Bible has been undertaken within certain social, political and economic context of power structure (Sugirtharajah 2004:175-257). The Bible are increasingly taken as ideological source of doing politics, not only in terms of being members of religious community but also as citizens of multicultural public or nation-state.
Against this backdrop, we identify problems of neoliberal multiculturalism and pose our central question on why and how Christian primacy of love is rendered hermeneutically capable as radical critique of neoliberal multiculturalism. Love is the leading narrative of Christianity. It perceives God as God of love, and Christian community is equally conceived of as community of love.
But what is love in the Bible? How best should we reinterpret biblical text in coping with multiculturalism? As concept as well as practice, Christian notion of love changes throughout history of Christianity since its rise in the first century up to the present.
Our hermeneutical stance is that the text cannot speak for itself, and the act of interpretation is situated within the tradition of textual and practical interpretation collecting and transmitting from the past, and our reinterpretation as response to the contemporariness of human condition. It is worth arguing that multiculturalism, into which religion is deeply implicated, urges us to contest multiculturalist interpretation of love, its objectives and its far-reaching effects on the Christian subjectivity and practical engagement with cultural difference.
In political theology, our reappraisal of love is not new intervention. Current strands in political theologies have undertaken hermeneutics of love for multiple purposes. Among other purposes are love in relation to inter-personal love or romantic love, in relation to family, community and the nation. All these purposes are centered on the two fundamental biblical instruction, that is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt. 22:37-39). ‘Love God’ and ‘love the neighbor’ are treated as the Christian law of love as it followed by stronger claims that upon those commandments “depend all the law and the prophets” (22:40). As we make clearer in third session, our novel intervention to the discussion of Christian love stands out precisely at the intersection between radicality of Christian notion of love and deradicalization of such notion in multiculturalist’s narrative of tolerance.
What strikingly missing in current multiculturalist preoccupation with Christian love is the insurrectional, universalizing politics of love to go beyond ethnicity, race and religion. Christian love is then perceived of as charity at best and regulating principle of sexual relationship at worst. Such block-out from within multiculturalism has rendered unchecked the ongoing exploitation of ‘faith’ as microcosm of Christian engagement with the other in multicultural world.
Faith then looks more like commodity, getting locked in its particularity, and exposable in inter-religious dialogue under certain rule of neoliberal ordering of society and its relation with the state. This multiculturalist preoccupation comes not from outside religious practice and theology but deeply interweaving in variety of Christian community’s engagement with other religious community, culture, and particularly their engagement with public matters as citizens.
General overview of the problems and challenges has been presented in this first session. Our main argument is that re-invocation of insurrectionist-universalizing nature of Christian love needs to be taken for its radicality, or radical exposure to reimagine and construct new subjectivity and praxis of building multicultural unity beyond multiculturalist politics of essentialism.
Second session lays out problems of contemporary multiculturalism relating to its production of religious subjectivity, sensibility and praxis of religious engagement. As grand narrative of post-Cold War neoliberalism, multiculturalism takes culture particularly religion seriously as the only source and site of post-ideological conflicts. Religion is conceived of as both peace and conflict contributor to political-economic ordering of neoliberal world. Guided by the unfounding myth of ‘clash of civilization’, tolerance as multiculturalist technology of rule and discipline operates to the extent that relation between religion and politics is debated and then reoriented to produce anti-politics theology and anti-politics subjectivity.
Third session discusses possibility of Christian love as radical critique of multiculturalist project. It starts with hermeneutics of love in Christian tradition and its specific treatment in variety of political theologies. It encourages us to bring love which is insurrectionist and universalizing capable of being put into one united front with continental philosophy and political theories in coping with problems of multiculturalism.
In this third session it lays out relevance and urgency of this reappraisal in two strategic fronts, namely, creation of democratic agency and building cross-identity alliance for justice and equality. Christian love is capable of launching radical politics, politics of undoing multiculturalism and getting religion back to its place in both deepening and expanding democratic fusion of multicultural horizons. Call of Christian love, or politicization of Agape, is one among other sources at our hand to undertake new epistemology of doing politics based upon logic of cultural equivalence instead of multicultural difference.
(Seminary Chapel, Pius XII Kisol, Flores)
Multiculturalism: Spectacle of Religious Essentialism
For most religious scholars and experts in religious studies, multiculturalism seems to be taken for granted as good in itself or even perceived as narrative coming out of religious texts. We hardly find any academic resistance to this meta-narrative. The absence of critical investigation on this critical issue stems from at least two directions.
First, multiculturalism celebrates cultural difference by recognizing religious identity and this is something to be welcomed considering religious experience of exclusion and subjugation in public sphere. Second, introduction of this discourse into society works through state, or propagated by secularist government, as national narrative of living together among multicultural communities. Such absence, however, reveals in the first place the depth of its penetration into our dialectics of understanding and explaining our religious experience and in relating ourselves to other religious communities.
In stark contrast, scholars in post-structuralist and post-colonial studies in particular, have taken multiculturalism seriously as one of the latest manifestation of neoliberalism. This approach centered on one of the central feature of multiculturalism, namely, the rise of identity politics. Identity politics has been emerged in Europe and United States in the late 1960s, characterizing Middle East since 1980s and post-communist Eastern Europe since 1990s. In most of Asian countries the rise of identity politics takes place after the downfall of authoritarian regimes since the late 1990s and early 2000s.
All these relate in general to democratization of state-society relations within which citizenship and its liberty become increasingly important. For post-structuralist and postcolonial studies, this historical emergence is not natural progress in historical teleology as imagined by post-ideological scholars (see Fukuyama, 1992; also Huntington, 1996). Most of them argues that this historical trend needs to be understood as integral to democratic crisis, changing nature of late capitalism, and neoliberal arrangement of population in the service of global political economy. In short, identity politics is actually manifestation of in-depth neoliberalism.
Another central argument among the poststructuralists is that politics of identity rises in the service of new global empire. Antonio Negri (2000:22-41), for instance, argues that contemporary production and reproduction of cultural identity aims at localizing social conflict into multicultural terrain. It is part of its strategy to create new narrative of social reality and political subjectivity with total submission to the functioning of privatization, deregulation and the so-called free trade. Preoccupied with this narrative, people are drawn to think of their entrenched poverty and insecurity stemming from their own culture and religion.
Neoliberal order is taken as natural, as uncontested regime of truth, while culture and religion in particular are increasingly perceived as threat to this ‘natural’ order. This trend reflects modernist legacy of Cold War Developmentalism that culture and religion should be internally reformed and adjusted to neoliberal prescription. It suggests that religion should take the path of Weberian Protestanism capable of stimulating economic productivity for European capitalism only after it carried out fundamental break from medieval Catholicism.
Naturalization of neoliberalism and securitization of culture are made operational by the employment of Tolerance as technology of rule and discipline. Wendy Brown (2006:25-47 ), for instance, argues that neoliberal tolerance promotes multicultural difference and recognition of cultural identity in order to exercise its full-blown surveillance. Instead of investing in culture for social transformation, it actually prioritizes ‘majority’ culture, either secularist or ethnic-religious, as ideological proxy to regulate and control possible uprisings in multicultural society. It turns out to be political discourse concerned with enactment of certain social, cultural, legal norms over vast variety of cultures and religions, and rendered possible state’s repressive, sometimes violent, intervention to those claimed to be transgressing the frontiers.
In all these trends it is clearer that identity is reproduced as subject of tolerance. Underlying objective is both to essentialize and to depoliticize cultural identity, or in other words, to produce and to manage them. It gives illusion of being recognized and exercising cultural autonomy while simultaneously keeps them under surveillance and discursive adjustment. We can trace multi-front of its ideological investment.
There are policy areas where this investment takes place effectively such as state’s policy on multicultural education from elementary school up to university curriculum, and state’s policy on multicultural dialogue promotion. Another policy area is state’s policy on managing and resolving inter-religious conflicts. Narrative of neoliberal multiculturalism becomes hegemonic in the sense that we hardly find alternative or resistance to this regime of tolerance. Its moral-ethical imperative has been so prevalent and similar in academic literature, educational curriculum, religious teaching and state’s policy.
Neoliberal investment in culture and religion has dramatic consequence for our subjectivity, sensibility and political praxis. With the celebration of identity as unchanging essence, our hermeneutics of self and other is getting locked within our own cultural and religious tradition. Space of negotiation in our conversation with other religious tradition and biblical texts steadily disappear from our hermeneutical horizon of understanding and explaining the world. Despite offering us with sense of cultural supremacy, this particularizing propensity blocks possibility of democratic exercise of demos, a political unity building on multicultural exchange.
Chantal Mouffe (2000:129-39), for instance, argues that neoliberal politics of recognition gets cultural diversity in antagonistic relation to each other within friend/enemy articulation. It is matter of time to witness such relation degenerate into violent exclusion and collective violence. She then proposes what she calls ‘agonistic pluralism’, new ethics of recognizing the impossibility to have full identity out of which we need other in the constitution of our own identity.
From different critical perspective, Slavoc Zizek (2008: 9-38) asserts grand narrative of neoliberal tolerance creates our religious subjectivity and sensibility out of constant fear of the other. We are then made more concerned with ‘subjective violence’ taking place between inter-religious communities than concerned with ‘objective violence’, which is neoliberal multiculturalism, that makes us prone in the first place to rights-claims, religious supremacy, and exclusion of the other.
Consequence of this objective violence results in subjective violence: escalation of violent tension between Christian ultra-nationalists and migrant Moslem radicalism in Europe, revival of white supremacist in United State, protracted war between Sunni and Shia political communities in Syria and Yemen, and in many parts of the world with varying degree of intensity including in Indonesia today. These events are relatively global reflecting similar pattern, symptoms of diversity deadlock within the hegemony of neoliberal multiculturalism.
Toward this spectacle of religious essentialism, we are enabled to take up hermeneutical suspicion of neoliberal multiculturalism. Following the difference between modern and postmodern consciousness offered by David Tracy (1987:82-114), neoliberal multiculturalism promotes centering of the subject, its identity, as prime text without ambiguity and plurality of its histories. Using Tracy’s analytical gesture, this project perpetuates modern consciousness that treats identity not as postmodern intertextuality in construction of identity. It follows then that neoliberal subjectivity, moral sensibility and political praxis are not grounded in conversation as productive moment experiencing radical otherness within ourselves and radical alterity of the other to itself.
The absence of conversation based upon radical ambiguity makes quite impossible for religious communities to raise new hope and multi-front resistance against neoliberal multiculturalism. Instead of proposing space for authentic conversation, neoliberal tolerance provides regulatory-legal space where both religious-fundamentalist and religious-secularist reading are contested merely to offer reasonable answers to the question posed by this narrative.
It has been apparent that within this hegemonic discourse religion experiences two conflicting orientations in its political theology. Its tendency to be integral part of the discourse always confronts within itself tendency to resist the discourse. Paul Ricoeur (1986:1-18) explicates this tension as contraction between ideological and utopian polarity in political theology within multiculturalist rule. These two tendencies share negative consequence in identity construction of religious community. Equipped with rhetoric of certainty and supremacy, both religious trends have respective pathology for identity construction.
Pathology of ideological trend is its dissimulation in that individual or community perceives current condition as legitimate in so far as their religious identity is recognized and dominant. While pathology of utopian trend is its escape from present reality by dreaming new world of religious experience completely detached from present encounter. Our unquestioned preoccupation with religious tradition produces integrative fundamentalism, subject of total submission to the complicity of religion in multiculturalism, while simultaneously our groundless desire to flee from this world encourages the rise of reactive fundamentalism, suicidal subject of breaking the existing religious tradition with no clear project of living together in the future. They are mirroring each other, as two faces of neoliberalized religion.
Exploration above poses critical question of what kind of religious responsibility neoliberal-Christian theology offers to cultural diversity? Once deeply complicit with tolerance project Christianity turns out to be institution of power with moral authority at the center of its theological praxis. Religious response to cultural diversity and suffering of the other is limited to moral instructions. Religious community assumes the task no longer resulting from ethical experience of multicultural conversation. Even moralization of responsibility goes deeper in our hermeneutical preoccupation with tradition, liturgy, sanctity, revelation, and prophecy.
Our limited capacity to respond is fundamentally shaped by neoliberal norms that qualify certain life or identity as fully liveable life or partially life, less worthy of attention (Judith Butler, 2009:2-12). Such norms shape our epistemological capacity to apprehend what is life, what is tolerable, within which identity of the other has been put into such moral register. In most cases of violence, religious sentiment is exploited and mobilized to grieve victims among the community similar to us without taking reflective question of why and how such violence has been committed.
This prototype of neoliberal responsibility can easily be detected in the religious-humanist narrative of charity as supreme acts of benevolence instead of human empowerment and social-economic transformation. Another manifest example is globalist-Christian plea for humanitarian intervention in protracted wars, exploiting women and children as commodity of care while not honestly acknowledging its own complicity, as Christian West, in triggering, escalating and perpetuating the conflicts.
Latest event of Aleppo liberation in Syria bears witness to dissimulation of neoliberal tolerance in which perpetrator and provocateur of war turn to be angel calling for international demonizing of other parties to the conflict in time of losing the geopolitical game. It is in daily life that we are witnessing how religious responsibility to human sufferings regardless of their identity are so deeply passive and intact, and it waits for the primetime news and government’s signals of emergency to awake us from our collective ignorance.
Christian Love: A Radical Critique
Presentation in previous session leads us to discuss possibility of Christian preoccupation with love as radical critique to neoliberal multiculturalism. The question is to what extent Christian love is distinguishable from neoliberal politics of care, that is, tolerance. To put in more elaborative way: On what hermeneutical-philosophical ground can we reinvigorate love as radical politics of care that recognizes ambiguity while simultaneously embraces possibility of togetherness, of being one; love that unites while lets the parts stand out in their otherness.
If we take up more practical ways, the question reformulated as follows: which act constitutes the act of love. It is clear here that our critical engagement with Christian love persists in intersection with the notion of care and responsibility in the grand narrative of neoliberal multiculturalism.
Love in Christianity has been a fundamental metaphor. Through centuries of doctrinal change and theological dispute, this word remains in its central place as ultimate signifier of Christianity. Its meaning and spectrum of its applicability relatively change at least in four great moments in the historicity of Christianity: Early Christianity, Medieval-Scholasticism, Reformation, and Modern Christianity. As elaborated adequately by Carter Linberg (2008:1-18), there are four distinct elements that give different weight to love: Greek, roman, medieval and modern (enlightenment and post-enlightenment).
Greek contribution is explicit in variety of words such as ‘storge’, ‘epithymia’, ‘philia,’ ‘eros,’ and ‘agape’. However, since medieval to the present, relatively complete meaning of love refers to Agape, to expressing God the absolute and redemptive. Agape then conveys God’s love shown in divine project of human salvation in the person of Jesus Christ. While Eros remains central as to indicate human love, which not only erotic, but also faithful to each other. Up to now, Eros-Agape binary has been debated and started to be perceived as mutually enacting particularly in moral theology of marriage.
Centrality of love in Christianity has its biblical source and theological justification. Love is the greatest among two other principal metaphor, namely, faith and hope. Love should be directed both to God and the other or neighbor. It is explicit in (Mt. 22:37-39), “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with your entire mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. This twofold direction of love constitutes what is called the law of love and consequently its interpretation. So one cannot love God without loving his or her neighbor because the measurement of love is through deeds and not only by believing (Jas 2: 14–26). It is also found in the parable of last judgment taught that those called to the Kingdom would be those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, give clothes to those without, visits the sick and imprisoned (Mt 25: 31–46).
Moreover, there is something hermeneutically more fundamental in the relation between 3 theo-political virtues: love, faith, hope. Alan Jacobs in Hermeneutics of Love (2001:33) argues that love commandment requires faith and hope to be complete act of love. Act of love applies faith in the first place. To love our neighbor who are strange but in need of care means we should trust, not only to the neighbor, but trust to our act of reaching out to him or her. So we have to be faithful to our act because only through such act both we and the neighbor are getting connected. But of course this is a risky affair, full of unpleasant welcome or utilitarian exchange.
In our reinterpretation, the point is the acting out of love does constitute our relation with other with all its ambiguity that opens new moment of identity formation and subjectivities. This is also another way to inform biblical statement on ultimate power of faith in the act of love as illustrated in the parable of the mustard seed (Mt13:31–32) or in statement that we can remove the impossibility with a piece of faith in our heart. Alan Jacob compares this act of love with the act reading. He writes that in reading Bible:
“We must be prepared to subject what we read, those who write what we read, and ourselves as readers to the authority of that righteousness. As interpreters of texts, then, we should “test the spirits” (1 John 4: 1) present in what we read; but such testing will be nothing more or less than sin if we do not simultaneously offer up our own spirits to be tested, both by the works we read and by the righteousness of God that is our proper rule and standard” (p 33)
It is interesting to see how current philosophical encounter with love has turned this notion of love into political signifier, as poetics of politics. Alain Badiou (2012: 53-76) makes clear that “In love, it is about two people being able to handle difference and make it creative. In politics, it is about finding out whether a number of people, a mass of people, can create equality”. He then argues that politics of the future should be politics of love, as resurrection, as faithfulness to decision, decision as an act of love.
It suggests that such kind of love, which is Christian in nature, is capable of innovation where risk and adventure must be reinvented against safety and comfort. Another scholar, Vincent Lloyd (2001:187, argues that biblical reading on texts of love must end up in recognizing the urgency of what he calls Politics of the Middle: a politics that stands not in both giving and receiving end of the act. It means that love is an action that connects both sides into a joint experience. Let us quote his eloquent words on Christian love:
“its significance comes from its efficacy at opening the middle through effacing itself. The two is fecund because it self-destructs: the purported unities of lover and beloved are inflated until they pop, leaving practices performed by each, practices in conflict, and, out of that conflict, from the invisible, come new practices performed together”. (p.29)
Christian scene of salvation is a spectacle of love. The ultimate performer in this drama of love is Jesus Christ himself, Son of God. Hermeneutic of Christian love would be out of biblical context if not bring the man from Nazareth into central stage. In their effort at rescuing Christianity from liberalist and fundamentalist reading, a number of continental philosophers-theologians redevelop what they call materialist-eventual theology.
Slavoc Zizek (2010:75-99; see also Blanton 2016:1-20), the leading proponent, argues that New Testament actually portrays Jesus as the truth-event of love, and shown by not only God-becoming-human, but more radically his betrayal of God in the garden before cruxification (Father, why you forsaken me?). This is the moment when he turns completely human, in complete ambiguity and then takes the task of human salvation to fulfill the task. Jesus in his treatment becomes a model or exemplar: “what defines the subject is his or her fidelity to the Event; the subject comes after the Event and persists in discerning its traces within his or her situation”(p76). The notion of fidelity to the event means being faithful to the act of love one is now taking. So love then is understood as ‘patient struggle for this faith to happen, that is, the long and arduous work to assert one’s fidelity to the Event’ (p82).
In political theologies, Christian is mostly centered on care of the other which is excluded. The ‘poor’ and the ‘sick’ are taken as metaphorical-practical figure for both human misery and divine grace. Central message is that to love is to do justice. Instructions to care and take side with this figure are significantly abundant in Old Testament and New Testament.
Prophet Isaiah states clearly, ‘to open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison, and those who live in darkness from the dungeon’ (Is 42: 7), or ‘to soothe the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, release those in prison, to proclaim a year of favor from Yahweh’ (Is 61:2). The Israelites are instructed not to ‘cheat the poor…of their rights’, ‘oppress the alien’ (Exod 23: 6, 9) or exploit the weak or ill-treat the poor (Amos 4:1). Other references are ‘justice was to be administered impartially (Lev19:15), or proper care had to be taken of ‘the foreigner, the orphan and the widow’ (Deut 14: 29).
In New Testament, most of the Jesus’s teaching focuses on care for this figure as manifestation of our love to God, which is Love itself. Jesus announces at the very beginning of his mission that he is appointed by God ‘to bring the good news to the afflicted…to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord’ (Lk4: 18). He mentions explicitly that his true disciples are those who carry out God’s commandments (Mt 7: 21).The most celebrated reference is parable of the last judgment stating that only those who feeding the hungry, offering drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, giving clothes to those without, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, are welcomed by God in heaven (Mt 25: 31–46).
It is in response to this call for care and justice, political theologies since Liberation Theology launch their analysis and critics of political-economic structure sustaining and perpetuating economic poverty, political discrimination and social inequality. By taking justice into their agenda, Christian love has gained broader social and political engagement with the other regardless of their ethnicity, race, and religion.
Building on the legacy of Liberation Theology, post liberation theologies works with three principles: a break with non-liberation orientation, locus of the theology is the poor and direct reference to the Word and the Bible (Sigmund Paul, 1990:14-17; see also Rowland, 2007)). Nowadays theology of love becomes more contextual and power-sensitive, exercising in multi-front of issue, actors, networks and power structure (Hornsby-Smith, 2006: 321-342). As argued by Sugitrahajah (2004:175-275), political theologies also have their postcolonial turn with vernacular approach as manifest in Black Theology, Feminist Theology, Dalits Theology and many others. From different direction, we are also witnessing the dynamics of theological strands built primarily upon continental hermeneutics-philosophy encounter, or what is called Postmodern Theology, such as post-liberal theology, post-metaphysical theology, deconstructive theology, reconstructive theology, and radical orthodoxy.
Overall preoccupation with love in Christian political theologies as presented above reveals constant struggle to rescue Christianity from its complicity with multiculturalism discourse. Either deepening or expanding our understanding of love relates directly to the questions of self-identity and identity of the other. Rehabilitation of Christian love as universalizing metaphor has been in permanent tension with liberalist and fundamentalist reading with their strong essentialising-particularizing tendency.
We strongly argue that love, as poetics of politics, does not presuppose essential identity before undertaking the act of love but let freely the act as eventuality of our being with ourselves and being with other at the same moment. This acting-out of love is process and space of creation for unity with the other. With this in mind, hermeneutics of love is simultaneously hermeneutics of the text within the productive tension between tradition and freedom that conditions fusion of horizons. This love is radical insofar as it refuses to stay intact and refuses to get lost in the faithless act as well. It is through acting-out of love, we and the other identify ambiguity and plurality of our becoming human.
Conclusion: Poetics of Love for Democracy
Christian engagement with the other belongs to biblical narrative which completely different from tolerance that nested in neoliberal multiculturalism. The first is always a hermeneutical act while the latter mirrors the historical legacy of foudationalist epistemology. We cannot combine both into one package of mutual understanding for only hermeneutics, the act of understanding and explanation, equipped with ethics that seeks to embrace the otherness and alterity of both our identity and others. In sharp contrast, multiculturalism dictates tolerance to give human face to the other while hides its true face of Leviathan. In Christian love, face — identity— is not there in the first place, but takes shape retroactively in the acting-out of love.
Such differentiation indicates that Christian poetics of love provides hermeneutical moment out of which democratic subjectivities and sensibilities are likely to emerge. Likewise, in Radical Democracy tradition (Laclau, 2007:47-66), democratic subject is understood as political agency who is able to undertake hegemonic politics which gets together with multiple others in search for creation of unity—demos. This agency must have hermeneutical awareness about contingency of his or her own self-identity and its plurality of its socio-historical and cultural identification with others.
This is due to the fact that radicality of democracy, like radicality of love in its poetics, does not presuppose self-identity and other’s identity outside collective identification as guiding principle of its politics. If it takes otherwise, struggle for building inter-cultural alliance are deemed to fail. Radicality of democracy also conveys its permanent tension between struggle for liberty and equality, and between individual quest for autonomy and collective call for wellbeing. It is precisely this tension that makes politics productive, keeps totalitarian tendency under check, and the multicultural conversation continues.
There has been a variety of non-Christian resistances to neoliberal multiculturalism. It should be an integrated effort to undo this ideological tentacle into which poetics of Christian love can join in our interconnected world. In doing so, it requires inter-religious conversation that broadens its spectrum to capture human sufferings and aspiration as our collective problems and challenges. In this way such conversation differs from celebration of cultural difference that has proven to take identity narcissism into the level of commodity fetishism. When religion has turned into commodity-like entity, we are witnessing a spectacle of hatred and war, mutual destruction of ourselves and other, a disenchantment of the world.
(Frans Djalong. Political Theology-Radical Democracy Project. 2018)
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