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2007 / 2
Introduction
Marie-Theres Wacker and Elaine M. Wainwright
It is not easy to define the subject-matter of this issue. A basic reason for this is that the readers of Concilium belong to different language areas. The Romance languages use two distinct terms for something that is much the same in English and German. On the one hand, the German word `Land' refers to a national territory or can even be used as a synonym for `State' or `nation' (just think of the words `Deutschland' and `England'). On the other hand, it is also used in the less precise sense of a territory or region, and then `Land' has the connotation of coming from or belonging to that area (as with `Vaterland' [literally fatherland]; `Heimatland' [one's own country, one's native land, the place one comes from, although here `land' already begins to part company with `Land']). Then `Land' matches the Romance `pays', `paese', and `país'. But the German word `Land' also denotes `land' in the sense of `earth', when the meanings and shades of meaning become legion. For instance, `Land' can be the counterpart of 'Wasser', as in English `earth and water' (for `land and water' wouldn't work in modern English). But `Land' can also mean `arable land' or `fertile land' or `fertile soil'. In this range of meaning, `Land' is a synonym for `die Erde', meaning `earth', and `Erde' in German is also `the Earth', and therefore not only `soil' or `ground' but our world, the populated planet that moves in orbit round the Sun. Then `Land' corresponds to the Romance `terre', `tierra', and `terra'.
The foregoing suffices to show that our world is subject to many different conflicts in which `land' is an essential concern. For instance, we will think immediately of the appropriation by force of national territories by other States in order to gain geographically strategic advantages, such as access to the sea, or to exploit specific mineral or other underground resources of the area to be occupied. Then there are territorial boundaries drawn by colonial powers even though they contradicted ancient traditions, and which there-fore persist as permanent sources of disputes for indigenous populations that define their relationship to the land in their own way. We will also recall the `ethnic cleansings' carried out by dominant groups of people who refuse [8] to tolerate `foreigners', `outsiders' or `aliens' on their territory. There are also the many ecological problems and conflicts all over our world that are not restrained by the borders of nation States, and in respect of which it has not as yet proved possible to devise any effective and far-reaching means of conflict resolution that can bypass the interests of those nation States.
Conflicts in which forms of religious legitimization are involved are especially disruptive. From a Christian viewpoint, we should recall the history of colonization, initiated by powerful Christian European nations that divided the world into spheres of domination, denied the indigenous populations their common-law rights, and dispossessed or enslaved them. In the process, in some territories, such as South Africa, biblical promises of land and accounts of land appropriation were particularly invoked in order to legitimize the behaviour of these incomers. In the present-day conflict in the Middle East, the central problem is the land known to the Bible as the land of Canaan and promised to the people of Israel; the land, in which the United Nations established the State of Israel after the Holocaust; and the land where the Palestinian people strive to achieve recognition as a State. The topic of the `land' is also of special concern to Christians precisely because of this conflict in the `Holy Land', where religious and secular-political, national, and transnational interests are so interwoven that it is scarcely possible to disentangle them.
The theme of the `land' marks out a broad field of potential conflicts, but also, often interwoven with it, a no less broad and many-layered area of potential visions and utopias. The concept of `utopia' itself has connotations of space and locality, and it is frequently adumbrated in terms of spatial imagery. Paradise, the `Garden of Eden', is certainly the best-known example of this, and one that is not at all confined to the Bible. The Bible, of course, at least in the Hebrew writings, pays a great deal of attention to the topic of the `land'. The Pentateuch alone already contains several different notions of land. The most important of these are the Deuteronomic concept, which views life in the land as dependent on Israel's loyalty to the Torah, the conception of the priestly writings that sees God as the one, true proprietor of the land, who has given it to his people as, so to speak, on loan; the concept evident in the older ancestral narratives of a pragmatic existence alongside one another of tribes of different peoples; and the understanding of the `land' offered in the first creation narrative as embracing the whole earth made by God. In this respect, accounts of conflicts and the eruption of utopian ideas often appear side by side.
As a theological topic, the theme of the land would seem to have been [9] addressed to date exclusively in two contexts: in the socio-ethical setting of discussion about property, which also includes land; and in the framework of ecologico-theological questions. This, however, is far from exhausting - perhaps even appropriately outlining the scope of - this complex, multi-facetted subject. What are the initial theological questions that emerge when an actual conflict about land, or even a utopian image of it, is proposed as the point of departure? What do political or legal and spiritual or theological aspects of the subject have in common? This issue of Concilium provides some stimuli for reflection on all this. It is also intended to encourage further investigation of these and similar problems.
I. Land conflicts: three case-studies
The contributions to this issue begin with three case-studies, each of which deals with the core problems of an as yet unresolved conflict about land.
Oskar Wermter, a Jesuit who has lived and worked for almost forty years in Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia), outlines the history of this African country since the start of British colonization, and does so in terms of different land concepts and policies. Initially, the introduction of European ideas of land ownership on the basis of disposable private property, accompanied by the provision of homelands for the indigenous population (that is, by a division of land in accordance with racist criteria), had an incisive effect on the local situation. At first Christian missionaries accepted this status quo, which they thought guaranteed the protection of the African population. After World War II, this system was increasingly called in question by the educated class of indigenous people, since it ensured that the inhabitants of the homelands remained systematically dependent on an economy and population policy controlled by the white population. Since the 1960s, Catholic bishops had spoken about the need for comprehensive land reform. Even the liberation struggle from 1972 onwards was not least of all a struggle to obtain common-law rights of land ownership. In the 1980s the Catholic bishops called for the principles of a land reform that would not merely benefit the new, now indigenous ruling elite, but would be based on social and ecological criteria. Whether the present policy of nationalization of land ownership contributes to the establishment of any such principles is questionable.
The cultural anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet gives an account of the Aboriginal Canadian Dene Tha people of north-west Canada and their ceaseless struggle for rights to land in their traditional territory. A short historical survey shows clearly the considerable degree of subjection of the [10] indigenous population to the political and economic interests of the European Christian settlers from the start. They did not find the Canadian Constitution's grant of equal status to all indigenous inhabitants of the country sufficiently far-reaching, since it implied the simultaneous loss of some contractually regulated privileges, such as the right to hunt freely or the exchange of goods across the boundaries of provinces and countries. Moreover, road-building changes the migration of wild animals, and industrial sites cause ecological damage to ground and water. The tracts of countryside where plants and animals significant in indigenous culture grow and live constitute an especially sensitive area of contention. In many cases, contemporary court judgements in Canada have been passed in favour of Aboriginal Canadian traditions. The outcome of the current dispute about the construction of a big, highly-profitable pipeline through Dene Tha territory is an open matter.
Zimbabwe and Canada are examples of unresolved consequences of the colonization of regions that can be matched by structurally analogous instances in countless places throughout the world. The theologian and historian Heiko Overmeyer cites the example of the Russian Orthodox Church to illustrate the fact that `land disputes' are far from limited to secular territories or States, but can arise within the Church. In 2002, when the Vatican raised the status of the existing apostolic administrative areas in the territory of the Russian Federation to that of dioceses, the Moscow Patriarchate protested fiercely about this infringement of its `canonical territory', where (it claimed) it would be improper for other Churches to engage in missionary activity. The analysis of the conflict shows that we are faced here with a complex of several unresolved problems: the ecclesiological question of the relationship between the Roman-Latin Church and the Orthodox Churches; that of the local value of religious freedom in the Orthodox Churches in the former Soviet Union, which has to do with the question of the relation of the Churches to the modern world; and, last but not least, the question of how exactly a `local Church' is associated with a specific territory, and possibly, beyond that, with specific national frontiers or ethnic boundaries. This very question refers us to the broad historical area of confrontation between Church and State, together with specific associated territorial implications that we cannot enter into in this issue of the journal. [11]
II. Conflicts over the Holy Land
Conflict over the Holy Land is a particular centre of gravity in its own right, to which we devote four articles.
Jean Bosco Tchapé is an exegete from Cameroon who outlines the theology of the land of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Torah, which has become a crucial model for many other biblical texts and traditions. The land is God's gift to Israel, God's chosen people. The nations that lived here before Israel were culpably displeasing to God and therefore lost their land. Their fate is a warning for Israel, whose existence in the land is governed by the instructions of the Torah, and whose continuing presence in the land is associated with loyalty to God's Torah. Tchapé closes his contribution with a quotation from the Easter zoo(' homily of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, in which both sides, the Israeli as well as his own, the Palestinian, are asked to let God's love take effect. In fact the quotation in question reflects what is probably one of the few authentic ways in which the Bible can be seen to be openly relevant to the present Middle East conflict. Here, in the context of divine worship, a Christian addresses his community, which recognizes Scripture as the Word of God. On this occasion, too, a Christian is speaking from Jerusalem, itself affected by local problems. Tchapé's article implies that it would be an evident short-circuit if, opposed to this, one were to apply anything like the message of Deuteronomy directly to the policy of the State of Israel, as if it were not a modern parliamentary State, but a `divine State' that took the Bible as its Constitution. There is an interplay of micropolitical and macropolitical, economic, military-strategical and specifically religious levels of reference in the present conflict in the Middle East. Thorough fundamental analyses and systematic initiatives are required on many levels in this connection.
Hannah Liron, a literary scholar who lives in Israel and in Switzerland, investigates the topic of the `land' — between utopia and reality — from a Jewish viewpoint. The Bible tells us of a problematical relationship between a demanding God and an overburdened humankind, in which the land is treated as a security for behaviour that is pleasing unto God, whereas in the Jewish Diaspora it has become a utopian image, and also, since the time of the messianic prophet Sabbatai Zwi, a challenge to answer the needs of the present. Various interests came together in the Zionist movement: the independence of a national State; cultural autonomy; and, not least of all, protection from multiple forms of anti-Semitism. Beyond (or behind) that, Hannah Liron suggests, lie utopian concepts of a just and free society that [12] exceed human dimensions but have contributed nevertheless to a real living model in the form of the kibbutz. The State of Israel, which after the Six Days' War was still seen as the `land of our forefathers' become reality, is now faced with the decision either of defending this territory as an occupying power, or of remaining a Jewish State and to that end surrendering part of the sovereignty already achieved. Hannah Liron suggests that the utopian dream should be subordinated to reality, and, as a symbolic image of that proposal, invokes Amos Oz's description of Ashdod, a small town on the Mediterranean-a town on a human scale.
Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem and one of the best-known contemporary Palestinian theologians, reconstructs the history of Palestine since the mid-nineteenth century as the history of the failure of two national movements, which are also increasingly determined by religious-fundamentalist interests. He portrays the Zionist movement as supported early on by Britain as a great power, entering Palestine as a colonizing power in its own right, and succeeding in becoming a State in 1948. The Arab movement was defined initially in contradistinction to the rule of the Young Turks, and soon came to conceive of itself over against the Zionist movement. Raheb maintains that the founding of the State of Israel led to many hundred of thousands of refugees on the Palestinian-Arab side, and that a specifically Palestinian identity came into existence only after the Six Days' War, with the rise at the same time of new Jewish national-religious movements. In the meantime heavily religious-fundamentalist characteristics became determining influences on the Palestinian movement, too. But, according to Raheb, western Christian theologians are also subject to fundamentalist simplifications, when they jump the space of thirty centuries, identify the Israel of the Bible with the Jewish people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and refer to the land of Palestine as if the Palestinian people were not there. His summary account of a Palestinian-Christian re-reading of the whole Bible as a book of elucidation of the significance of `land' reinforces criticism of nationalist or exclusivist ideas of identity and acts as a plea for crossing boundaries.
Matthias Morgenstern, who teaches Jewish studies in Tubingen, introduces us to the world of Israeli literature and theatre, with special reference to the association of the land theme as a motif of Jewish identity with aspects of gender. Jewish tradition contains many ascriptions of female, or more exactly maternal, features to the land. The interpretation of life in the Jewish Diaspora as `feminization' is related to the thorough polarization, especially in modern times, of male energy and female passivity, and similar dualisms. [13] Accordingly, it is possible to interpret the Zionist return to the land as a return to Mother Nature (the mother). The Jerusalem author Abraham B. Yehoshua connects this theme — combining Zionist and psychoanalytical insights — with detachment from the `God the Father figure' who has disputed with his `sons' in the Diaspora about the `mother'. For him Jewish identity is possible only in the State of Israel. A quite different picture comes from the author Shulamit Lapid in the shape of her play The Stepmother, which transfers the biblical figures of Abraham and Sarah to the present day (the twentieth century). Lapid raises Sarah to the status of protagonist and in her reveals an alternative to the male domination of the land that also makes talk of the biblical `motherland' inappropriate to nationalist aspirations.
III. Land utopias
Where are we to find forms of association with, and of access to, the `land', that represent not only alternatives to its exploitation, subjection, and domination, but a good life for all those who relate to it, and contemplate it? Three articles are devoted to this prospect, which, however utopian it may be, demands to become reality.
Ilaitia Tuwere, a theologian from Fiji, uses the topoi of `land' and `garden' to give an insight into the thinking and feelings shaping the experience of the Oceanic cultural complex. Land, in the sense here of a womb, implies a perception of one's own relation to the land not as `ownership' or `possession' but as deep attachment. This gives rise to a strong impulse to assume responsibility for this land. A garden is not merely a useful piece of ground or a place of recreation, but, in panentheistic mode, the location — indeed, the body — of the divinity who bestows fertility upon it. This god is represented as androgynous, and therefore evokes the notion of the relationship between male and female. Tuwere suggests that this kind of holistic under-standing of (the) `land' might be taken up as an epistemological and ethical challenge — with regard, moreover, to actual politico-economic and ecological problems on a local as well as a global scale.
The Swiss Dominican Christoph Gempp, who has lived and worked for more than a decade with the Q'eqchi', descendants of the Mayas in Guatemala, also starts from the actual situation he has experienced `on the ground'. The independence movement in the first half of the nineteenth century and the `liberal' reform of 1871 represented the end of the common-law ownership of land by the Indios. The military dictatorships of the [14] twentieth century either frustrated any attempts at agrarian reform or simply failed to put it on the agenda. Indios have managed to obtain title-deeds for pieces of land made out by the courts only since the end of the civil war in 1997. Christoph Gempp sets this struggle of the Q'egchi' Indios for land in an explanatory context that seeks to unite Christian theological suasions, Mayan spirituality and critical political analyses. He shows that on two occasions in their history the Q'egchi' have experienced an `exodus' from conditions of life amounting to enslavement, and that this `exodus' enabled them to obtain their own land and a modicum of self-determination: for the first time, after the collapse of the Mayan cities; and, for the second time, quite recently, when the government allowed them to turn an area of primeval forest into arable land. During the first `exodus experience' they also had recourse to those aspects of Mayan spirituality that see the earth as mother. The recent experience was connected with the temptations offered by the neo-liberal economic system. The association of indigenous spirituality and Christian theology made it possible to develop a means of pacific resistance in the context of small-scale alternative agricultural projects.
The Brazilian Augustinian canoness and theologian Ivone Gebara recalls a demonstration by peasant women on International Women's Day 2006. The women entered the laboratories of a multinational cellulose company in order to remove genetically-manipulated eucalyptus cuttings. Ivone Gebara sees this demo as a form of `exodus from disorder': from, that is, a disorder manufactured by transnational economic structures, which only a few people will profit from. The women's `action' was a form of abandonment or transgression motivated by love of another order: of one that is of benefit to everyday life. In it we can discern the outlines of an alternative understanding of sin and redemption: one steeped in experience, sensitive to injustice, and evident in the forceful activities of women inspired by the vision of a just earth.
IV. Theological perspectives
Although no strict demarcation-line between utopia and theology is apparent in the contributions of Ilaitia Tuwere, Christoph Gempp and Ivone Gebara, theological considerations constantly emerge in Parts I and II, and theological viewpoints are much more emphatic in the last four articles.
One of the biblical land traditions that contemporary Christian theologians find most problematical is the account of the acquisition of the land [15] in the Book of Joshua. Although scripture scholars and archaeologists agree that this is not a report of historical events, the text narrating the successive acquisition of the land of Canaan and the eradication of its inhabitants remains a document that has often been used in the history of Christianity to legitimize the subjection of other peoples and the appropriation of their land. The Australian exegete Norman Habel tries to respond to the challenge of finding a hermeneutical way into this biblical text that takes it seriously yet exposes to critical treatment its potential for justifying the use of force. In the context of his work on `biblical land ideologies' he has already treated the Joshua narrative as one of several different land theologies, and has therefore shown its relative position within a biblical setting. In the present article he has chosen to approach the text from the viewpoints of various possible readings that so to speak shatter the dominant understanding of the scriptural text. For the most part, Joshua 1-12 has been interpreted from the viewpoint of those who take possession of the land. Then the text is represented as a charter of divine legitimation of acquisition of the land by force. But Joshua 1-12 can also be read from the viewpoint of the Canaanite inhabitants of the acquired land. They will have seen what happened as cruel and devoid of any legal basis. In this perspective, the figures of Rahab and Caleb become important, for they enable us to hear the voice of the Canaanites. The third viewpoint is that of the land itself, to which it lends a voice, as it were. Norman Habel finds the bases of these approaches not only in the biblical texts but in contemporary authors at the intersection point of the ecology debate and post-colonial discourse.
The Brazilian Benedictine Marcelo Barros has also received recognition for a book on the subject. His Teologia da terra (Theology of the earth), written with Jose Luis Caravias, was published in 1988. This book offers an overview of the `land question' of the Latin American continent, describes Indio and African-American approaches to a spirituality of the land/earth, provides a summary account of the theme throughout the whole Bible, indicates the relevance of selected phases of church history, and suggests the principles of a pastoral theology oriented to the land/earth. In his article, Barros refers to modern, including the most recent, developments in Latin America, and in particular the growing political significance of indigenous movements. He sees these as a major driving force among the movements for `another world' that are beginning to emerge all over the globe, and that come together for instance in international social forums, but are themselves essentially impelled by ecological motives or indigenous traditions of respect for the earth on and by which they live. Barros draws attention to an interesting [16] tendency: motives of social-revolutionary, and specifically Christian and Indio or African-American origin, key in with one another in the indigenous movements, whereas a preliminary reaction in the Churches has been the initiation of critical political analyses. Moreover, a recently-published document by more than a hundred bishops of different Brazilian churches and communities now also adduces the indigenous notion of the land as a `womb', in order to combat the idea of the earth as a mere reservoir of raw materials or even as a capital resource.
Neil Darragh shows that the inevitable contextuality of all theologies extends to the influence of places of origin and landscapes, just as perceptions of land and landscape are cultural constructs. His article is a treatment of the land- and earth-related topoi of homeland/locality, paradise and landscape, which are particularly relevant for a theologian who acknowledges himself as a descendant not of the indigenous people of New Zealand but of the white immigrants to the country. New Zealand is their obvious home-land, yet at the same time they are aware of their ancestors' immigration and are also increasingly prepared to examine critically their to some extent problematical relation to the indigenous population. The original British immigrants extolled the `paradisiacal' aspect of New Zealand, which is now in danger of succumbing to fatal distortions of paradise. One of the challenges facing New Zealand is vast indeed: that of protecting its landscape along sound ecological lines. With these observations, which unite a contextually aware `theology of place and space' with historical evidence, Darragh interweaves theological suasions with regard to sin, responsibility and a redefinition of the relationship of God and humankind in respect of the creation.
Finally, Ulrich Engel, a Dominican and a fundamental theologian, also attempts a definitive examination of the subject by analyzing the basic suppositions of modern national States. He starts from the situation of the increasing numbers of migrants and refugees across the world who cross national boundaries in order to lead a better life or merely to ensure their bare existence. In fact, their sheer existence subverts the principle of the national State, established on the threefold basis of birth, territory, and State. This is doubly true of `illegals', or clandestine migrants and refugees. Ulrich Engel relies on a notion of the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has defined the detention centre where refugees are imprisoned to exclude them from society as the place, or rather the `non-place', where the State `shows its true face'. If theologians are to take these non-places of society as a starting-point, they should do so along the lines of [17] a negative political theology that does not close up the empty space in the structure of power, but recalls the Messiah's empty chair or, as the case may be, devises an explanation of cross and resurrection that, paradoxically, cuts across both the `normal' and the `exceptional' states of things.
We wish to thank the following for their helpful suggestions: Erik Borgman, Nijmegen; Thomas Bremer, Münster; Arndt Bunker, Münster; Ulrich Engel, Berlin; Edward Farrugia, Rome; Norman Habel, Adelaide; Diego Irarrazaval, Santiago de Chile; Othmar John, Bonn; Maureen Junker-Kenny, Dublin; Solange Lefebvre, Montreal; Eloi Messi Metogo, Yaounde; Alberto Melloni, Reggio Emilia; Marco Moerschbacher, Aachen; Norbert Reck, Munich; and Carlos Luiz Susin, Porto Alegre.
Translated by J. G. Cumming
