Allan Boesak (1979:20) holds that the Bible testifies to the liberation of the oppressed people that began with God‟s liberative act in the Hebrew Scriptures and found fulfilment in Jesus the Christ in the New Testament. In this sense, Boesak understands the God of the Bible to be the God of liberation rather than oppression; a God of justice rather than injustice; a God of freedom and humanity rather than enslavement and subservience; a God of love, righteousness and community rather than hatred, self-interest and exploitation. Elisabeth Fiorenza (1981:100) says to truly understand the Bible is to read it through the eyes of the oppressed, since the God who speaks in the Bible is the God of the oppressed. This explains why the real concern of liberation theology is commitment to the context. It is for this reason that West (2006:400-4) calls this kind of biblical interpretation “Contextual Bible study.”
Here, we have a good example of scholarly study of scripture not done as “art for art‟s sake,”
but it is undertaken because of the recognition that the Bible has something essential to say to a critical human situation. Fiorenza, cited by West (2001:169), maintains that this particular critical human situation is the context of the poor and marginalized. Therefore, the use of the notion „contextual‟ in West‟s „Contextual Bible Study‟ signifies commitment to a particular context, the context of the poor, the working class and the marginalized (West, 2006:401).
Fiorenza (1981:100) is more outright. She says for a correct interpretation of the Bible, it is necessary to acknowledge the “hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed” and to develop a hermeneutics “from below.” In this way, a commitment to the experience of the poor and marginalized becomes a crucial area for theological reflection and of course the fulcrum of liberation theology (West, 2001:170).
The thesis places much emphasis on the context of oppressed because we cannot measure the people‟s well-being through the eyes of the elite but of those who suffer and struggle in life.
West (2014:3) cites Gustavo Gutierrez who says, liberation theology has chosen „nonpersons‟
as its chief interlocutors, „the poor, the exploited classes, the marginalized races, all the despised cultures.‟ Thus, the epistemological privilege of the poor is the central concept of liberation hermeneutics (West, 2014:3). Fiorenza (1981:92) strongly believes that the poor and marginalized in question are women. She says not only do women and children represent the majority of the „oppressed,‟ but poor and Third World women suffer the triple oppression of sexism, racism and classism. She then urges liberation theologians that if they make the
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„option for the oppressed‟ the key to their theological endeavors, then they must become conscious of the fact that „the oppressed‟ are women. I strongly agree with her because majority of the poor and hungry in the world are women and children dependent on women.2 Her stance helps us understand who the poor and marginalized are in Habakkuk and Malawi contexts.
A focus on the context of the poor and marginalized takes us back to the understanding that Contextual Biblical Study can also be referred to as liberation theology. It needs to be pointed out here that Contextual Biblical Study is a form of liberation hermeneutics that emerged in South Africa in 1980s. In presenting the background to this model, West (2014:2) says the South-African apartheid state, with its overt theological foundation, demonised liberation theology and relentlessly detained anyone associated with such forms of theology. Hence, the term „contextual theology‟ was coined to subvert the apartheid state‟s efforts to rid all those who were pro liberation (West, 2014:2). Contextual theology thus became „an umbrella term embracing a variety of particular or situational theologies that is able to mutate and appear in a different form in each new context it finds itself in (Speckman & Kaufmann, 2001:xi). This suggests that for the liberation theologians the pursuit of understanding of God comes in the midst of practice, which means that theology is inevitably contextual and conditioned by the environment and activity in which theologians are themselves engaged (Rowland, 1995:171).
Therefore, liberation theology, as said by Christopher Rowland (1995:170), seeks to persuade churches and communities at large of the priority of the responsibility to the poor and needy.
For liberationists, the Bible is considered as a weapon in the struggle of liberation. Because liberation, a theme that permeates large portions of the Bible, constitutes one of the central semantic axes of such a reading, the reading that we do “from our location” of oppressed and forgotten peoples leads us to rediscover the socio-historical horizon that produced the text (Croatto, 1995:220). Put it in contrary terms, analysis of the socio-political conditions out of which a biblical text emerges leads us to a message that is in accord with that demanded by our own situation (Croatto, 1995:220). Such an interpretation within the context of a critical situation, theology of liberation offers a message that has as its aim emancipatory effects on the poor and marginalized (Fiorenza, 1981:109). As we shall see shortly, the two sub-
2 It needs to be pointed out that “Persons with Disabilities” are included in the context of the oppressed, the poor, the hungry and the marginalized.
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theoretical frameworks have been employed in this study because they provide a critical perspective on liberation hermeneutics (West, 2014:3).
2.2.1 Liberation Biblical Hermeneutics
Liberation biblical hermeneutics developed based on this biblical witness that maintains that God condemns oppression, stands with the oppressed and liberates (Nyirimana, 2010:25). As a liberating God, says Nyirimana (2010:26), Yahweh delivered the Hebrews from socio- political oppression in Egypt and the Exodus narrative provides grounds for hermeneutics of political liberation. Jorge Pixley (2010:131) points out that liberation criticism begins with hermeneutical insight that biblical interpretation is always affected by the experience and social location of the reader. He further says liberation criticism is grounded in the experience of oppression, which necessarily affects the reading of the Bible suggesting that the political and social structure of any context will always influence the meaning of the text. It is important to note that a central hermeneutical principle of liberation criticism is that the biblical message, particularly the Gospel preached by Jesus Christ, is meant to be relevant to life in this world, which means that it is a call to struggle for the liberation of the oppressed (Pixley, 2010:131).
Pixley (2010:131) points out that the manner of the struggle and its strategy must be a subject of discussion in the church where social analysis is placed alongside the study of the Bible.
This is where the real dialogue between the Bible and the reader‟s context takes place. Some examples of oppression that require liberation include political and economic oppression, oppression against women, and racial oppression. Ukpong (2001:23) says in contextual Bible study, the Bible is read against a specific concrete human situation, which in this study is political and economic oppression. In this way, liberation hermeneutics in general uses the Bible as a resource for struggle against oppression of any kind based on the biblical witness that God does not sanction oppression, but always stands on the side of the oppressed to liberate them (Ukpong, 2001:19).
Nyirimana (2010:26) is clear that God‟s instructions to Israel and Jesus‟ attitude and teaching in favour of the poor provide the basis for the hermeneutics of economic liberation. When life becomes intolerable because of an oppressive force, the lordship of Jesus Christ, who said that the Gospel He preached was for the poor, becomes a liberating message (Pixley,
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2010:131). The task of liberation biblical hermeneutics in this study, therefore, is to situate the book of Habakkuk in its literary and socio-historical context, then allow it to dialogue with the Malawi socio-economic and political situation out of its ancient context. This task will be carried out bearing in mind that the agenda of liberation theology in this study goes beyond the condemnation of political oppression and economic exploitation to include a commitment to the transformation of the society (Nyirimana, 2010:26).
2.2.2 Postcolonial Biblical Criticism
Gale Yee (2010:205) observes that while liberation biblical criticism focuses on economic and class differentials, postcolonial biblical criticism focuses on power relations and disparities between empire and colony, between centre and periphery. She says:
Under the pretext of bringing “civilization” to their colonies, Western imperial nations rationalized their brutal conquest and predatory extraction of their colonies‟ natural and human resources. It is the conflicted unequal relations between colonizer and colonized that are the focus of postcolonial studies as an academic endeavor (Yee, 2010:193).
As mentioned earlier, postcolonial biblical criticism is a meeting point of biblical studies and
postcolonial studies (Moore & Segovia, 2005:2). Postcolonial studies emerge from the reality of the actual lived experiences of particular forms of colonialism or imperialism (West, 2008:152). Postcolonial biblical criticism is, therefore, a terrain that focuses on three areas:
(1) issues surrounding the political, cultural and economic colonial setting that produced the text, (2) presentation of both biblical and modern empires and their impact and (3) focuses on the freedom of subjected nations (Sugirtharajah, 2012:2-3). In short, it situates the Bible in a larger global context: the geopolitical relationship between centre and periphery, the imperial and the colonial, whether in antiquity or modernity or postmodernity (Yee, 2010:208).
Postcolonial biblical criticism is devoted to analyzing an ancient biblical text in light of a social, economic, cultural and political context that has been shaped by imperialism. The primary aim of postcolonial biblical criticism is to situate empire and imperial concerns at the center of the Bible and biblical studies (Sugirtharajah, 2012:46). Sugirtharajah (2012:47-9) suggests three tasks required if postcolonial biblical criticism is to achieve its goals, which include: first, is to retrieve side-lined, silenced, written-out and often maligned biblical figures and biblical incidents and restore their dignity and authenticity; second, is to unearth the imaginative ways in which those once colonized had formulated their response to the
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empire and how they resisted some of the missionary hermeneutical impositions; third, is to recover the hermeneutical works of the missionaries and European administrators who were part of the colonizing process but ambivalent about the purpose and the logic of the empire.
This process is necessary considering that postcolonial theory is ideologically committed to the retrieval of marginalized discourses or resistances, and to ensuring that political independence of the former colonies is succeeded by economic and cultural liberation (England, 2004:90). We observe that postcolonialism has been able to intervene in the area of biblical translation and repair some of the cultural and theological damage done in that process (Sugirtharajah, 2012:50). Here, we need to understand that postcolonialism is not a discourse of historical accusations, but a committed search and struggle for decolonization and liberation of the oppressed (Dube, 1997:14).3 Robert Young (2001:4) maintains that postcolonial studies are directed toward the active transformation of the present out of the control of the past. In agreement, Jeremy Punt (2003:61) says postcolonial study concerns itself with social formation and analysis as well as cultural production by striving to rewrite history; the study imagines reflective modality which allows for a critical rethinking of historical disparities and cultural inequalities which were established by colonialism.
Sugirtharajah (2003:41) explains this in clear language, when he said: “Postcolonialism is not simply a physical expulsion of imperial power. Nor is it simply recounting the evils of the empire, and drawing a contrast with the nobility and virtues of natives and their cultures.
Rather, it is an active confrontation with the dominant system of thought, its lop-sidedness and inadequacies, and underlines its unsuitability for us.” In referring to liberation theology, Kalilombe (1991:408) quotes the Ecumenical Association for Third World Theologians who rejected as irrelevant an academic type of theology that is divorced from action. The logic behind this line of thought is that postcolonial biblical criticism should not be satisfied with simply exposing imperial tendencies in canonical texts and deconstructing them, but should go further to construct interpretations which have decolonizing effects in the contemporary world (Sugirtharajah, 2006:67).
3 Before postcolonial biblical criticism appeared, Musa Dube read the Bible as a Western book and considered biblical Christian believers as referring to white Western believers while “pagans” refers to all non-Christian Africans. The Western imperial readers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrote themselves into the text and characterized non-Christians as their pagan counterparts in order to validate the latter’s subjugation (see Dube, 1997:11-12).
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Gale Yee (2010:206) observes that the stories of the Hebrew Bible narrate Israel enduring the different structures of imperial control in the course of its history, each with its particular brand of oppressive rule under imperial powers such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and (for the New Testament) Rome. She goes on to point out that their socioeconomic and cultural domination of Israel makes it an excellent subject for postcolonial scrutiny. On the other hand, we notice that Western economic and political expansion heavily involved a religious and cultural colonialism, in which the Bible was a major component in the evangelization of Asia, Africa and the Americas, in many ways legitimizing the suffering and destruction of indigenous peoples (Yee, 2010:206-7). Therefore, the purpose of this study is not just about “understanding” but challenging the Malawian context. The task today is not territorial liberation but freedom from the control of the neo-colonial market (Sugirtharajah, 2012:134). Malawi realized her political independence in 1964, what is required now is to achieve a just measure of economic independence and non-exploitative global relationships.