Issuu

The Neighbour in Need Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. Martin Luther KING, Jr.

An old ecumenical adage says that ‘doctrine divides, service unites’. Although doctrinal dialogue is indispensable for the long-term growth of Christian unity, often it is the Christian praxis that constitutes the most convincing witness for the world. The social dimension of Christianity is the focus of the the current issue of Mozaik. Concrete experiences, case studies, meditations, reflections on Christian thinkers; all these contributions have their origin in the basic Christian concern for this world. The concern for the neighbour and for a just economic structure of society are the core motifs of this issue. Several of the articles appearing in this issue are directly linked to the Solidarity Conference of WSCF Europe ‘I was a stranger and you invited me in’: Homelessness and Poverty Housing in Europe Today, which took place in May 2006 in Cluj, Romania. The conference concentrated on the situation of homeless people in different societies, as well as on theological perspectives and policies on refugees. Mozaik follows the same line enriching the theme with historical and local case studies dealing with modern poverty and economic (in-)justice, first-hand experiences of

WSCF Activities – Calendar for 2007 the authors, as well as with the liturgical perspective. This time we present to the reader articles written by authors from Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. They cover an array of issues and we hope that the reader will be able to find among them approaches to modern poverty that will inspire him or her to an engaged Christian response to this challenge of our times. The readers are cordially invited to send comments, feedback, questions and further ideas to our e-mail address wscfmozaik@yahoo.co.uk or to contact directly the authors, whose e-mail addresses are included in their mini-bios. The atmosphere of Mozaik is always coshaped by a young artist, whose artwork accompanies the reader throughout the journal. This time we introduce to you the Finnish photographer Ville PIRTTILAHTI, whose photographs are little allegories of the (frequently unsuccessful) attempt of the human to make the world better. Simultaneously we remain grateful to Anna-Kaisa MIINALAINEN for her help in selecting and processing the photographs. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my coeditors Rebecca BLOCKSOME and Thorsten NILGES for their excellent work. I really appreciated their commitment to the editorship during this exceptionally hot summer and I enjoyed the spirit of our co-operation very much. Ut omnes unum sint.

MOZAIK

2005/2

World Student Christian Federation

3-10 October 2006

Europe Region

WSCF Europe Thematic Conference: “Religion and Society – Partners or Competitors?” Copenhagen, Denmark 26-29 January 2006 1-8 July 2006

11-15 January Nordic Winter Meeting 2007

“Can’t Hurt with Love – Domestic Violence inMeeting the Lives of Young European Regional Committee Adults”

Malta Velskola, Finland

9-13 February 20062007 8-11 February

CESR Summer Seminar : “Brave New World: Searching for Security in the 21st Century” Salzburg, Austria

June to September 2006 Lingua Franca Language and Leadership Training Courses

Various locations in Central and Eastern Europe WSCF ExCo Meeting Meeting: “Amazing Meetings between Nordic Winter Porto Alegre, Brazil the Religions” 1-8 August 2006 9-13 February 2006 WSCF Inter-regional event: Empire Sweden

Pre-assembly Youth Event of the World Council of Churches General Assembly

Nairobi, Kenya

Porto Alegre, Brazil

ESG (German SCM) in cooperation with WSCF Europe: International Student Meeting: “Let’s Talk About Freedom!”

22-26 February 2007 Porto Alegre, Brazil

July 2006 Agape Theological Camp CESR Winter Seminar : “Leadership and DecisionAgape Ecumenical Centre, Prali, Italy 14-23 February 2006 making in Democratic Communities” “God, in Your Grace, Transform the World”— 9th General Assembly of 20-26 August 2006 Sopron, the WCC Hungary

4-11 March 2007

Berlin, Germany 22-26 March 2006 WSCF Europe Thematic Conference: “Family – CESR Winter Seminar: “‘May Their Voices Never Be Silenced’: The August 2006 Expectations and60Exceptions” Spirit of Central Europe Years After Shoah” Agape Political Camp Lublin, Poland Strasbourg, France

Agape Ecumenical Centre, Prali, Italy

7-10 April 2006

19-22 April 2007 Consultation on Religion and Society Staff Meeting Denmark Edinburgh, Scotland 3-9 May 2006

3-10 October 2006 WSCF Europe Thematic Conference: “Religion and Society – Partners or Competitors?” Copenhagen, Denmark

WSCF Europe thematic Conference 23-28 2007 “‘I Was aMay Stranger and You Invited Me In’: Poverty Housing and WSCF Europe Thematic a annual theme of WSCF global for 2006 is Homelessness in Europe Today” Conference: “If I Were The Cluj, Romania Migrant …” Youth Perspective on Migration and Empire.

Integration of Young Migrants into Society Rome, Italy

Calling 6-10 June 2007

All Senior Friends!

Too old to come to conferences, young enough to want to keep in touch with Ecumenical Church Daysbut - Kirchentag the dynamic student ecumenical movement? Become part of our newly estabKöln, Germany lished Senior Friend network!

We September are currently collecting names, addresses and minibiographies of people who 4-9 2007 have been active in WSCF Europe throughout the years; our goal is to create a

The database Third of European experienced people who share our vision and are committed to our Ecumenical Assembly work. (EEA3): “The Light of Christ As a senior friend, you’ll receive the WSCF Europe e-newsletter updating you on Shines our activities, as well as the most recent goings-on of WSCF at the global level. YouUs might also be called upon to share your wisdom as a lecturer or resource Upon All” person at one of our conferences. And, you’ll be put in contact with other senior Sibiu, Romania friends from across Europe, with whom you might even dream up some activities specifically for the post-graduation generation.

16-21 October 2007

You will also have the opportunity to subscribe to Mozaik, our fine ecumenical

WSCF Europe journal, which Thematic aims to reflect the wide variety of opinions and viewpoints Conference: “Religion present among the different Student Christian – Source of Peace or Movements (SCMs) in dialogue. A two-year subscription (4 issues) costs 15 euros. Violence?” So, if you’re interested in getting involved, please contact Ingjerd Helene Jøssang, Paris, France ExCo member and SF network coordinator, at ingjerdhj@gmail.com. We look forward to updating our acquaintance with you!

21-23 October 2007

European Regional Assembly Paris, France

Békés Gellért

Ecumenical Insitute (Pannonhalma, Hungary) Established in 2001 by Archabbot V ÁRSZEGI Asztrik OSB, this Benedictine Institute is a place to pray and work for the visible unity of the Church by means of publications, conferences, lectures and workshops. Our young theologians are involved in the ecumenical and interreligious dialogue internationally and in Hungary. If you wish to know more about us, contact NAGYPÁL Szabolcs, BAKOS Gergely OSB and OROVA Csaba:

bgoi@chello.hu

mozaik

The „System” of Modern Poverty

2006/1

Alessia Passarelli

A Place to Call Home When we talk about homeless people, generally we have in mind those who live at the margins of our society, sleeping in the streets of our cities; we usually remember them during the wintertime when the community mobilizes itself, collecting blankets and preparing hot meals to distribute to them. The old lady sitting on the stairs of a church feeding the birds, the man outside the train stations building a refuge with papers—in our imagination those are naïve images we have inherited, which are not inclusive at all of the homeless situation today. There are, indeed, many ways of being homeless, and the one that I have chosen to reflect upon is the phenomenon of global homelessness. Sometimes they leave home in the dark of the night, taking only what they can carry, knowing that because of their politics, religion, race or ethnic community they won’t be safe tomorrow morning or any other morning. In some places they leave in shock and despair, driven away by bombings, wars, or by earthquake or flood. These are people without a home, without a country. These are refugees. Being born and living in a place that automatically is called home is something most of the time we take for granted. We may have changed homes, or sometimes countries, but in the majority of circumstances it is a matter of choice for us, it is an improvement that we make in our lives. Millions of people around the world, however, are forced to leave their homes. They flee to survive, escaping wars, torture, violence and death. Those people become, suddenly, homeless—the global homeless.

HomE AwAY From HomE A refugee or asylum seeker is a homeless person, either in terms of house or often in terms of state. A refugee, to be designated as such, must fit the criteria defined in the Geneva Convention (1951) or into the asylum law of the country of asylum; before that, a person who flees her or his home because of persecution of any kind is an asylum seeker. Refugees have no choice but to leave everything behind them and search for

stability elsewhere. They find themselves uprooted and living in an alien and sometimes hostile environment that, while certainly safer than the one from which they have escaped, cannot in any way be thought of as “home.” The status of refugee is a temporary one; it is a provisional response to an immediate problem which needs to be solved. Ultimately, however, such problems need a “durable solution,” a long-term solution acceptable to the refugees themselves, which takes care of their rights and needs. In other words, “durable solutions” are ways to give opportunity to refugees to rebuild their lives, to create a new home away from their original one. Which durable solutions are we talking about? Voluntary repatriation, local integration and resettlement. Voluntary repatriation to the country of origin occurs when the situation and the factors which forced the refugees to flee and to seek asylum in another country are no longer there, so the refugees can go back home feeling safe and regain their lives. Unfortunately this option is not possible for every refugee; sometimes what they have been through is so deeply rooted in their minds that going back to their country of origin is not an option anymore. One must be aware that being repatriated is not an easy step to undertake, either. When refugees finally are able to go back home, they often return to a country devastated by conflict. Emotions can run high; their absence might be judged as a desertion, and they might still be the target of ethnic rivalries which erupted and caused them to flee in the first place. Local integration happens when refugees are able to put down roots in the country of asylum. As we mentioned above, the situation in the country of origin cannot always be solved in the short run, and the foreseeable future might remain so dim that settling in the country of asylum becomes a better option than repatriation. In some countries, refugees are able to integrate themselves because the host country provides them with access to services and access to the labour market or to land, while in others they

remain confined to camps where they depend on assistance from the international community. This is, for example, true of Kenya, where refugees are stuck in camps more than 15 years in some cases. As for resettlement, among the durable solutions this is the least known and most misunderstood tool of protection, especially in Europe. Resettlement is often confused with repatriation or return, while in reality it is the movement of refugees from the country of first asylum, where for several reasons local integration is not foreseen by the local government, to a third country where they can rebuild their lives. Sometimes when refugees’ lives are at risk, resettlement in a safe country is the only way to protect persecuted or endangered people—for example, they might be denied basic human rights in their country of refuge. Resettlement may also be used for survivors of torture, injured and traumatized refugees who are unable to obtain treatment in their country of refuge. Resettlement is scarcely known in Europe and rarely used as tool of protection—actually only six European countries are resettling refugees from various parts of the world: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. But this is not enough, both in terms of numbers and in terms of commitment by Europe to share responsibility for the world refugee situation. All the durable solutions, all those ways to create a home away from home, have to be seen and understood as whole mechanism of protection for those people who are homeless in the wider concept of the word.

The „System” of Modern Poverty

Europe: Fortress or Refuge for Uprooted People? According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), by the end of 2005 the number of global refugees—those who have been granted asylum—reached an estimated number of 8.4 million persons, the lowest since 1980. The same phenomenon is true for asylum seekers: the figure, which is 668.000 persons, decreased by 2 percent from 2004. Looking at the figures of refugees in Europe, those show that since the beginning of 2005 there was a decrease equal to 15.2 percent. This is not an anomaly, because it was at least the fifth year that there has been a decrease in both refugee and asylum seeker requests. Interestingly enough, the media within European countries seem not to be aware of those figures because they always try to emphasise, often negatively, the arrival of strangers, migrants, aliens and refugees to Europe. Moreover, they create confusion and misunderstanding among those categories of migrants. When we look at the current policy of European Union member states, we can easily see that each country has its own asylum law (or none at all); so far there has not been a common European asylum law, although it is on the agenda of the EU Commission. Although other countries in the world share far greater responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers than European countries do, the perception of an invasion of immigrants, shared by some politicians and by the public alike, is there and it is real. Other widely held misconceptions include the idea that the asylum system is subject to widespread abuse, and that most asylum seekers are not genuinely in need of protection but are really economic migrants in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

Homelessness vs. Uprootedness The Churches are not only aware of the global phenomenon of homelessness, but also Suggested Reading http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/ vtx/protect?id=3d4545984 http://www.ecre.org http://www.ccme.be

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they have developed a global network addressing this important issue. In 1995, the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches unanimously adopted a statement on uprooted people: “People leave their communities for many reasons and are called by different names—refugees, internally displaced, asylum-seekers, migrants. As churches, we lift up all those who are compelled by severe political, economic and social conditions to leave their land and their culture—regardless of the labels they are given by others. Uprooted people are those forced to leave their communities: those who flee because of persecution and war, those who are forcibly displaced because of environmental devastation and those who are compelled to seek sustenance in a city or abroad because they cannot survive at home.” The paradigm of uprootedness was meant to challenge the distinction between refugees and asylum seekers on the one side, and migrants on the other. Refugees and asylum seekers are recognized as those fleeing persecution and deserving of protection and assistance. Migrants, on the other hand, have usually been characterized as persons moving voluntarily, choosing to leave, in order to obtain better economic opportunities. The WCC document highlights the importance of considering the effects of globalisation and recognizing that, however it is defined, globalisation is reshaping the world economy and the relations among states, regions and people. War, civil conflict, human rights violations, colonial domination, and persecution for political, religious, ethnic or social reasons are major causes of forced human displacement today. Taking into consideration what we have just said, it is clear that that the vast majority of people who leave their countries and their homes have little or no choice in this matter.

Home Sweet Home “A place to call home” was the slogan of the campaign launched by UNHCR on the occasion of World Refugee Day 2004 (June 20), to raise awareness of the need to share responsibility for global homelessness towards the uprooted people. It is important to continue to raise awareness of the fact that Alessia Passarelli is a graduate in Cultural and Social Anthropology. Her thesis was based on a two-year-long field research on Romanian Roma people in Rome. She has been the Chairperson of WSCF Europe Region

2006/1

Europe cannot stay behind, it cannot be led by fear of an “invasion” of strangers without considering seriously the numbers, without taking into consideration that the movement of people is only one of the consequences of the world being “globalised.” “Globalisation” means that people flee their countries of origin also because of the politics of industrialized countries. The export of arms to developing countries, the war for oil, and the privatisation of water are causing refugees. As Europeans, what is our role in making refugees and migrants feel at home? Jesus said: “For I was a stranger and you welcomed me in.” Are we a welcoming society? Does Europe offer a home to uprooted people? And if yes, which kind of home? Is it the kind of home where we would like to live ourselves? Saying “home,” we mean being secure, feeling safe, comfortable, cosy. Does Europe offer that? And we, what is our role as Christians and as students? Have we welcomed uprooted people in our country, in our city, in our community, in our SCM, in our life? Having a roof above your head does not automatically transform a place into a home. To feel at home, people have to be integrated in the place where they live, and integration does not only mean living according to the customs of the hosting society. Integration has to be a proactive process from both sides—the receiving society as well as the refugees and migrants themselves. As a matter of fact, we live in multicultural societies which at the moment are far from being inter-cultural or transcultural; each community remains within its ghetto and they rarely have contacts among themselves. Unfortunately uprooted people are often seen as a danger in our communities and in our churches as well; we are afraid of losing our own identity, and for this reason we close the doors of our congregations to strangers, to uprooted people who are not welcome anymore. To stay on the side of the “lasts,” to stay and support uprooted people in re-building their homes materially and psychologically, is not only a matter of charity, but it is also our responsibility as we are part of the causes which forced people to flee. And, besides, as believers we should never forget that Jesus Himself was a refugee.

since September 2006. She is currently working as project assistant for the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe, Brussels. Her e-mail address is alessia_passarelli@hotmail.com.

mozaik

The „System” of Modern Poverty

2006/1

Hanna Kaarina Tervanotko

Poverty Suits Her Well: A Meditation on Modern Poverty, Empire and Christians Mihaela is 30. She lives in a village in the eastern part of Romania, together with her five children and her elderly sick mother. She is a cleaning woman. She wakes up at five in the morning to go to the neighbouring town to work. She cleans hospitals and sometimes private houses. Now and then she has to stay in town until very late in order to finish everything. Then her body gets very tired and aches. Other times she leaves earlier and spends the rest of the day working on a little piece of land, where she cultivates potatoes and carrots for the family’s use. In the evening she returns home to take care of the family. Mihaela earns about 130 EUR each month, and with that money and her mother’s tiny pension she feeds her children whose father has left the family. Sometimes the money is just not enough to cover all the expenses of the family: food, clothes, medicine. Mihaela is very skinny—she weighs only 42 kilos. She dreams about being able to raise her children in dignity and having a decent quality of life. Anna is 34. She lives alone in a beautiful newly renovated flat in London. She holds a master’s degree in international law and speaks four languages. Anna works in a big law firm. In the weekends she flees the city to spend time in the countryside with her parents or flies to some European capital with her friends. Anna has everything one could desire from life: education, money, family, friends, work—but yet she feels empty and lonely and has suicidal tendencies. Anna is also hungry. Usually she does not eat anything during the day, but after work she tortures her body in the gym for hours. Sometimes she is forced to eat in a restaurant with her clients or colleagues. She does not like to and she does everything she can to avoid it. She can spend 150 EUR for a meal that she will throw up afterwards in a bathroom. Anna also weighs 42 kilos, and she wants desperately to get thinner. Both women are hungry and dissatisfied with their lives. One aches for food,

the other for healing to be a complete person. Mihaela’s hunger is concrete and she could be fed, but how can Anna find the food she needs? The two persons are fictitious but the plot could be true. Both Anna and Mihaela are victims of our time—the time that keeps on dividing the world and creating empires. The time that gives to poverty new faces. The empire sets the prices and determines who makes the profits. This system looks down on those who are already in difficulty and makes their lives even more difficult. It creates a fake image that real life exists only in some metropolis: the jobs, education, culture, access to information and the important people. If one is not part of this culture, one is nobody. Falsely the empire also nourishes the image of a modern successful person who is energetic, cosmopolitan, international, highly cultivated, beautiful and thin. Women and men are captivated by the image of beauty that the empire has created. Slimness is beautiful, but only when it is dressed in expensive brands and looks sexy. Being skinny for real hunger is not attractive for anyone.

Suggested Reading Beckford Robert. Find the Power. Reading the Bible. London, 2�� 006. Corbelius Klas, I mammons tid. Visby, 2005. Collins John, The Biblical Vision of the Common Good. Encounters with Biblical Theology. Minneapolis, 2005.

Duchrow Ulrich – Hinkelammert Franz Josef, Property for People, Not for Profit. Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. Geneva, 2004. Gnanadason Aruna, Listen to the Women! Listen to the Earth! Geneva, 2005. Alternative Globalization Addressing People and Earth (AGAPE) http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/jpc/agapenew.pdf

The Christian Response—Resistance It is true that some Biblical passages, for example the Sermon on the Mount, anticipate that ultimate justice will happen only in the life after death. “God blesses those who are persecuted because they live for God, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs. God blesses you when you are mocked and persecuted and lied about because you are my followers. Be happy about it! Be very glad! For a great reward awaits you in heaven. And remember, the ancient prophets were persecuted, too” (Matthew 5:10–12). One should not think that Christians can avoid responsibility for the current state of the world and should not engage with social ethics. Postponing justice to the life everafter cannot offer any solution for the growing injustice

where everyone is part of the system and therefore responsible. The impact of a conscious person remains very superficial unless Christians reflect more on what our task could be in this society in the light of our holy book. What kinds of societies are we encouraged to build? The slogan of the anti-globalisation movement says “Another world is possible,” but what is that “another world” we can envision? The Bible is a book that has influenced the whole western world, but what does it say about social ethics? One Biblical premise is formulated in the message of the Old Testament prophets, who cried for justice and condemned those seeking profit by using those who are less fortunate. This can be found especially in the book of Amos (e.g. chapter 8), but the same message is present also in the book of Isaiah (chapter 5) as well as in various commandments concerning the Sabbath (Exodus 23,12; Deut 5,13–14) and the jubilee year (Deut 24,19–22, 15,4). The prophets, whose task was to deliver the divine messages, did not have a practical resolution on how to eliminate poverty as such. Therefore they concentrated on forwarding the message about how as many people as possible could live a life of dignity. Their answer was the concept of the common good, which should be the interest of everyone. If the focus on profit-making would be shifted to the common good, it would also eventually bring peace to the communities. Short-sighted individualism and self-interested empire building have no ground in the message of the prophets. “I am creating something new. There it is! Do you see it? I have put roads in deserts, streams in thirsty lands” (Isaiah 43,19). I would like to express my gratitude to the Latin American theologian Gabriela Garcia Miranda, who gave me the idea and inspiration for this article.

Hanna K. Tervanotko is a minister of the Lutheran Church of Finland. She studied theology, semitic languages and European studies in Finland and philosophy in Italy. Her main interests are Biblical exegesis, inter-testamental literature and feminist theology. Since 2004 she has been working as the regional secretary of WSCF Europe in Budapest. Her email is regionaloffice@wscf-europe.org.

The „System” of Modern Poverty

mozaik

2006/1

Anna Gerhardt

Emmaus Communities in France: A New Chance for the Poor in a Rich Country The French organisation Emmaus was founded in 1953 by the Roman Catholic priest Henri Grou�� è�� s, also �� known as Abb��é� �� Pierre��. �� Today, it �� is well known �� and respected all over France, and Emmaus International has groups in more than 50 countries around the world. This article aims to explain how Emmaus communities in France function and what a crucial role values play in daily life there.

The Beginnings After World War II, the housing situation in France was bad. The Roman Catholic priest Abb��é� �� Pierre helped homeless families with the construction of dwellings. This was often illegal and he got into conflicts with the administration. He founded the very first Emmaus community when he met a homeless man and invited him into his house. In 1953, Abb��é� Pierre �� founded the association Emmaus. In the winter of 1954, many people suffered from the cold and had to live under bridges due to the lack of decent housing possibilities. One night a woman died on the streets of Paris. She still held in her hands the document which declared her expulsion from her apartment because she could not pay for it anymore. This was a signal for Abb��é� �� Pierre: �� on the radio he asked people to give him blankets to help the people living on the streets of Paris. He said that this action should be an ‘insurrection of goodwill’. Surprisingly, many people donated blankets and other material to help those in need.

Emmaus Communities Today This principle still functions: people can bring almost everything they don’ need or want anymore to the Emmaus community next to them. There, the former homeless people who have joined the community the so-called “companions will check the donations”, eventually repair them and then sell the goods at reasonable prices. Often, poor people can buy equipment such as refrigerators or furniture for less money if they bring some proof that their financial situation is especially difficult. In each of the 115 Emmaus communi-

ties all over France live between 20 and 100 companions. The communities may be very different, for example regarding their wealth. How rich a community is depends often on the region it is settled in and, as a consequence, on the quality of donations and the ability of customers to pay for the goods. Without the companions, there would be no community, but without their boss, it would not function as well. Being the boss of an Emmaus community is not a job for everybody; it needs a lot of enthusiasm and strength. Companions are mostly men who have had and still have a hard life not always easy to handle. Some bosses live in the community; others leave in the evening to go home. I experienced that this generates an important feeling of independence; companions stress the fact that they are not children that need somebody to look after them all day long. The boss and a secretary are paid for their jobs. They manage the community like an enterprise because they are responsible for the financial balance of the community; but on the other hand, they are like social workers who are an important contact for personal problems. A newly arrived person can stay for some days or even find a new home for many years if there is a free place and if she or he is willing to accept some rules that are necessary for life in the community. According to her or his health, the new companion will get some kind of work: cooking for the other companions, driving a truck to collect donations or to deliver goods from the community shop, controlling the quality of the donations, repairing electrical equipment and furniture, or selling in the Emmaus shop. Everybody gets a single room, so there is enough space for privacy. This is crucial because life in a community is not always easy, especially if one lives there due to the lack of better possibilities. An Emmaus community offers stability and thus enough time to reconsider one’s life before eventually starting something new. Some rules have to be respected, e.g. no drinking of alcohol in the commu-

nity. Companions get some money for their work and they are free to decide if they want to spend or to save it. In companion assemblies, important topics of the communitarian life are discussed. The expression companion emphasizes that living in such a community is something special that one can be proud of. It also generates a new sense of belonging: the companions constitute the community and make it run. They have all the same rights and duties; there is no hierarchy among them. Of course, there are “old” and “new” companions, and rivalries between groups or individuals may occur. But nevertheless, I could often experience a special sense of belonging together, especially between companions who have lived a long time in several Emmaus communities and who know each other from these communities or from companions gatherings. This leads sometimes to beautiful and strong friendships, regardless of differences in age, nationality or belief. In our community, there were three good friends: a man in his 50s from Belgium who was an excellent cook and had made several times the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela; a 30-yearold man from Italy; and another 30year-old man from Morocco, a Muslim. This shows that the companions of Emmaus are no homogeneous group: young and old, French and foreigners especially from Eastern Europe or the Maghreb countries meet and live peacefully together. Some of the companions really make the community their new home and take excellent care of their own rooms. This showed me that whatever may go wrong in my own life, I can start a new life by looking for a place in an Emmaus community and just never giving up. Besides the companions and their boss, there are the volunteers. They signify a contact with the outside world. Some come regularly and share some hours of work, a meal and human contact with the companions. In several communities they have international youth summer camps. Communities who take volunteers for a whole year give them the chance to

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learn a lot about the companions and their problems. The fact that a young person shows interest in their way of life and probably organises special activities for the companions brings diversion to their everyday lives.

Why Emmaus? The name of Emmaus communities is very symbolic: in Luke 24,13:35 we can read the story. After Jesus had died, two of his disciples walked to the village of Emmaus in mourning. Jesus met them on the road and walked with them, but they did not recognize him. Arriving at Emmaus in the evening, Jesus pretended to continue his journey, but the two disciples asked him to stay with them. When they had dinner together, he took the bread, thanked

The „System” of Modern Poverty

2006/1 God and broke it they way he used to do and gave it to them. At this moment, their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but Jesus had disappeared. They understood that their Lord had risen from the dead and they were very happy and went back to Jerusalem and told the other disciples what they had seen. This is why the story of Emmaus is so powerful: out of a meeting with an ordinary person, we may learn something new, something that creates new hope and confidence. Without knowing it, they had hosted Jesus. If you do the same, you too may be rewarded: in every person for whom you open the door, you open the door for Jesus. We just have to be open-hearted, openminded, and give them and ourselves a

chance to get to know each other. This simple action, to invite a stranger in, this is what in Emmaus communities is called welcome. “I was a stranger and you invited me in”, says Jesus in Matthew 25. This is exactly what Emmaus communities are about: inviting people in, giving them something to eat and drink, a bed, a shower, medical help, and if they want to, the possibility to stay at the Emmaus community and work there. “Whoever knocks at the door is sure to be let in whatever may be his religion, his origin, his thoughts, his past, his successes or failures”.

Living Emmaus Values One cannot explain how the communities work without explaining Emmaus values: welcome, work, solidar-

The „System” of Modern Poverty

ity (accueil, travail, solidarit�� é��) are �� the founding principles of life in community. Theses abstract values become a reality that everybody can experience and learn to pass on to others. Welcome means: everybody who knocks at the door is welcomed. There are no criteria such as sex, race, religion, age or others. It does not count what you did wrong in the past; you get a new chance if you are willing to adapt to some essential rules that make the life in community possible. So, other companions will never know where you are from if you are not willing to tell them. This makes it much easier to behave without prejudices towards people. I welcomed a man from Vietnam who had problems with his residence permit, so he stayed illegally in France. I got to know him better and he told me something of his former life: growing up in Vietnam, first his father left his mother, then his mother left the boy and he lived on the street with other children. Years later, the young man lived in France and worked as a carpenter until the police got him because he was smuggling drugs. After ten years in prison, he was supposed to return to Vietnam Now, he works as a seller in one of our shops. Not knowing everything about his past helped me to welcome him without prejudices. Working as the person who is responsible for the welcome gave me the opportunity to start relationships with new companions very soon and sometimes I was surprised at how the person changed, once she or he had a shower, something to eat and some sleep. One or several companions have to take care of the newcomers. This is work they do in addition to their normal work, and sometimes means a lot of work such as washing towels and linen, cleaning the guest room, providing them something to eat even if they arrive late at night, and showing them their new surroundings. And, last but not least: to welcome a new arrival means respecting her or him as a human being, supporting her or him, talking to her or him.

Suggested Reading www.emmaus-france.org www.emmaus-international.org

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In communities where the the head of the community leaves in the evening, it is especially the responsibility of the companions to take care of newcomers. This may be difficult, but it gives them responsibility and shows them they are important they don’t only need help, but they also can give support to others, even if they have their own problems and are poor. So, on a cold winter night, somebody called at our community and asked if we could take care of two families from Chechnya who tried to sleep in a municipal park because they could not find any accommodation and other social organisations said they had no place for them. The companions accepted them into their care and started to gather enough blankets to prepare them a place to sleep. Manu, a companion who worked as our cook, knocked at my door and I could give him my pillow and a blanket. This was simple, but at the same time, it was very important. Another aspect of welcome is showing respect to other companions. As respect is a crucial value for people with personal problems and for the functioning of a community life, our boss expected everybody to greet each other in morning. This was a nice and powerful ritual that took time. When somebody refused to greet another companion, this normally meant there was a real problem between them that everybody noticed, and our boss talked with them. Work is very essential in the life of the community. Work unifies the companions: everybody has to do it, expect when she or he is ill or physically not able to work. As Emmaus communities do not get money from the French state or other social organisations, they have to make enough money to survive. This generates a special pride amongst companions but also for the individual: one knows that one works for what one gets from the community. Work is also about learning to have responsibilities. Then it occupies people and they have less time for thinking about sad things in their past. Solidarity is the third value that defines what Emmaus communities are about. Generally spoken, there are

Anna Gerhardt is a German Lutheran who was born in 1984 in Hamburg. Currently she is studying in Łódz˙, Poland, pursuing a B.A. in European Studies. Baptised in 2005 in Chemnitz, she discovered the Christian meaning of

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two types of solidarity: the solidarity within the community, and the solidarity that shares money and experiences with other communities or projects on the local, national or even international level. This is important, and very simple: you are never too poor to share something with others. So, the community I lived and worked in cooperated with an African organisation. Once a year, some companions flew to Africa and worked in a village to improve their access to water. This was a very good experience for them to see how poverty looks in other regions of the world, and to see they can become actors of solidarity towards people who are more in need than they are. The other way around, the African people who came to our community got a more realistic image about Europe: they could see that even in France, there is a lot of poverty.

A Chance for Everybody In spite of the difficult life many companions have, the atmosphere of an Emmaus community may be very friendly and positive. I never laughed as much as I did during my year in France. This is one of the reasons why I have so much respect for the companions: many of them did not give up, but saw the life in an Emmaus community as a new chance instead of complaining about their situation. And even if they seem rather lethargic, you never know what efforts they have to make to get up early every morning and start a new day with a lot of work. All in all, Emmaus communities seem to me a very good place for people who are marginalised in our societies. They give a chance to everybody who knocks at the door but they also require respect for some essential rules and values. They offer a place to calm down, but they also help to start a new life outside in the “real” world. They prove that a communitarian lifestyle is possible at least in small communities. If I were to define the meaning of Emmaus communities in one word, I think I would use the word “hope”.

Emmaus after her one-year stay in the Emmaus community of Montauban in the south-west of France. She is fond of hiking and philosophy, as well as dancing, journalism and social work. Her email is anna_gerhardt@web.de.

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The „System” of Modern Poverty

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John George Huber

A Scenic Experience of Christian Unity: On the Way to the World Council of Churches in Brazil Thirteen ecumenically committed tourists began their journey to South America with me on February 9, 2006. I had recruited these lay people and clergy for this adventure in order to acquaint them with the work of the World Council of Churches, which was holding its ninth assembly on the spacious campus of the Pontifical University in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from the 14–23 February. We represented six different Christian traditions��:� Roman �� Catholic, Episco� �� pal, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and my own ecumenically cautious denomination, The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Thus we were literally an ecumenical movement, on the move together to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Iguac˛u Falls on the border of these two beautiful countries. It was at the majestic Iguacu Falls— more dramatic than Niagara or Vic� toria—that I was reminded how the World Council of Churches (WCC) has sometimes been depicted as a river flow� ing through a long series of interchurch gatherings. But it would be more accu� rate to say the WCC is actually a con� fluence of at least three streams, each representing an emphasis in the quest for Christian unity. There is the Mission stream that started with the World Mission Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, with the goal of strengthening the churches’ united witness around the globe. This event is regarded as the birth of the ecumenical movement in the XXth century, 52 years before Vatican II. The Life and Work stream, seeking peace and justice, began at a world con� ference in Stockholm in 1925. Those advocating this prophetic approach to unity at first rallied around the slogan “doctrine divides, service unites.” But it is the Faith and Order stream, tracing its early beginnings to a world confer� ence at Lausanne in 1927, that dared to examine doctrinal differences openly, seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit toward agreement on such divisive top� ics as the sacraments, Christology, and how the church is to be ordered. A convergence statement, Baptism,

Eucharist and Ministry, was finalized by Faith and Order in 1982. It represents the diligent work of Protestant, Angli� can, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and even Pentecos� tal scholars, bringing the World Council of Churches a bit closer to its goal of “visible unity” and “one eucharistic felllowship.” These three accents—Mission, Life and Work, and Faith and Order—were evident in the deliberations of the WCC at Porto Alegre, where more than 3,000 Christians worldwide gathered under the ambitious and prayerful theme, “God, in Your Grace, Transform the World.” This was the fourth time that I was privileged to attend a WCC assembly. Once again, I was given press accredita� tion to write an article for The Southern Cross, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego. Thus, a high priority was to speak to at least one of the 18 Roman Catholic representa� tives who were present at this assembly. Although this church is not a member of the WCC, it does hold full membership in the council’s Faith and Order Com� mission and also the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. The media staff arranged for me to interview the Rev. Monsignor John Radano in a quiet room. He is an Amer� ican priest and theologian assigned to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, under the splendid leadership of Cardinal Walter Kasper, who addressed the WCC assem� bly during its opening days prior to my arrival. In response to my questions, Msgr. Radano said that this assembly can be “a turning point in deepening the ecumenical movment.” One reason for this very positive assessment is that the assembly accepted the report of the Special Commission on Orthodox Par� ticipation which brought about a new consensus approach to decision-making in the Council’s work. He also appreciated the theological criteria that were adopted for accept� ing new member churches, and also the development of a Global Christian Forum that will foster an outreach to

Pentecostals, Evangelicals and other Christian groups that are not currently in touch with the structure of the ecu� menical movement. Msgr. Radano calls this a creative period for the World Council of Churches that also advances its own self-understanding. He also affirmed the council’s goal of full visible unity, and added: “That’s our goal.” I couldn’t resist asking him to com� ment a bit on the milestone agreement between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation, the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed at Augsburg, Germany, on October 31, 1999. He noted that the World Method� ist Council and also the World Alliance of Reformed Churches have produced significant reflections on justification, indicating wider ecumenical agreement on this expression of the Gospel. Thus, he says, the Lutheran-Roman Catho� lic Joint Declaration is growing in its influence. A highlight of this assembly for me was the rich experience of worshiping together each morning and evening in a huge tent. The hymns and liturgical responses represented a wide variety of cultures and confessional traditions. The Eastern Orthodox led us in their vespers, assuring us that the blessing of bread and wine was not eucharistic. The chanting of the priests was almost operatic. At the end of the service, baskets of bread were distributed to all who attended. Because of my special interest in the dedication of Faith and Order to the quest for unity, I was especially impressed by the text on ecclesiology, “Called to Be the One Church,” which was adopted in consensus style as the delegates raised their orange cards, indicating that they were warm to this document. The subtitle is “An Invitation to the Churches to Renew Their Com� mitment to the Search for Unity and to Deepen their Dialogue.” There are references to “the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who has brought our churches into liv� ing contact and dialogue.” Through this text, the delegates “confess one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church as

The „System” of Modern Poverty

expressed in the Nicene-Constantinop� olitan Creed.” This is an example of how the text lifts up Baptism as a basis of our unity: “Baptism bestows upon the churches both the freedom and the responsibility to journey toward common proclama� tion of the Word, confession of the one faith, celebration of one eucharist, and full sharing of one ministry.” The statement concludes: “Noting the progress made in the ecumenical movement, we encourage churches to continue this arduous yet joyous path, trusting in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, whose grace transforms our struggles for unity into the fruits of communion … Let us listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches!” It would be impossible in this brief report to do justice to the eloquent pre�

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sentations, the far-reaching pronounce� ments on everything from AIDS to war and a “just peace,” and the sense of fel� lowship in the Body of Christ that was felt during our time together. In the title above I mention “a scenic experience of Christian unity.” Refer� ence has been made to Iguac˛u Falls as an illustration of how the World Council of Churches can be depicted as a river fed by a confluence of various streams. But there was another scenic high point on our tour of Argentina and Brazil that made me think of this assembly in Porto Alegre. Soon after we landed in Rio de Janeiro, our guide took us up to Sugar Loaf by a gondola suspended from a cable, and then up another mountain by train where we viewed the famous Christ the Redeemer statue. The figure

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of Christ has his arms outstretched, as if to bless the oikoumene. That’s Greek for “the whole inhabited world,” from which we get the word “ecumenical.” In those outstretched arms I saw the incarnation of God’s cross-shaped agape love. This is the love that enables us to transform the world. Martin Luther once said that we should become “little Christs.” Perhaps this is the ultimate answer to the prayer and the theme of the assembly, “God, in your grace, transform the world.” Perhaps as little Christs we could also transform the church. John George Huber is Evangelical Lutheran, a retired pastor of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, currently the Chair of the Faith, Order and Witness Committee of the Ecumenical Council of San Diego County, California, United States. His e-mail address is john.huber@ecunet. org.

Thorsten Nilges

Poverty Reduction and Human Rights Today world-wide more than one billion people have to live on less than 1 US Dollar per day. They are regarded as living in extreme poverty. Eight hundred million people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. We think of development as the movement towards a better and more just society. But what does that mean?

The Beginning of Poverty Reduction Policies Development politics are known as measures to increase the (economic) wealth of countries to improve the welfare of their inhabitants. Tradition� ally economic development has been seen as the growth of the gross national product. The key aim of development, the increased welfare of inhabitants, has been seen as the logical result of economic growth. At the beginning of development politics the impact of measures on the poor were seldom

investigated, while today aid efficiency is becoming a more and more discussed and investigated field of development politics. Factors like sustainability, especially ecological sustainability, have been discovered only later in the ‘80s, while the first UN Development Decade was announced by UN General Assembly resolution 1710 in 1961. The foreseeable industrialisation and mechanisation of agriculture should “trickle down” to the rest of the devel� oping society. Economists like Rostow thought about a “take-off into self-sus� tained growth.” At the beginning of the second UN Development Decade in 1970, nearly all Western industrialised countries com� mitted themselves by the UN General Assembly resolution 2626 to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national product for official development assistance, but they never did, except for The Nether� lands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Luxembourg. In the ‘80s, the third UN Development Decade, the aim of the UN was an eco� nomic growth of 7 percent, but growth decreased because of the falling terms of trade. This means that prices of the raw materials which were exported by

the poor countries fell, while the prices of industrial products increased. The UN world conferences of the ‘90s: The UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and its Agenda 21 put the idea of sustainable development on the world’s cultural map. Further confer� ences have been realized, like the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna 1993, as well as the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and others. While the protection of the environment was the focus of Rio, the World Summit on Sustainable Develop� ment in Johannesburg in 2002 moved the problem of poverty into the centre of the discussion on sustainability. In September 2000 at the United Nations Millennium Summit, UN mem� ber states committed themselves to halve the proportion of the extreme poor by 2015. Following the Millen� nium Declaration and the goals laid down in it, eight measurable goals with 18 sub-goals and 48 indicators have been announced by the General Sec� retary of the UN in his Road Map for the Implementation of the Millennium Declaration.

The „System” of Modern Poverty

expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.” This is an example of how the text lifts up Baptism as a basis of our unity: “Baptism bestows upon the churches both the freedom and the responsibility to journey toward common proclamation of the Word, confession of the one faith, celebration of one eucharist, and full sharing of one ministry.” The statement concludes: “Noting the progress made in the ecumenical movement, we encourage churches to continue this arduous yet joyous path, trusting in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, whose grace transforms our struggles for unity into the fruits of communion … Let us listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches!” It would be impossible in this brief report to do justice to the eloquent pre-

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sentations, the far-reaching pronouncements on everything from AIDS to war and a “just peace,” and the sense of fellowship in the Body of Christ that was felt during our time together. In the title above I mention “a scenic experience of Christian unity.” Reference has been made to Iguac˛u Falls as an illustration of how the World Council of Churches can be depicted as a river fed by a confluence of various streams. But there was another scenic high point on our tour of Argentina and Brazil that made me think of this assembly in Porto Alegre. Soon after we landed in Rio de Janeiro, our guide took us up to Sugar Loaf by a gondola suspended from a cable, and then up another mountain by train where we viewed the famous Christ the Redeemer statue. The figure

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Thorsten Nilges

The Beginning of Poverty Reduction Policies Development politics are known as measures to increase the (economic) wealth of countries to improve the welfare of their inhabitants. Traditionally economic development has been seen as the growth of the gross national product. The key aim of development, the increased welfare of inhabitants, has been seen as the logical result of economic growth. At the beginning of development politics the impact of measures on the poor were seldom

investigated, while today aid efficiency is becoming a more and more discussed and investigated field of development politics. Factors like sustainability, especially ecological sustainability, have been discovered only later in the ‘80s, while the first UN Development Decade was announced by UN General Assembly resolution 1710 in 1961. The foreseeable industrialisation and mechanisation of agriculture should “trickle down” to the rest of the developing society. Economists like Rostow thought about a “take-off into self-sustained growth.” At the beginning of the second UN Development Decade in 1970, nearly all Western industrialised countries committed themselves by the UN General Assembly resolution 2626 to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national product for official development assistance, but they never did, except for The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Luxembourg. In the ‘80s, the third UN Development Decade, the aim of the UN was an economic growth of 7 percent, but growth decreased because of the falling terms of trade. This means that prices of the raw materials which were exported by

the poor countries fell, while the prices of industrial products increased. The UN world conferences of the ‘90s: The UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and its Agenda 21 put the idea of sustainable development on the world’s cultural map. Further conferences have been realized, like the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna 1993, as well as the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and others. While the protection of the environment was the focus of Rio, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 moved the problem of poverty into the centre of the discussion on sustainability. In September 2000 at the United Nations Millennium Summit, UN member states committed themselves to halve the proportion of the extreme poor by 2015. Following the Millennium Declaration and the goals laid down in it, eight measurable goals with 18 sub-goals and 48 indicators have been announced by the General Secretary of the UN in his Road Map for the Implementation of the Millennium Declaration.

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Millennium Development Goals 2015 Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Target 1 Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day. Target 2 Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

Target 3 Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

Target 4 Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and to all levels of education no later than 2015.

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

Target 5 Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.

Goal 5: Improve maternal health

Target 6 Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio.

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

Target 7 Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS. Target 8 Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

Target 9 Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources. Target 10 Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Target 11 By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Target 12 Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system.

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2006/1 [Includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction – both nationally and internationally.] Target 13 Address the Special Needs of the Least Developed Countries. [Includes tariff and quota-free access for LDC exports; enhanced programme of debt relief for HIPC and cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous ODA for countries committed to poverty reduction.] Target 14 Address the Special Needs of landlocked countries and small island developing states (through the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States and the outcome of the 22nd special session of the General Assembly.) Target 15 Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures in order to make debt sustainable in the long term. Target 16 In co-operation with developing countries, develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth. Target 17 In co-operation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable, essential drugs in developing countries. Target 18 In co-operation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.

Defining Human Rights Different cultural specifics for human rights may exist, but the dominant understanding of human rights is enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The ICCPR and the ICESCR were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 and entered into force in 1976. These three documents form the so-called Bill of Human Rights. Both have been ratified by 153 states. Other important Human Rights declarations or conventions are, above all, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (entered into force 1981) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (entered into force 1990).

The state carries the responsibility for the protection of human rights. Three levels of duties exist for the state: States have to respect human rights; States have to protect human rights from being violated by third parties, e.g. by private sector enterprises; and States have to take short and longterm measures to fulfil human rights.

A Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction The advantage of a human rightsbased approach to poverty reduction is that it links poverty reduction to the questions of obligation, rather than welfare or charity. Furthermore it gives a definitive statement to the question of whether or not societies need a certain level of economic development before a democracy can be realized. The capability approach to poverty refers to Amartya Sen’s approach. He regards poverty as the denial of a comprehensive formation and development of personal abilities. These can only emerge if basic freedoms like freedom from hunger, disease and illiteracy, but also a reasonable degree of civil and political freedom, are guaranteed. His pioneering analysis of famines pointed to the empirical regularity that famines never occur in a functioning democracy, especially with a relatively free media. In practice the so-called civil and political rights of the aforementioned ICCPR are very important for poverty reduction. History has shown that concepts of development which took care of special vulnerable groups, for example by asking for their participation and ownership, had a better impact on developing societies than industrialisation projects where nothing trickled down to the poor. Empowerment of the poor, freedom of speech, peaceful assembly and association help to promote good governance and accountability of governments. Looking at the aforementioned ICESCR, it is obvious that the Millennium Development Goals for the year 2000 and human rights are interrelated.

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Reaching goal 1 of the Millennium goals would be a fulfilment of the individual human right to food. In Article 11 of the ICESCR, “the States Parties recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for him-

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self and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.” Of course the responsibility for concrete realisation is held by the individuals themselves in principle, but further human rights are required for realisation, such as the rights to education and non-discrimination.

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

In the ICESCR not only the right of every person to education is recognized; the full development of the human personality is aimed at, as well as the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the enabling of participation.

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

The need for equal rights for women and men is already stated in the preamble of the Human Rights Declaration of 1948, as in Article 3 of the ICCPR and the ICESCR. Furthermore, the CEDAW convention for the promotion of gender equality has not yet been realized in any country of the world.

Goals 4 through 7 (Reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and ensure environmental sustainability)

Basically goals 4-7 are all mentioned in Article 12 of the ICESCR: “The States’ Parties…recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” Already in 1966 the international community declared it would take steps to reduce the stillbirth-rate and infant mortality, to improve all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene, and to prevent, treat and control epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases. The big innovation of the Millennium goals is that measurable results are foreseen.

Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

The development of a global partnership expresses the responsibility of all countries for the reduction of poverty. Whilst the aforementioned seven goals are criticized for being only the responsibility of the developing countries, goal eight explicitly states that a non-discriminatory trading and

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financial system is needed and asks also for debt relief. Furthermore, the private sector is mentioned especially the pharmaceutical industry should contribute to access to affordable, essential drugs in developing countries. Politics of the developed countries, e.g. the Group of Seven (G7: U.S.A., UK, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy) as well as the United States and the European Union themselves, have an enormous impact on the realisation of the Millennium Development Goals as well as on the respect of human rights, their protection and fulfilment. The export of weapons, especially of small arms, is a violation of the human right to life. The small arms report for the year 2003 is called “Development Denied” to express how terrible the influence of small arms is on developing countries like Congo and Yemen. Other factors are, of course, the subsidies for the agricultural sector. Cheap exports of frozen chicken meat from Europe are destroying local markets, especially in West African countries. The right to food is violated and the first Millennium goal is negated because possibilities of income generation are destroyed by European and U.S. trade policies. Another fact is that the traderelated intellectual property rights of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are the reason for the expensive HIV/ AIDS drugs in the developing world. The right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health is stated in Article 12 of the ICESCR. But the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications is also explicitly recognized by the States’ Parties in Article 15 of the Covenant. International trade law should be aligned to international human rights, not the other way around.

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tion, is too repressive for citizens to influence its policy. But as soon as the right of freedom of expression is made possible, it’s up to us to use it! Mahatma Gandhi said: “All the world would be Christian, were not all Christians so unlike their Christ.” To reclaim the Christ and protect human dignity, our first challenge is to respect the difference of everybody else and to act without discrimination against any religion, race, ethnicity or gender. Church aid agencies and other civil society organisations across the world, as well as governmental development agencies like the UK Department for International Development, have launched initiatives to support human rights-based approaches to development. Practical actions for individuals and movements are possible: on the one hand everybody is a consumer and has a personal impact on fair working conditions and ecological sustainability in developing countries and in her or his home country. And on the other hand, we can promote human rights education and raise awareness. Especially SCMers could use their networks and cooperate with big human rights organisations like Amnesty International or Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), as well as small regional or local movements, to expose human rights violations all around the world. Suggested Reading Hamm Brigitte, How Can the Poor Gain Their Rights? Poverty Reduction and Human Rights. Bonn, 2004. Sen Amartya, Development as Freedom. New York, 1999. Thorsten Nilges, Roman Catholic, 28, finished his studies in political science, European and constitutional law and social work in September 2006. He is the WSCF Europe Solidarity Interest Group coordinator and a member of the India Working Group of the German SCM. His e-mail address is thorsten.nilges@gmx.de.

How Can I Promote Human Rights? Human Rights are violated in many countries of the world, including some in Europe. Sometimes a socalled government, with or without democratic legitima-

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Eva Drlicˇ ková – Vladislav Kaputa Doing Fair and Responsible Business:

The Concept of Business Ethics in Slovakia The term business ethics has its origin in the general term “ethics”; it means applying ethical axioms in the process of entrepreneurship. This paper introduces a part of the results from a complete study held in central Slovakia (Banská Bystrica region) in 2006. The aim of the research was an outlook survey of business subjects for business ethics standards and the compatibility of economics and ethics on the market.

ics depends on the extent to which the management supports them with sanctions and rewards. Such ethical codes are distinct from moral codes that may apply to the culture, education, and religion of a whole society. To confirm or disprove the stated assertions it is necessary to make a relevant study: to collect and analyse the opinions of people working in the commercial sphere.

The Concept of Business Ethics

The Research: Objectives and Methodology

The common life of people requires behaviour in consonance with generally accepted rules. The observance of these rules in common life is referred to as morality. If we move the rules of general ethical principles to the commercial area, we talk about business ethics. Instead of definition, we want to illustrate the meaning of this term with the following title of Arnold S. Luknicˇ’s book: Fourth Dimension of Entrepreneurship—Ethics. People often assume that ethics and economy do not go together and that the market is a place where ethical ideas are weaker than egoism, profit, contention, damage of environment, etc. An ethical code as “a means for implementation of morality” in the commercial sphere may be styled as a code of professional responsibility, which may dispense with difficult issues of what kind of behaviour can be considered ethical. In the context of an organisation, a code of ethics is often a formal statement of the organisation’s values on certain ethical and social issues. Some of them set general principles about the organisation’s beliefs on matters such as quality, employees or the environment. Other set the procedures to be used in specific ethical situations, such as conflicts of interest or the acceptance of gifts, and delineate the procedures to determine whether a violation of the code of ethics occurred and, if so, what remedies should be imposed. The effectiveness of such codes of eth-

The objective of the study was to make a survey of entrepreneurial subjects’ attitudes towards business ethics, ethical standards, compatibility of economics and ethics, and the effectiveness of codes of ethics. Research focused on the code of ethics because it is one of the tools for the institutionalisation of ethical principles in practice. The study was carried out using questionnaires as a basic form of information collecting. Questioning took place throughout March 2006. Four hundred people from the Banská Bystrica region in central Slovakia were asked personally to fill in the questionnaires. The anonymous questionnaire contained twelve questions aimed at ethical issues in entrepreneurship and three questions aimed at the identification of respondents (sex, type of enterprise, number of employees). Respondents could answer questions using a 5degree evaluation scale or by selecting an answer in multiple choice. Gathered information was processed using standard software packets.

Selected Results of the Research Three hundred seventy-two respondents filled in and returned the questionnaire, i.e. 93 percent of the total of 400 people approached. The legal identities of surveyed subjects were the following: physical persons (14%); limited liability companies (46%); joint stock company

(31%); cooperatives (3%); other forms 6 %. One hundred percent of the respondents claimed they were aware of the term “code of ethics.” A code of ethics had been implemented in 39 percent of them already. This percentage concerns mainly the limited liability companies and joint stock companies. The more employees a company has, the higher the assumed chance that problems occur. More than 87 percent of the respondents had experienced ethical problems already. Most of those who had not experienced any problems of this kind were physical persons. Almost all were men and 69 percent did not employ any employees. Most of the respondents deemed that business in Slovakia is ethical. In addition, most of the respondents agreed with the assertion that the code of ethics elaboration in most of the Slovak companies would lead to the improvement of the entrepreneurial environment. A striking majority—91 percent—recommended elaborating the code of ethics as an internal guideline. A full 99 percent of respondents agreed with the assertion that the chief example of ethical (moral) behaviour in a company should be the top management. Furthermore, nearly 100 percent of the surveyed subjects claimed that every employee has an influence on the moral behaviour of the company as a whole. Some 90 percent of respondents deemed ethical behaviour a strong supporting means for the long-term prosperity of a firm. Considering this, we could deduce that concern for moral values, together with responsibility for legal action, is becoming perceived as a factor creating a firm’s identity. Research showed that respondents consider as the most immoral the following issues: corruption, abuse of confidential information, stealing of company property and violation of job discipline. It is interesting that physical persons, who in most cases did not have employ-

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ees, had a negative attitude towards the elaboration and application of the code of ethics.

Moral Values in Doing Business Beginning with Aristotle and later on including other philosophers, theologians and economists, people have been intensely concerned with the relation between morality and economy. The opinions of Aristotle are influencing ethics even today. Business ethics do not have a long tradition in the Slovak Republic, if we disregard the short period in the first half of the XXth century. It was the change of the political climate and economic circumstances after 1989 that opened up the space for development of business ethics. Receiving foreign experiences was an important factor too. It was primarily large international corporations which opened affiliated companies in Slovakia, that brought elaborated ethical rules (like the code of ethics) to practice. Furthermore, there were affiliated branches of banks, insurance companies and other service-oriented firms—institutions having direct contact with clients—which also contributed to this process. A basic idea which business ethics brought to economic activities is: profit should not be only the object of entrepreneurship, but also a means for a better quality of life. Business ethics should help to distinguish what is positive and negative, moral and immoral, what is responsibility, respectability, fairness, confidence or justice. All the respondents of our research had already encountered the term “code of ethics” previously. It is a stimulating factor for the further development of business ethics in Slovakia, especially in view of the fact that there was not nearly the same extent of familiarity with this concept ten years ago. The same goes for the fact that almost 40

Suggested Reading Klopfer M. Etika podnikania (Business ethics). Bratislava, 1995. Luknicˇ A.S. Štvrtý rozmer podnikania—etika (Fourth Dimension of Entrepreneurship—Ethics). Bratislava, 1994. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_code

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percent of the respondents had elaborated their own code of ethics. The transfer of information between Slovakia and the international scene, common European market, globalisation and unification of business conditions on national and international markets coming from interdependency are accelerating and enlarging the adaptation of business ethics. These phenomena brought also problems, as every human activity does, but this is another topic. The implementation of the code of ethics and consecutive control plays an important role in the process of ethics institutionalisation in the structures of enterprise management. Rules observance of business ethics is voluntary as it assumes respect for the basic moral axioms of society. There are economic and non-economic factors that influence the “voluntarism” of respecting moral axioms. Within non-economic factors, we could identify the values orientation of the individual, corporate culture, moral principles of society, etc. The main economic factors are the global material welfare of society and material welfare of the individual. The influence of total material welfare significantly affects the interest of society in business ethics. We assumed that the higher the level of material welfare, the higher the interest of society and individuals in moral issues in entrepreneurship. This hypothesis was partly proved by the research.

Eva Drlicˇková was born in 1971 in Dojcˇ, Slovakia. She is an associate professor at the Technical University in Zvolen and lectures on business ethics, interpersonal communication and marketing communication. Vladislav Kaputa was born in 1976 in Bardejov, Slovakia. He is a researcher at the Technical University in Zvolen for the department of marketing, trade and world forestry.

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The Zeitgeist in

Movement: An Interview with Dear Liam, when one clicks on the homepage of SCM United Kingdom and the movement magazine, one

discovers in the upper right corner of the website a link to the MakePovertyHistory campaign. That goes very well with the theme of this issue of Mozaik, which deals with different aspects of modern poverty. Why this connection between movement and SCM UK on one hand and the MakePovertyHistory campaign on the other?

I’m proud to say that, here in the UK, churches and Christian organisations have led the way in getting issues of economic injustice talked about by politicians and the general public. It was the churches which launched the Jubilee 2000 campaign in 1999, calling on the developed nations to cancel the unjust debts which are crippling developing countries. They’ve since been heavily involved in campaigning to get international trade rules changed, and to get more and better aid supplied to developing countries. Why does all this matter so much to SCM UK? Our vision statement says that faith and social justice cannot be separated. We believe we have a responsibility to speak out against economic injustice, to stand in solidarity with the poor and oppressed elsewhere in the world. And as members of one of the most privileged and affluent societies in the world, we have to acknowledge that our comfortable lifestyle carries a high price for people in developing countries, and to look for ways of changing that. While SCM UK has a reputation for

Liam Purcell has been editor of movement since 2002 and co-ordinator

being radical and on the fringe of the conventional church, all the mainstream Christian denominations here have also thrown themselves behind the MakePovertyHistory campaign. It was inspiring to see banners hanging on all the churches last summer, when the leaders of the G8 wealthy nations were meeting in their heavily fortified hotel in Scotland. It’s important that the churches make a stand like this to show that the neoliberal economic model is not opposed only by extremists, while also reflecting Biblical principles. The idea of jubilee from the Old Testament inspired the campaign for debt cancellation, and solidarity with the poor and oppressed is fundamental to the message of Jesus and the prophets.

What do you personally see as the main fields of action for young Christians in the struggle against modern poverty in the United Kingdom? Firstly, the struggle against global poverty and injustice continues. The G8 leaders made some promises in Edinburgh last year, but they didn’t go far enough, and politicians’ promises are easily broken. So SCMers and other young Christians continue to be involved in MakePovertyHistorytype campaigning. Over the last year, we’ve focused

of the UK Student Christian Movement since 2004. He�� ’��s studied English language and literature and has a

especially on HIV, pressing our government to meet its commitment to ensure universal access to HIV treatment by 2010. The UK government is particularly well placed to make this happen, and has shown more willingness to tackle this very important issue than many other Western governments. But we need to look at poverty in our own society too. Inequality has grown and grown in the UK over the last few decades, and poverty and social exclusion are very real issues for many, even in such a wealthy country. An issue which I think should be of particular concern for Christians is that of refugees and asylum-seekers. The right-wing press in the UK continually print misinformation and xenophobic, sensationalist stories about immigrants and asylum-seekers, creating a very real climate of fear and hatred. The government make things worse, with policies which victimise people who are already fleeing terror and torture. Many asylumseekers in the UK are now forced into destitution by these policies, and I think it’s essential for young Christians to speak out and to support these marginalised people.

Movement is a magazine sensitive to the issues of our time; attentive to the Zeitgeist. How do you choose your priorities and the themes of individual issues of movement? SCM UK places great importance on being led by our student members, and the magazine is no exception. SCM UK has a gathering every term,

postgraduate diploma in publishing. He came to SCM and WSCF late in life he missed out on it completely

as a student, but has been making up for lost time since he started editing the magazine!

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The latest issue of movement is the issue No. 123. That tells us there is quite a bit of history behind the magazine. Please, tell the readers more about the origins and history of the magazine. When did it all start and how has movement evolved throughout the years? SCM had had various short-lived publications before, but it decided to start printing a regular, professional-quality magazine in the early ’70s. They recruited editorial staff who’d had experience working on radical and Christian magazines in the U.S. and elsewhere, and movement was born. Or rather, Bilbo was born. The first issue was named after

the main character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which was very popular in UK student Christian circles at the time! The name was soon changed to movement, though. Movement has caused its share of controversy. In the ’70s, SCM UK included a series of political pamphlets in the magazine. One of them was banned by the government because it contained instructions for members of the armed forces on how they could desert in protest if they didn’t want to serve in Northern Ireland. The magazine’s gone through many changes in terms of content, style and presentation over the years. In its early days you were likely to find details of seminars on Marxism alongside interviews with radical activists; today there’ll be interviews with TV personalities and even some Christian liturgy materials, alongside the radical politics! But there is some continuity in terms of the approach. When the editors of the time did a retrospective for the one hundredth issue, they identified the common strand as ‘liberation’. Whether it’s in theology, politics, culture or just the sense of humour, I think that sums up movement pretty well. It’s a unique publication, both within the international community of SCMs and within the Christian community in the UK. Many non-students subscribe to it because there simply isn’t another magazine with the same mix of politics, theology, culture and irreverent humour. I’m proud to be working on it.

What was your personal highlight in your “career” as the editor-inchief of movement? After we published an issue with

a special feature on sex and sexuality, I received a letter from a student reader which reminded me why I’m doing this job. The person wrote to thank us because they’d been struggling with a lot of questions about these issues, in the context of a very conservative and repressive church. Reading our feature, they discovered for the first time that they weren’t alone, that there were people tackling these questions with integrity whilst still holding onto their Christian faith. That was very moving for me. In SCM UK, we can get rather blasé about some of the ‘standard’ issues for liberal Christians. We’ve been addressing issues of sexuality for so long now we helped to found the UK Lesbian and Gay Christian movement in the eighties that we can feel there’s no more to be said. That letter reminded me that SCM’s voice, speaking out for openness and inclusivity, is still vitally needed in the UK’s churches.

Who were the celebrities appearing in movement, either in interviews or as contributors? In my time, we’ve interviewed a few ‘big names,’ but they’re not really filmstar-type celebrities. We’re more likely to talk to people who’ve presented interesting documentaries on TV, or journalists with controversial opinions. I was rather starstruck, though, when I got to meet the activist singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, who’s a hero of mine! I can reveal that we should be printing an interview soon with Norman Kember, one of the Christian Peacemakers who was held hostage in Iraq. (This was big news in the UK, but I guess people will have heard about it in other countries too.) It turns out

with

hosted by a local student group or chaplaincy. All our groups and members are invited to attend. As well as speakers, worship and time to socialise, we have meetings of working groups which plan SCM’s policies and activities, including movement. Everyone at the gathering is entitled to take part in any of these groups and have a say. So the students get to make decisions about our events, our social justice campaigns, and the content of the magazine. We usually plan out the general themes for each issue about a year in advance, and then plan each issue in detail about a term before its publication. Of course, the exact details of writers and articles can vary quite a lot, once it comes down to actually commissioning things. The line-up of articles can keep changing right up to the last minute, causing me some sleepless nights on occasion! I have a diploma in publishing, but none of my lectures told me what to do when one of your writers misses a deadline because their father has driven a tractor off a cliff.

Liam Purcell

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that he was an SCMer in his student days, so it’ll be interesting to see if it was SCM that radicalised him and set him on the path he’s taken. We also had a column for a while from Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop. She talked about activism, ethical living and spirituality she had an interesting perspective because she isn’t a Christian but cares about the same issues as many of our members. I was subsequently disappointed to hear about her selling off The Body Shop to L’Oréal, a company with a rather less ethical approach than the one she pioneered in her work. Maybe I’ll invite her to return some day and justify her actions to our readers …

One of the sections in movement that I like a lot is called Celebrity Theologian. It is a very ecumenical section: it contains profiles of, e.g., Julian of Norwich, Ignatius of Loyola, Dietrich Bonhöffer or Karl Barth. I even found the Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali among the presented thinkers. Indeed. We’ve also looked at secular figures such as Galileo, to see how their thinking had an impact on theology. It’s probably the most ‘educational’ part of the magazine it really aims to introduce big ideas in a way that young people with no theological training can understand. We now occasionally run a similar feature called ‘Doctrine for Dummies,’ which introduces key aspects

of Christian belief in the same way. We wanted to demonstrate how there are many approaches and ideas within the Christian tradition; very rarely is there one right answer, however much some Christians might try to claim that there is.

Along which lines should Christian media, such as movement or Mozaik, create their policies, in order to stay both popular and influential on one hand and to be an alternative to secular media on the other? In other words, how should they combine their specific Christian character with the Zeitgeist? I always find this kind of question difficult to answer. We rarely sit down and calculate the balance of Christian to secular material in the magazine, or try to work out how to express a Christian view on a subject. I hope that the approach and content of the magazine just flow naturally from the things our members and writers are interested in, as Christians with a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. One thing which I think may have helped movement to keep its distinctive voice during my editorship is my own faith position. I grew up Catholic, but stopped attending church for many years. I attend a Quaker meeting nowadays, but am still very much on the fringes of traditional Christianity. So I care about the Christian tradition and the Church, and I understand its

structures, but I often find I feel like an outsider. Perhaps that helps me to strike a balance between the secular world and a Christian view. I certainly think it’s very important that SCM UK creates a space where people like me can be part of a community alongside more traditional Christians.

And lastly, maybe a little controversial, but certainly relevant question. Aristotle claims that the human is by nature a zoon politikon. How political, therefore, should a Christian be?

I have to quote Desmond Tutu here: ‘I am puzzled about which Bible people are reading when they suggest religion and politics don’t mix.’ I believe in God’s preferential option for the poor, I believe the Bible is a massively political text, and I believe it’s impossible to live out a meaningful faith without engaging with the real world and trying to make it a better place. I think this is particularly the case for organisations like WSCF, which are part of the ecumenical movement. The root word of ‘ecumenism’, oikoumene, literally means ‘the whole inhabited world.’ So the call from the gospel ‘that they may all be one’ is a call for Christians to work for the unity of the whole world, not just the church. That means building a just and equal society, it means protecting the environment, and it means being open to what we can learn from other cultures and traditions. If that isn’t political, I don’t know what is.

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Nagypál Szabolcs

Pioneer, Architect and Mastermind:

John Raleigh Mott “Plan as if there were no such thing as prayer. Pray as if there were no such thing as planning.” (John Raleigh Mott)

John Raleigh Mott was among the leading evangelists and missionaries in the history of Christianity. Furthermore, he was among the pioneers of the ecumenical movement in the world. In a sense, he even personifies the modern ecumenical movement, because in him converged uniquely the varied strands of which the ecumenical movement is woven.

Awakening and Volunteering There was a one-month long missionary awakening for students at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in 1886, which was led by Dwight L. Moody. He solemnly declared: “All should go and go to all.” Another important keynote speaker in the meeting, William Ashmore, delivered there the following grand

statement: “Show, if you can, why you should not obey the last command of Jesus Christ!” But it was a third Biblical preacher and evangelist at that meeting, namely Charles Thomas Studd, who finally converted John R. Mott, a student at that time, and set him to his future direction, calling for “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” Soon, in his local Student Christian Movement (SCM) at Cornell University, Mott brought together the students from all denominations, including Roman Catholics, already by the 1880s. After the high and impressive missionary fervour of that gathering, the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) was formed, headed by John R. Mott. He played a prominent role in it up until its gradual disappearance after World War I. As for facts and numbers, even now the SVM is considered to be among the greatest missionary movements since the Pentecost.

(1865–1955)

Student Christian Movement John R. Mott was the most significant youth leader of his age, since for him students were the lever by which he sought to move the world towards God. This was the area in which his most effective work for the Reign of God was done. The World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) is considered to be the first ecumenical organisation of the world. Some even put the true beginning of the ecumenical movement in the year 1895, with the establishment of the Federation in Vadstena, Sweden. WSCF has also been an important organisation in the academic field, being the first international student organisation as well. The founding Student Christian Movements (SCMs) were from North America (USA) and from Western and Northern Europe (Germany, Great Britain, Norway and Sweden). Since then, WSCF has served as a breeding ground, a training school, a halfway house, and a launching pad for future ecumenical leaders. John R. Mott served WSCF as general secretary from 1895, and as chairperson from 1920 to 1928; all his other

John R. Mott

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achievements have their roots in the concerns which WSCF has fostered. He wrote a considerable number of WSCF booklets on Bible study, prayer, spiritual growth, and even fund-raising. He was instrumental in launching the oldest ecumenical review, Student World, in 1908; it has been a major forum for ecumenical creativity ever since. He even had energy to write the history of the first 25 years of WSCF. His firm conviction was that Student Christian Movements (SCMs) in all countries should combine their forces to glorify Jesus Christ. The main ecumenical idea of WSCF was that the denominations would give their riches, not give them up; they would share their heritage, and not surrender it. It was a student movement, of students, by students and for students. They dared ecumenical experiments undreamt of by the official churches, in the laboratories of the student Christian conferences, the warp and woof of Federation growth. Each of these marked an ascent, an advance into some new area of the world or into some new region of thought; or the initiation of some new phase of policy or activity. They took the divisions of Christianity seriously and initiated ecumenical action to overcome them. Through all these, the participants learned new depths of the riches of God in Jesus Christ.

premillennialism on the other, and he served as a mediator among these lines of thought. The Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910 was the all-time high water mark in Western missionary enthusiasm, the zenith of optimism, pragmatism and futurism. It was an opportune, appropriate, critical, decisive and testing time (kairos) for Christian mission. As its chairperson, he sent more than six hundred personal letters all over the world, calling for unity in mission and mission in unity. When the International Missionary Council (IMC) was finally established in 1921, Mott was elected to be its first chairperson. As such, he called for an end to the distinction between sending and receiving churches. A highly important step towards dialogue on an equal footing took place already at the IMC Jerusalem Conference in 1928. He was also the chairperson of the IMC Tambaram Conference in 1938. Irony and self-criticism were not alien to Mott either. Together with others, he asked the sarcastic question: “Do we consider that we now have on the home field a type of Christianity, which should be propagated all over the world?” Step by step he managed to familiarise Christians with the great idea of looking steadily at the world as a whole, and of confronting this whole world as a unit by the Christian Church as a unit.

Mission and Evangelization

World Tours and Conferences

Mission was his passion. In his understanding of mission, John R. Mott believed in personal evangelism, as a means of enthroning Jesus Christ in individual, family, social and national life. He kept alive the holistic understanding of the Christian faith with the aid of fortuitous or unintentional ambiguities, which allowed each person to assign to it the interpretation she or he preferred. He also managed to find the balance between the Social Gospel emphasis on the one hand, and fundamentalism or

His first trip to Europe was in 1891, to Amsterdam. But it is his world tour in 1895 and 1896, which can be considered to be the most fruitful ecumenical journey that anyone has ever undertaken since the days of Saint Paul. Among other places, in his first world tour in 1895 he visited Central Europe, Wien and Budapest, which led to the establishment of SCMs in the region (in Hungary, for example, in 1904). Because Latin America (as an already Christian territory) was left out of the scope of Edinburgh, a tentative commit-

Suggested Reading The Archives of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). Genève, 1895–1930. Fisher Galen Merriam, John Raleigh Mott (1865−1955): Architect of Cooperation and Unity. New York, 1953. Hopkins Charles Howard, John Raleigh Mott (1865−1955): A Biography. Genève, 1979. Mackie Robert C., Layman Extraordinary: John Raleigh Mott (1865−1955). London,

1965. Matthews Basil Joseph, John Raleigh Mott (1865−1955): World Citizen. London, 1934. Mott John Raleigh, Addresses and Papers. New York, 1947. Potter Philip – Wieser Thomas, Seeking and Serving the Truth. The First Hundred Years of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). Genève, 1997. Rouse Ruth − Neill Stephan C. (eds.), A

tee on cooperation in Latin America was established, with Mott as its secretary. The first Congress on Christian Work in Latin America led to the constitution of the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA), the foremost ecumenical pioneer on that continent. “When, since the early Councils, has there come together a gathering representing so nearly the entire Christian Church?” he wrote about the WSCF Constantinople conference in 1911. After the meeting, he also found time to organise SCMs in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Since this experience, he had insisted that the student and youth work of WSCF should be conducted in harmony with the principles of the Orthodox churches in predominantly Orthodox communities. His moral and spiritual authority was so great that in 1913, he, an American Methodist layperson, chaired the first conference on reunion amongst the different branches of the Syrian Church in India. He first visited the African continent with a trip to South Africa in 1906. He organized and chaired a groundbreaking WSCF conference in Atlanta in 1914 on the role of African Americans in U.S. society, and on cordial relations of equality. It was the first meeting of its kind ever held in North America. In Asia and the Pacific, the uniting force of the awakening ecumenical movement was Mott. He set the movement in motion; its leaders were discovered and given confidence and training by him. The ecumenical movement in Asia and the Pacific started already in 1895, when he paid a visit to China. In 1907, WSCF held its first Asiatic conference in Tokyo, Japan, and a second one in Beijing, China, in 1922. The first WSCF regional conference was held in Tjiteureup, Indonesia, in 1933. From October 1912 to May 1913, he held eighteen regional and three national conferences in Asia, in seven different countries, towards comity, cooperation and unity. He also organized mutual visits among the countries.

History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517– 1948. London, 1954. Verkuyl Johannes, Inleiding in de nieuwere Zendingswetenschap. �� Kampen, 1975. Weber Hans-Ruedi, Asia and the Ecumenical Movement (1895−1961). London, 1966. Nagypál Szabolcs (1974) is a graduate in ecumenical theology, law and literature. He works in the Benedictine Békés Gellért Ecumenical Institute (BGÖI) in Pannonhalma,

and teaches philosophy in ELTE in Budapest. He was chairperson of KÖD (Magyar SCM) and CESR; and a member of ERC and ExCo. He is the moderator of the Theology Commission of the International Ecumenical Fellowship (IEF). He is the editor-in-chief of Student World, the Central European Ecumenical Anthologies, and was that of Mozaik. His email address is nagypalszabi@yahoo. com.

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years: in Geneva under Marc Boegner; in Britain under Archbishop William Temple; and in New York, under John R. Mott, one of the presidents. It was then more than natural that when the official body of the ecumenical movement, the World Council of Churches (WCC), was finally established in Amsterdam in 1948, Mott became its honorary president.

He visited Aotearoa−New Zealand in 1926 and Australia in 1927, which resulted in the formation of the National Missionary Councils of these countries. These meetings were all precursors of the East Asia Christian Conference (EACC), and then of the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA). The World YMCA specialized in relations with Orthodoxy, so they held three consultations with church leaders in Sofia in 1928, in Kephissia in 1930 and in Bucharest in 1933, under Mott’s leadership. Following five so-called Muslim Conferences, he was instrumental in founding the Near East Christian Council (NECC) in 1927, the predecessor of the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC). Many National Christian Councils are the fruits of his initiatives. He considered his greatest contribution to the missionary movement the enabling of the formation of these National Christian Councils, in order to strengthen the identity and independence of the new missionary-founded churches. The Oxford Conference of the Faith and Order movement in 1937 aimed at clarifying and crystallizing Christian thought and strategy concerning the burning issues of human society. Its deliberations were guided by the chairperson, Mott, who was also the director of the study programme. The Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in process of formation met in three different groups, during the long war

Discernment and Inspiration He was as tireless and as urgent as the Apostle Paul. He made extensive journeys around the globe, preaching in universities and organising SCMs ceaselessly. As a prophetic but not theologically trained Methodist layperson, he became the architect and mastermind of many ecumenical endeavours. He combined a dignified, commanding presence, a deep religious faith, an evangelistic zeal, a wide-ranging vision, courage, tact, an administrative ability, a power over public assemblies as a presiding officer, and a compelling, convincing speech. He also succeeded in a masterful way in combining his faith in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ with his faith in the marvellous providential achievements of modern science. In his understanding, all these serve as a handmaid to the sublime enterprise of extending and building up the Reign of God in the whole world. He considered trade, industry, science and technology as God’s way to create the providential kairos for the world to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ. Prophetically, he considered the then-rising communism as the most dangerous adversary and even enemy of Christianity. Especially during World War I he supported joint peace initiatives, such as those organized by the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. He served on an official American mission which visited Russia in June 1917. Further, he was the chairperson of the Anglo-Saxon Emergency Committee of Cooperating Missions in 1918. As such, he visited

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Germany in 1920 to allay resentment at charges against German missionaries. He had a rare capacity to discern ability and promise in youth and to inspire it, with a sure instinct for first-class minds. He even had the rare power of enlisting outstanding personalities for the enterprises with which he was concerned. Let us mention just two remarkable examples here. First of all, he was the main influence on another Nobel Prize winner, Nathan Söderblom, to join the ecumenical movement, and later to establish the Life and Work movement. Second, it was also John R. Mott who discovered Hendrik Kraemer, at that time the chairperson of the Dutch SCM, and commissioned him to write a study book in preparation for the Tambaram Conference of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1938. This book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, later became one of the crucial contributions to missiology; and Kraemer became the first director of the Bossey Ecumenical Institute. An incessant traveller, he was highly disciplined in the use he made of his travelling time. He read a lot and wrote voluminous reports on what he had seen and done. He was a prodigious and indefatigable worker, who always found time for an enormous amount of solid and diversified reading. He had an attitude of creative faith, of humility, of open-minded teachability, of receptiveness of new visions, of dissatisfaction with present achievements, and of Christ-like capacity for dialogue. He had a rare balance of equipment, which made him at once an evangelist and an organiser; a person with the widest view of the world affairs and a master of careful detail. For his commitment to peace and reconciliation, and for all his life achievements, John R. Mott was in 1946 awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Bogdan Popescu

Saint John Chrysostom The Father of Liberation Theology Saint John Chrysostom could be considered one of the dissonant voices which had the courage to challenge the powerful Byzantine emperors for the sake of solidarity with the poor and marginalized Christians. The archbishop did not try to isolate Christians from society, nor to reject any form of possession. He tried to change the society itself, by stressing that exaggerated wealth could be a danger for the stability of public life, provoking tensions, envy, robberies and inequalities. He did not separate Christians from the world, but rather tried to make them a ferment and a matrix of a new state in which the real palaces are the churches.

The Bishop of the Poor In 397 John Chrysostom became the archbishop of Constantinople, supported by the influential eunuch of the emperor Arcadius, Eutropius. The Byzantine official made this choice not because he was a religious man but because was a pragmatic one. John was a real monk, without political experience, a modest and solitary person, and Eutropius considered him a perfect future marionette. He was already leading the political destiny of the empire by profiting of the Arcadius’ weakness, and he wanted the religious power, too. But the eunuch was wrong. Indeed, Saint John did not want to involve himself in the political games; but on the other hand, he was also not willing to tolerate the abuses created by the Byzantine two-headed eagle. The archbishop didn’t reject the political system as such, but rather the unworthy representatives. He stressed that in the same way, God instituted marriage and its good effects but He was not guilty for the conflicts within families and the mistakes of the partners. Therefore, Saint John supported poor people but accepted the principle of subordination that is also present in nature in order to organize the life of the irrational creatures: “In bees, for example, or cranes or herds of wild grazing animals. Neither is the sea devoid of this social organization, but many marine Suggested Reading John Chrysostom, The Twenty Fourth Homily on Romans. In From Irenaeus to Grotius.

species marshal themselves behind a leading fish and so make long expeditions in formation” (The Twenty-Fourth Homily on Romans). Human society is built in the same way, based on subordination between parents and children, elder and younger, teachers and students, rulers and servants. For this reason he asked the Christians not to be ashamed of subordination, because God instituted it. Christians should not fight against the political power which confers stability; they should continue to pay taxes as recognition of the legitimacy of this institution and pray for it. In a society, the rulers have the role played by cross beams in a house, keeping the unity and the right order: “For what cross beams are in a house, rulers are in cities, and just as if you were to take away the former, the walls, being separated, would fall in upon one another so, if you were to deprive the world of magistrates and the fear that comes from them, houses, cities and nations would fall upon one another in unrestrained confusion, there being no one to repress, or repel, or persuade them to be peaceful through the fear of punishment.” But on the other hand, rulers have to be just and protect the poor servants as members of the same family, and this idea was not very much appreciated at the Byzantine court at that time. The main target of the protests launched by the bishop was the empress Eudoxia. The daughter of a Frankish general, she loved luxury and was suspected of having immoral relations with an official. After the death of the consul Theognostus she seized the property of his widow. Bishop John asked her to return the stolen goods; she considered the attitude abusive and conflict became eminent. Emperor Theodosius was also criticized for the cruel taxes imposed in order to pay the Gothic mercenaries and for his vices, but even John Chrysostom never contested his political authority. He only condemned the sins of the Christian Theodosius.

A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, Cambridge, 1999. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood. In The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Michigan, 1956. Fouyas Methodios, The Social Message of Saint John Chrisostome, Athens, 1968. Pagels Elaine, The Politics of Paradise, In The City of God, New York, 1995.

The Nature of Sacramental Authority Nor was the other head of the Byzantine eagle spared the reproaches of Saint John. The ministers of God very often used to cross the boundaries of the symphony, involving themselves in political life, living in luxury, acting like earthly rulers. In the Treaty on the Priesthood, John Chrysostom emphasized the sublimity of the priesthood and the necessity of its witness in the world without being contaminated by earthly influences. According to him, the priests live among the people, using the means of this life, adapting to the various situations, but they should not forget their real mission. They have to be the salt of the earth and not the gold of the political power. Those who want the clerical office just for a good career are punished by God, as well as those who ordained them. The ministers who introduce secular ambitions into the Church,are compared with the waves that break the silence of the sea. The candidates for the priesthood should not be selected as the officials were, by taking into consideration material benefits. The archbishop deplored the elections made according to earthly criteria: important family, great wealth, relationship, influence or force. If all these are conditions for a social position, the important element of an ordination is “the test of the character.” The priests do not need the authority conferred by any social advantages. Their authority has its sources in heaven and they are not consecrated ad imperium but rather ad servitutem. The love of power is foreign to the Church because it divides, while real love unites. The instrument of the priest must be persuasion and not force: “We have not lordship over your faith, beloved, nor commend we these things as your lords and masters. We are appointed for the teaching of the word, not for power, not for absolute authority. We hold the place of counselors to advise you. The counselor speaks his own sentiments,

Bogdan Ioan Popescu was born in Bucharest, Romania on August 30, 1976. He graduated from the Orthodox Seminary of Bucharest in 1996 and from the Orthodox Faculty of Theology (Bucharest University) in 2000. He has got a Master’s degree from the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey (University of Geneva) and currently he is a PhD student in Sibiu, doing research

in the field of early Christian literature. He was a lecturer in church history at the Cernica Seminary. Currently he works as an inspector in the Department of Education of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He is the coordinator of the Theology Interest Group.

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not forcing the hearer, but leaving him full master upon what is said” (Homilies on the Epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians). But John Chrysostom did not recommend the isolation of the clergymen and the refusal of a social life. The intervention of Bishop Flavian of Antioch is considered by him to be a good example of the role that the ministers can play in difficult situations, because the old bishop succeeded in saving the city while the officials were helpless.

The Social Message of John Chrysostom The patriarch directed his criticism also to the false Christians who boast this name but behave like pagans and thus compromise the Church. In the IVth century many people converted to the new religion, and some of them did it in order to gain political advantages. They benefited by the privileges and continued to live their traditional life. A dangerous evil of the new hybrid Byzantine society was egoistic wealth, considered by John Chrysostom to be incompatible with the quality of a Christian. According to the bishop, the things possessed are called “goods” but do not make their owners good傭ut rather, greedy and rapacious. God did not create human beings as rich and poor. Everything in this world belongs to God and it was made for the common use: the stars, the sea, the heavens or the earth. Saint John stressed that men started to appropriate things, calling them “mine” and “yours” in an arbitrary way, while in fact a wealthy person never possessed but was possessed by the goods (The Twelfth Homily on I Timothy). The archbishop did not try in this way to isolate Christians from the society and to reject any form of possession. He tried to change the society itself, by stressing that exaggerated wealth could be a danger for the stability of public life, provoking tensions, envy, robberies and inequalities. He did not separate Christians from the world, but tried to make them a ferment and a matrix of a new state in which the real palaces are the churches (Homilies on the Epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians). He also did not want to abolish the private property and to create conflicts in the empire. He did not consider property an evil in itself, but protested

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against the selfish way of using it. The archbishop asked the rich to help the poor, considering them the children of the same God within a new Christian world. John Chrysostom lived in two rich cities of the empire, Antioch and Constantinople, so his fight against de-Christianization through luxury is understandable. The reasons were religious as well as political. Excessive wealth was a danger for the Christian faith, which was the binder, the common denominator of the Byzantine State. In order to keep the political unity and the cohesion of a cosmopolitan world, it was necessary to overcome this potential disease of the official ideology. The patriarch did not intend to start a war against the rich but against the bad use of richness. He stresses in the Homily on the Fall of Eutropius: “I am often reproved for always attacking the rich. Of course I do, for they are always attacking the poor and anyhow I never attack the rich as such, but only those who misuse their wealth. I keep on pointing out that I accuse not the rich but the rapacious: wealth is one thing, covetousness quite another.” Eutropius, the powerful eunuch, became an example used often by Saint John to illustrate in his sermons the instability and the danger of selfish wealth. He was considered de facto the ruler of the state. Statues of him were raised everywhere, he had power and wealth and was honored, but he disregarded the Church’s rights. However, suddenly the official lost his power, became poor, hunted and disgraced. He begged the help of the patriarch and asked for the right of sanctuary, which he had tried to abolish. John Chrysostom did not revert to revolution or a just war, but within his place and means he began to improve different aspects of spiritual and material life. He sold the furniture and the treasures of the Episcopal palace and gave the money to the poor and the hospitals. The Episcopal banquets ceased, since they were considered to be “a robbing of the temples.” The unworthy ministers were punished; hospitals and hospices were built for strangers. The right of sanctuary was used for the protection of the poor and the slaves. He also regarded slavery as a mark of sin because God made human beings equal. In the Homily XXII on the Ephesians, the archbishop showed that “slavery is the fruit of covetousness, of

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degradation, of savagery, since Noah … had no servant, nor had Abel, nor Seth.” He stressed that the Church should not adopt this unnatural institution. He often protected the slaves and accused the officials who wanted to be Christians but also to keep a “sinful” institution.

Church, Society and Transformation With all these decisions, John Chrysochallenged the marriage between state and church produced during the reign of Constantine. He did not ask for a divorce, but tried to set limits in order to influence the secular partner and to keep the identity of the ecclesiastical one. In his vision, Christians should live in society but not be conquered by it. They have the duty to work slowly but determinedly in order to transform it into a Christian family. The sermons of Saint John were a signal of alarm. He tried to save the Church from the process of secularization. He did not want a hybrid society but a strong Christian one. He did not intend to transform the believers into aliens or isolated monks. They were to serve the Church and the state but in their own way, protecting the poor and the marginalized. I consider that the Church needed this prophetic voice that attempted to tear it out of the political dream. For this reason the social doctrine elaborated by John Chrysostom can be considered crucial, a real definition of the proper involvement of the Church in the state. This doctrine should help the contemporary society to rethink and keep social values of Christianity in a secular Europe. Christian churches shouldn’t emphasize only the social dimension; at the same time, they need to transform sermons into practice. The AGAPE Document, prepared by the Commission for Justice, Peace and Creation of World Council of Churches with the aim of overcoming poverty, should not remain only a document, but it should be applied in daily life. The Christian message has the force to transform society if we are ready to act together as the children of the same God, as the inheritors of the message sent through centuries by John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople. stom

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Rebecca Blocksome

What’s the Matter with Matter? A Literary Investigation into the Nature of the Cosmos Deep in the thickets of Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino, a beautiful half-woman, half-goat reveals the secret nature of the world to the eponymous hero: “Then the Unique, because of his perfection, through generosity of himself, tends to expand, to widen in ever broader spheres of his own fullness; he is, like a candle, victim of the spreading light, the brighter it grows the more it melts. Yes, God liquefies in the shadows of himself, becomes a throng of divine messengers, Eons that have much of his power, but in a form already weaker. There are many gods, demons, Archons, Tyrants, Forces, Sparks, Stars, and what the Christians call angels or archangels. ... But they are not created by the Unique, they are an emanation of him. ... The Unique could not wish to emanate so far from himself, but he cannot resist this dissolving of himself into multiplicity and disorder.” “And this God of yours cannot dissolve the evil that ... that forms around him?” “Oh, yes, he could. The Unique constantly tries to reabsorb this sort of breath that can become poison, and for seventy times seven thousand years he has succeeded continually to make his residue return into nothingness. ... One day, however, he was unable to control one of his intermediary powers, which we call the Demiurge, and which is perhaps Sabaoth or Ildabaoth, the false God of the Christians. This imitation of God, through a mistake, or through pride, or through ignorance, created time, where before there had been only eternity. Time is an eternity that stammers. You understand? And with time, he created fire, which gives heat but also drowns; earth, which nourishes the grasses but can become avalanche and suffocate them; air, which lets us breathe but can become hurricane. ... The Demiurge was like a child, who messes in the mud to imitate the beauty of a unicorn, and what comes out looks more like a mouse!” “So the world is a sickness of God?”

Sickness unto Death Baudolino was a man on a quest—an Italian peasant with an adventurous streak, he sets off with five friends in search of the Earthly Paradise, the Kingdom of Prester John. His way, how-

ever, is beset with all the usual hazards of life in the XIIth century betwixt the Crusades; and by the time he finally reaches the magical kingdom where the above conversation takes place, he has had ample time to take in all the suffering and oppression of the world. It’s not surprising, then, that despite his Christian faith, this fantastic myth holds a seductive appeal for Baudolino—as it can for many other Christians as well. Heresies aside, it provides an at-leastsuperficially reasonable answer to that most basic of questions: How could a good God create such a bad world? It doesn’t take too much to see the world as a “sickness of God,” a monumental flaw in God’s divine plan. Any short catalogue of human miseries will serve to prove our point: Israeli border strikes kill 28; Civilians flee Sri Lanka fighting; Belarus jails Lukashenko’s foes; AIDS hits Africa’s health staff; Southern China typhoon death toll rises; jobless rise as U.S. economy slows; Colombia car bomb kills five. And those are just the BBC headlines for right now, this instant, 3:04 p.m. on August 4, 2006. Compound that inventory exponentially over the past several thousand years of human existence, and you come up with a—literally—staggering amount of pain, suffering, and ultimately—death. It’s relatively easy to accept the precept that if someone is hungry, you should give her or him something to eat. It’s more difficult to understand why anyone should be hungry at all. The dilemma here is how to make sense of the root causes of poverty and injustice: not the political sense nor the economic sense, but the existential sense. Humans have been struggling to resolve this dilemma since the beginning of time. Their answers have frequently been recorded in myths, stories which attempt to explain how the world was created or why it is the way it is. In this sense the Christian Genesis narrative is also a myth, albeit one which we happen to think really happened. From the anthropological perspective, however, all the various myths conceived across all the various epochs and cultures can claim equal validity. Thus

by examining a parallel myth, in this case from the Gnostic faith, we might be able to shed some light on our existential dilemma.

Origin of Species According to Gnostic mythology, the universe began with a single, unique and unknowable God, who spontaneously emanated lesser beings, known as Æons, in successive pairs. These emanations, while still dependent on the Ultimate Source for their existence, grow progressively more distant from and more unlike him—much as the ripples from a stone thrown into a puddle grow progressively weaker the farther they are from the center. Naturally, the most distant emanations have the greatest instability and potential for aberration. In the Syrian and Egyptian tradition the final and lowest pair of Æons, on the furthest fringes of the Divine Nature, were Sophia and Christ. Sophia, however, was not content with her place, and so she broke away from her pair and set out to create something totally apart from the One, without his knowledge or consent. Thus, in an abortive act of rebellion, she came to give birth to the Demiurge. He was a monstrous creature, and in shame she hid him away in a cloud. Cut off from his mother and all other creaturely contact, the Demiurge came to believe he himself was the only thing in existence; so he took it upon himself to create the physical universe and the physical aspect of humanity. Accounts differ as to whether the Demiurge created in unconscious imitation of the divine model, or with the deliberate and malevolent intent to entrap particles of the Divine in material form. But whether malicious or merely inept, he succeeded only in creating a macabre parody of the higher consciousness. A spark of Sophia’s power, however, was retained and woven into the fabric of his creation. This, therefore, is the Gnostic explanation for the state of the world we find ourselves in: whether by accident or design, it is the inferior product of an inferior being; matter is intrinsically corrupt. But nonetheless, even as suc-

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ceeding generations diverge farther and further from the origins, a trace, a memory, of the Ultimate Source remains.

Either/Or In comparing this myth to the Christian account narrated in Genesis 1–3, three significant differences emerge. First and foremost is the fact that, in the Christian version, the physical world is created by God Godself, rather than by a sub- or non- or anti-divine being. Thus the advent of matter is not the result of some cosmic accident, but rather the unfolding of a divinely ordained plan. The second key difference, then, goes hand-in-hand with the first: according to Christianity the physical universe is inherently good, being the handiwork of God (Genesis 1,31). Although the goodness of the world was corrupted during the Fall, this does not alter its substantive nature; evil is an accidental, not an essential, element of the universe. Finally, the Christian version maintains that all beings, both celestial and terrestrial, are creations—rather than emanations—of God. This simultaneously makes them both more and less powerful than the Gnostic pantheon: more, because they are independent from the Divine and thus can act contradictorily to the Divine will; and less, because they are not divine in and of themselves and thus are ultimately subordinate to the Divine will. This three tenets together outline the crux of our difficulties in understanding or accepting the Christian version of events. We understand God to be both infinitely good and infinitely powerful; therefore God’s handiwork should also be infinitely good. Finding this not to be the case, the Gnostics hypothesized a being not subject to divine sovereignty, a bit which somehow managed to “escape” from the Divine and take up his own initiatives. But alas, we have no Demiurge to blame for the ugliness of the world.

The Divine Comedy Setting all heresies aside, if we could somehow find a role for the Demiurge in the Christian myth, it would go a long way toward resolving our existential dilemma. Let us, therefore, undertake

Suggested Reading Berdyaev Nikolai, The Divine and the Human. London, 1949. Eco Umberto, Baudolino. New York, 2000. Lewis Clive Staples, Mere Christianity. New York, 1943. Sayers Dorothy, The Mind of the Maker. San Francisco, 1941.

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a small theatrical experiment: let us recast the characters from the Gnostic myth into the Christian drama—unmask them, so to speak. In this way we can reread the Gnostic creation myth as a kind of allegory for the Fall. As we have already mentioned, our experiment might be stymied at the outset by the necessity of finding a role for the Demiurge. At first glance, there does not appear to be room for him in the Christian scheme of things: Creation was an act of God, period. No one helped God in this process, and certainly no one had the power to carry it out independently of God. We must remember, however, that for the Gnostics the Demiurge was not the creator of matter, but rather the architect of the universe, shaping it from pre-existing material. Wholly separated from the Divine but bearing a superficial resemblance to him, the Demiurge struggled to imitate the Divine nature while working with a material intrinsically corrupt. Now a lightning flash of recognition strikes! The Demiurge is none other than man and woman themselves—ourselves—created in the image of God but hopelessly separated from God in the Fall. Impelled to create by our likeness to the Creator, we nonetheless find our efforts to restore the world to wholeness inadequate at best and counter-productive at worst. Like the Demiurge, we are merely messing in the mud. Once this casting difficulty is resolved, the other characters fall into place. Sophia—”wisdom”—can easily be located by her name; her role, however, is more passive than active in the Christian version of events. As the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, she was holy as long as she remained rooted in her source; once separated from the Divine, however, her fruit proves too strong for mere mortals to nourish themselves with. Finally we come to a bit character in the Gnostic play, who will also be immediately recognizable in our staging—the Christ-Æon. As Sophia’s rightful pair, Christ is understood by the Gnostics as an intermediary with whose help humanity can recover its lost knowledge of its own divine origin. By seeking knowledge creatures can tran-

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scend the physical world and return to the divine Source of all being. And now we see where the Christian drama diverges from the Gnostic play: in the Christian version, it is not with Christ’s help but rather through Him that the many can be reconciled with the One. It is not a question of transcending, but rather of transfiguring: matter must be redeemed, not renounced. The Demiurge’s “mess” is not consigned to an endless, echoing decay; there is hope for the restoration of the world.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript If only, then, we can conceive of “creation” as an on-going process rather than a one-time event, we might take up our role in the play. The Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, himself quite conversant with Gnostic thought, proposed just such a model of divine-human cooperation in the process of creation. In his writings Berdyaev expounds a breathtaking theory of a new Christian revelation, which he names the Third Epoch. First there was the Old Testament epoch of law, ordained by the Father; then came the New Testament epoch of redemption, embodied in the Son; and the Third Epoch, which we are on the verge of entering, will be the epoch of creation, manifested in the Holy Spirit. “The new revelation is not at all a new religion, distinct from Christianity, but rather the fulfilment and completion of the Christian revelation, bringing it to a true universality. This we do not have as yet. But we cannot simply wait for the revelation of the spirit. It depends upon man’s creative activity as well. It is not to be understood as only a new revelation of God to man: it is also the revelation of man to God. This means that it will be a divine-human revelation. In the Spirit, the divisions and contradictions of the divine and the human will be overcome, while the distinction between them will be maintained. This will be the crowning of the mystical dialectic of the divine and the human.” Heresy or prophecy? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Although unorthodox, Berdyaev’s “myth” is useful in bridg-

Rebecca Blocksome is pursuing her master’s degree in philosophy and theory of visual culture at the University of Primorska Faculty of Humanities in Koper, Slovenia. A native of Ransom, Kansas, U.S.A., she is American Baptist. Her e-mail address is rblocksome@yahoo.com.

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ing the gap between experienced reality and Christian doctrine: he readily acknowledges the progressive de-spiritualization and devastation of nature and the cosmos, the vanishing humanity of humankind. Borrowing Kierkegaard’s term, he speaks of God as being “incognito”—as if we were still in the seventh day of creation, when God is resting and the cosmos is temporarily being sustained by human efforts. As we are hopelessly

inadequate for the task, this period is marked by war and poverty, hatred and despair. But in the coming spiritual epoch there is hope: “The religion of the Spirit is the expectation that a new human and humane sociality will be revealed, radiating love and charity. It is also the expectation of the revelation of a new relationship between man and the cosmos, of cosmic transfiguration. The pro-

cess of the decomposition of the cosmos ... is nearing its end.” The Eighth Day of Creation, Berdyaev’s creative epoch, is imminently upon us. The end of the epic has not yet been written; there is still time for a dramatic reversal. We as human beings, created in the likeness of God, must join together with God in writing the final act—the Demiurge must redeem himself along with his creation.

Roman Kr�� álik

The Social Dimension of Kierkegaard’s Ethics: Kierkegaard’s Understanding of the Term “Neighbour” The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) often dwelled on diverse aspects of the relation between human and human in his writings. It is because of this emphasis that he is regarded as one of the greatest Christian psychologists.

Greatness in Smallness For the self-identification of small countries, Kierkegaard’s way of thinking is of invaluable importance, e.g. from the perspective of the historical experiences or current position of the “small nations” small due to their territory and total number of inhabitants. To understand the psyche and life activities of “small nations,” their philosophy and culture is one of the indispensable preconditions of spiritual greatness of these nations. It is precisely in this that the greatness in smallness and smallness in greatness lies. In the historical mission of small nations, mutual respect and understanding of one another boosts their spiritual greatness and leads them towards a specific understanding of the historical mission of big nations, especially by giving birth to exceptional personalities who become important world-wide precisely because of their originality, creative thinking and perception of the world. They can create universal values of timeless validity and they abolish the unnatural differentiation between the “small” and the “great” pointing out the absurdity of the opposition great vs. small.

One of the basic teachings of Christianity is that one shall love all her or his neighbours. Kierkegaard interprets this teaching radically. A human in relation to any other human is her or his neighbour. With this conception he wants to demonstrate that man should, or even must, regard all other humans as her or his neighbours: hence not only her or his own family, acquaintances, friends, or nation, but all people. It is certainly interesting that some of Kierkegaard’s researchers have been trying to interpret this concept of his and connect it (incorrectly) with radical leftist, almost Marxist ideas. These ideas were, however, adopted by Kierkegaard neither from Marx nor the Communist Manifesto, but from literature that originated well before the XIXth century.

The Duty to Love

It is the duty of a human being to love people neighbours, all of those one sees and meets at work or in private life. The one who loved all of humanity is Kierkegaard’s model of the love for a neighbour. That ideal is Jesus Christ the “reward” of humanity was his crucifixion and death. In Kierkegaard’s conception of relation to a neighbor, it is a conditio sine qua non to imitate Christ in his love for the world. To love one’s neighbour means to love her or him unconditionally, without expecting to have our requests met in return. He who sets up conditions does not love and does not meet the Christian commandment: you shall love. If

love (Jesus Christ) asks us and demands from us to love our neighbour, this love is to be boundless and unchangeable. If one’s love towards her or his neighbour shall be perfect, it means one must love the concrete person the way one sees her or him, i.e. with all her or his imperfections and weaknesses. But Kierkegaard goes even further. One’s neighbour remains her or his neighbour even if she or he has cheated, betrayed or hated one. Thus Kierkegaard presents himself to us as a man who goes beyond his limits the limits of his own self, beyond his ego.

The Infinite Debt of Love Our duty is not only that we shall love our neighbour, but that we even shall remain in a debt of love towards one another. The love towards one’s neighbour is always and ultimately an infinite debt. A person stricken by love recognizes the fact that she or he is thus brought into an endless debt within the relationship to her or his neighbour. If we want to (and we have to) cultivate the love of our neighbour, we have to be awake, constantly, determinedly, so that our love does not compare and is not satisfied with the deeds we have performed. Love is eternal, inexhaustible and limitless. Love is the base, a cornerstone, a building. Love builds up and educates and there is nothing that could shake or destroy her. Destruction is, however, the fate of a sensuous person, whose

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The Duty to Love

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relationships are based on lust and are without any real love for her or his neighbour. Christianity turns our attention away from the external and directs it inwardly, transforming each of our relations to our neighbour into a relation to God. Thus a question arises for everyone who claims to be Christian, which Kierkegaard tried to define by his notion: Is your relation to God represented by your love to your neighbour? Our attitude to God is a prism, so to speak, through which one should recognize how genuine one’s love for her or his neighbours is. Love is the greatest kindness and at the same time the greatest strictness. One who does not respect his neighbour decreases the requirements set upon one’s Christian faith and thus makes one’s conscience weaker. Love is a matter of conscience and hence it has to pour out from a transparent heart and an honest faith. Faith and a clean heart are far, far from any speculation, a decision made by rationalization or calculation. Kierkegaard emphasizes that the love towards one’s neighbour, love for all people, is the only and true sign of one’s being a Christian not even a sincere profession of faith in truth would suffice.

The Choice as an Act

By whom or by what teaching was Kierkegaard inspired? Among the answers one can count mainly Kierkegaard’s relation to pietism, to mystics. When trying to understand Kierkegaard it is very important to take into account Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Bible, which he read literally. It is among others also Kierkegaard’s inner sense of responsibility and his relation to God who punishes sins to the fourth generation. Kierkegaard did not long for the celebration of his person and he refused to be labelled as “a witness to the truth” or “martyr.” He regarded himself to

Suggested Reading Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Princeton, 1995. Králik, Roman. Problém zvaný Kierkegaard. Bratislava, 2006. Thulstrup, Niels and Mikulová, Marie (eds.). Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiania 1–16. Copenhagen, 1978-1988. Veverka, Lukácˇ Ján. L’udská viera a mravnost’. �� Žilina, 1996.

be a corrector of Christianity. It is because of this precisely that he attacks institutionalized Christianity and demands a return to love, which requires selfdenial. If one loves her or his neighbour in Kierkegaard’s notion, love increases and becomes more transparent. The more one becomes humble in one’s relation to her or his neighbour, the deeper becomes one’s relation to God in return. Love does not ascend to heaven, because it is from heaven that it descends and comes to man. One is confronted with a choice this choice is an act of free expression of human love towards God. Kierkegaard presents himself here once again as a philosopher of choice. But how can we connect Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbour-love to the issues related to the current political and economic situation in the world of our time in the setting of a world fighting against terrorism. What shall be our strategy so that humanity be rescued? How shall we manifest our love towards the enemy on the other side of the barricade? Where is the standpoint of truth and justice, and where do we stand? These are questions that naturally bump into and “buckle” Kierkegaard’s notion of “neighbour.”

Turning Away from Despair The essence of the authenticity of Kierkegaard’s philosophy dwells in the fact that it does not limit itself to a single point in the flux of time, nor to formulating the philosophical term existence. He raised humans where they belong: to the sphere where, in an infinite and unattainable distance, as if in a dream-like apparition of truth, we see, understand and feel something that cannot be obtained either by the knowledge of exact sciences or by a simple philosophical and positivistic summation of individual scientific facts. Kierkegaard is an authentic philosopher and his originality and uniqueness do not follow only from the doomed

Roman Králik (1973) studied pedagogy, philosophy and theology in Banská Bystrica and Nitra, Slovakia, and in Prague, Czech Republic. He took part in a research programme at the Hong Kierkegaard Library of St. Olaf College in the United States and has published a number of articles dealing with the thinking of Kierkegaard. In 2005 he established the Kierkegaard Collection in Slovakia, which is the only specialised library of this kind in the country. He has

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atmosphere of his family home but also from his extreme and, for a teleological thinker, troublesome sensitivity, irascibility and passion. At the same time he was indisputably distant from Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers in his understanding of love. Simply speaking, his thinking is a manifestation of a unity of sense, intuition, and mystical experience. The base, the essence of “I”, is authenticity and identity and Kierkegaard presents precisely these elements in his works. Nothing can replace the trials one has to overcome in the course of life. Relation to God is education and God is the educator. Despite the harsh criticism on the part of the Evangelical-Lutheran church’s representatives in the years 1854–1855 (Kierkegaard is often incorrectly interpreted as a critic of Christianity as such), Kierkegaard very strongly assails current ethics, philosophy, theology and the Church for failing to come back to its mission. This remains within his paradigm of love towards one’s neighbour. Kierkegaard was looking for the light because he was well aware of the darkness. Figuratively speaking, Kierkegaard’s task was to produce mirrors and show them to humans so that they would see their weaknesses and their finiteness, understand themselves more deeply and turn away from despair. It is solely up to us to admit and not only when reading the works of Søren Kierkegaard that we are only humans insufficiently reflecting the divine love. This is the place for the Church which, on one hand, should interpret the Bible to modern people once again and, on the other hand, lead humanity by its own enthusiasm to follow the Bible’s teachings, as Kierkegaard wrote about them and Dietrich Bonhöffer lived them. Because if one strives to be perfect in love, one does so to fulfil this mission of love to her or his best ability. One does this through loving one’s neighbour while seeing her or his imperfections and weaknesses, loving her or him even when the neighbour turns her or his back on him and one experiences denial and deception. ... The Christian choice is an act. a doctorate in theology from HTF UK in Prague. He is the author of the recently published monograph Problém zvaný Kierkegaard (The Problem Called Kierkegaard). �� His email adress is kierkegaard@centrum.sk.

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Envisioning Justice and Equality

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Martin Smedjeback

Three Questions about Two Extremists The church is the largest social movement the world has ever known. But how much of Jesus’ original message is alive in the church today? What happened to Jesus’ radically nonviolent style of challenging the violence and injustices of his day? There have been few times in history where we have seen Jesus’ methods and message acted out in a Christian context. One instance was in the American South in the 1950s and ’60s in the form of the Black Civil Rights Movementled by Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Few people have been written about as much as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesus. Even so, there are three questions that have been sadly neglected. Reflecting on these questions could provide keys to what the church must do to regain its soul and to be effective in working for a world in which everyone is treated as a child of God.

Question 1:

Why Were King’s and Jesus’ Movements Successful? They each had a vision. Martin Luther King, Jr. is probably best known for a speech he delivered in Washington D.C. in 1963. “I have a dream,” he said, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King often spoke about “the Beloved Community.” He talked about it when he received the Nobel Peace Price in 1964: “A worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.” King was not speaking of utopia; he saw it as a realistic goal that could be reached by a critical mass of people who were trained and believed in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence. Jesus was also a visionary. “No one will say: ‘Here it is,’ or ‘there it is,’ ” he is recorded as saying by Luke, “because the kingdom of God is within you.” They both resisted and invited. In her book Revolution and Equilibrium, the

feminist and nonviolent theorist Barbara Deming writes about the two hands of nonviolence. One hand resists violence and repression. It says: “I will not tolerate that you violate my or others’ human rights.” The other hand warmly extends an invitation to anyone, even your worst opponent. It says: “I want to be your friend. I want to listen to you and understand you.” It is nonviolence when both hands are used at the same time. Both King and Jesus used this way of thinking and acting. The goal of King and the Black Civil Rights Movement was to end racism and segregation. But they didn’t want to defeat or humiliate their opponents. The organizers of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott were aware that the campaign would cause anger and even fear among those whites that saw the nonviolent action as a threat to their way of life. Because of this, King appointed a committee to work on overcoming the bitterness that whites felt towards the black community. The committee spread the message of reconciliation through television and radio ads, articles, and direct dialogue with white citizens. “We must make friends out of them who are against us,” said King; “We must make our motives clear and we must move from protest to reconciliation.” King believed that there was goodness in the most hateful person. “Just like the parable of the prodigal son who escaped to a distant country of sin and evil,” he once preached, “I think that there is something that can make them come back to themselves. I think that Ku Klux Klan can change to be a Klan for God’s Kingdom. That is the core of the Gospel.” Jesus also both resisted and invited. In the Bible, Jesus is often portrayed eating with “tax collectors and other sinners.” Tax collectors were notorious for taking advantage of common people by putting tax money in their own pockets. Jesus ate with them even though he knew that their behavior was wrong. This was criticized by the Pharisees. By their rules, an upstanding person would never share a table with sinners. Jesus openly violated this rule and invited

all people to him. This doesn’t mean that he accepted their sinful behavior. There are several passages in the Bible in which Jesus’ example changes the tax collectors. They give back the money they have stolen from the poor. They wanted to change both the person and society. Both King and Jesus understood the importance of changing both the human heart and society. Today it isn’t common that the same person or movement talks about both. Most churches tend to focus exclusively on the need for inner change. Most peace movements only address the need for change in society. When King became a pastor he believed that Jesus’ message applied only to person-to-person relationships. He didn’t think it to be relevant on a societal level. Only when he learned about Gandhi did he understand that Jesus’ message of love could work on every level of human existence. In his famous 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” King said: “We are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.” King wanted us to look critically into our own lives, but not to stop there. To solve the world’s problems we must change ourselves, we must face and change our hate and egoism. But we must also struggle to change the structures of our society that lead to war, poverty and racism. George W. Bush said the day after the 11th of September 2001: “This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail.” If we, like King and Jesus, believe that every human being is both good and evil, then it is not so simple. Then we have to take a hard look at ourselves and see that we also have lots of things we need to improve in ourselves and in our lives. And if we can see both good and evil in ourselves, we can hopefully also see it in our opponents.

Envisioning Justice and Equality

Question 2: Why

Were King and Jesus Killed? They used creative and effective nonviolent actions. It didn’t satisfy King or Jesus to simply talk about beautiful visions. They put their words into action. They lived the way they wanted to see their future ideal society. The Black Civil Rights Movement used sitins: groups of black (and some white) men and women sat down together at lunch counters where they were forbidden to sit. By their action they directly achieved the goal of the action to sit at the lunch counter regardless of the colour of their skin. This and other nonviolent methods spread like a wildfire across the American South and were successful in overturning segregation. Jesus also employed various nonviolent actions. One example is described in the third chapter of the gospel of Mark. Jesus walks into a synagogue on the Sabbath and finds a man with a shriveled hand. “Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’ Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then

Suggested Reading King Martin Luther Jr., ”Beyond Vietnam.” www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm Acceptance speech and lecture at the Nobel Peace Prize award.

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the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.” Jesus could have healed the man’s hand outside or waited until the next day, but he chose to do it openly in the synagogue on the Sabbath in order to realize the kind of society he wanted to create: a society where religion would be for the people and not only for the scribes. Time and again Jesus broke the religious and political rules of his day when he considered them unjust. If King and Jesus had been satisfied with holding speeches and doing less challenging actions, they wouldn’t have been a threat to society and to those with power. Then they would not have risked their lives. But they chose direct, open, and nonviolent actions because they knew that if they didn’t, not much would change for the better. They were extremists. While in Birmingham in 1963, King was arrested for demonstrating without a permit. Sitting in the city jail, he read a newspaper ad placed by local clergy and calling for an end to public demonstrations. While injustices existed, they should be settled in court, not the streets. King and his colleagues should not break the law, they said; that is only done by extremists. In his famous response, King wrote: “But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as

www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/ king-bio.html Letter from a Birmingham Jail. www.thekingcenter. org/prog/non/Letter.pdf Wallis Jim, God’s Politics. San Francisco, 2005.

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I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who spitefully use you and persecute you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ … So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? ... Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” King was right that both Jesus and he were extremists. They had extreme visions and extreme methods to reach the world they were dreaming of. This is very dangerous in the eyes of power, even if you are an extremist for love. They challenged mighty men. Almost from the first day of the bus boycott in Montgomery, King and his family began to receive threats. At the worst period they got around 40 death threats per day. At the same time he found support from national media and some political leaders in Washington D.C. who thought that the segregation in the South was old-fashioned and embarrassing. After ten years of involvement in the

Martin Smedjeback is the former president of SCM Sweden. He is currently working as the secretary of nonviolence for SweFOR (Swedish Fellowship of Reconciliation) at their office in Stockholm. In 2002 he co-wrote Nonviolence in Israel and Palestine (in Swedish). His e-mail address is martin.smedjeback@krf.se.

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Civil Rights Movement, new challenges arose which were difficult for him to avoid. He was confronted by the young and desperate black men in the ghettos across the U.S. King told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. They answered: “But what about Vietnam? Is not our own nation using massive doses of violence to solve its problems?” “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos,” King reflected in his speech Beyond Vietnam, “without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today my own government.” When King began to criticize the war and the economic injustice in his country he lost the support of the national press and leaders in Washington. He was harshly attacked by the press and persecuted by the FBI. King’s family and many others believe that powerful leaders were involved in his murder. Jesus also challenged the leadership in his country. He was critical in words and deeds towards both the religious and political establishment. Seldom had there been anyone who dared to challenge the powers with openness, action and love. The leaders were afraid that he would gain enough support from the people to be able to take away their power.

Question 3: Why

Are King’s and Jesus’ Movements No Longer Successful? It can be argued whether or not King’s and Jesus’ movements continue to be successful today. The Black Civil Rights Movement achieved a lot. It succeeded in overturning most of the racist laws that governed the American South. But the struggle that King became involved in during the last years of his life the struggle for economic justice and peace was not so successful. The gap between rich and poor is still enormous, both in the U.S. and around the world. The U.S. is still arguably “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” with about half of the world’s military investments. Jesus began what is today the largest social movement on the planet: the worldwide Church. But did it turn out the way he had hoped? Did it become a movement that challenged violence and injustice? Did it become the movement for the love and peace that he

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2006/1 preached? We have it in bits and pieces in the church today, but in general it is difficult to see. I think there are two reasons why their movements are not successful anymore. We have only absorbed a small part of King’s and Jesus’ message. Most people know that King had a dream. If you know a little bit more about King, you know that he struggled for black civil rights in the U.S. Often that is all people know. There are few people who know that he worked hard against war and poverty. We have made King’s message safe and insignificant by reducing him to a dreamer. I don’t think this is all a matter of chance. Those with political and economic power want to talk about King as a good rhetorician and nice anti-racist organizer but not about King as a harsh critic of the capitalist system and a radical nonviolent activist against war and poverty. I also think that all of us (at least some parts of us) prefer to think about King as a dreamer. We can all be dreamers. Dreaming doesn’t demand any changes from us. If we think about King’s challenging words and how many of us are accomplices to the problems of war and economic injustice, then we might have to begin to question our own way of life, which can be very demanding and unsettling. When it comes to the message of Jesus, many Christians tend only to see it as a private matter, something between God and myself. Jim Wallis, one of the founders of the Sojourners, an American progressive Christian movement for peace and justice, writes in his latest book God’s Politics: “Restricting God to private space was the great heresy of the twentieth-century American evangelicalism.” The movement Wallis represents works for an awakening of the Church to regain the message of peace and justice in the Bible. He writes in the same book: “Our religious congregations are not meant to be social organizations that merely reflect the wider culture’s values, but dynamic counter-cultural communities whose purpose is to reshape both lives and societies.” In the work for a better world, there is a need for risk taking and willingness for sacrifice. Maybe what makes people most reluctant to get involved in the work for peace and justice is that this work sometimes requires both risk and

sacrifice. When we involve ourselves in the struggle, it can mean that we don’t always get the comfortable life that TV commercials promise us. It isn’t an attractive message for us in the time of egoism and ever-increasing consumption. But both King and Jesus saw the willingness to sacrifice as something central in their message and in their lives. “You don’t get to the promised land without going through the wilderness,” King said. “There can never be growth without growing pains.” Jesus willingly accepted pain in his life in order to create positive change. Pain and sacrifice can never be a goal in itself; on the contrary! It is because you want everyone to have the right to life and not have to experience pain that you choose to work nonviolently for others. But risky and painful situations can come up indirectly in an active nonviolent struggle for peace and justice. Today there are not many people in the church who are prepared, like King and Jesus, to sacrifice something of their lives to the nonviolent struggle for a better world.

A Future Beloved Community? Not unlike in the times of Jesus and King, we see injustice and war all around us. What is different from their time is that the nonviolent movements are greater than ever. There are many people who are actually willing to sacrifice something of their lives for others. But it isn’t happening in the churches primarily. In the best-case scenario, we can see churches supporting nonviolent movements and activists. In the worstcase scenario, churches are actively working against progressive nonviolent movements. When I read the Bible and when I see how King and his sisters and brothers in the struggle for civil rights used their faith as an instrument for positive change, then I have hope in what the Church one day can be. Imagine a world where the Church, in co-operation with other religious institutions and movements for social change, peace and justice, would actively, nonviolently and lovingly work as a joint body to change the very structures of our society. What a powerful and mighty force it would be! I truly believe that we then would begin to see King’s Beloved Community, or if you will, the Reign of God.

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Rozs-Nagy Szilvia

The Homo Socio-Spiritualis in Ecumenical Liturgies Theologies that emerged in Africa, LatinAmerica and Asia re-examined the centre of the Gospel that was brought to them by Western missionaries. Their main concern was to discover what the Gospel has to say in their present conditions, when they were trying to fight a battle seemingly in vain, because the tools they had received proved to be useless. The Gospel they were taught lacked real transforming and life-changing power. They realized that unless Jesus Christ is incarnated into their own context, and chooses the local people to be his disciples, he is not able to speak to their heart and soul, and to lead them to conversion (metanoia). Let us examine now together some of the new emphases of the Gospel highlighted by these theologies.

The Ever-Presence of God The liberation theologies in Latin America and Asia put the emphasis onto God’s love and God’s righteousness, claiming that these are God’s main properties. Black theology went further and said that God’s love contains God’s wrath as well, because of God’s justice and righteousness. God’s love means being there for the oppressed and marginalised blacks, protecting their dignity, finding a place for their expression of human freedom, and fighting with them against the white oppressors. We find three very important characteristics of God univocally stated by these new theologies. First of all, God is Creator and Sovereign, because God knows the meaning and purpose of all God’s creatures, and sustains life and justice. Secondly, God is Immanent and Transcendent, because God, the Infinite, accepted and shared the concrete reality of the finite in Christ. It should be mentioned, though, that God is not limited by historical events or authorities, but is leading God’s people out from their marginalisation and oppression. God’s Providence is the third characteristic, which is important for those who want to experience God in the present and not only in the future. Faith in God’s Providence is a faith in the Power

of God, which is always effective in spite of racial differences, oppressive institutions and evil social and political structures.

The Way of the Cross The historicity of Jesus Christ as the Oppressed One in the Latin American and other liberation theologies, and in black theology, is one of the most essential characteristics of Jesus Christ. When his continued presence is still to be believed, Jesus Christ should be experienced in his closeness to humanity. Jesus Christ is the One who has shared and continues to share the wholeness of human life, which includes hunger, injustice, and many times even persecution and death. Jesus Christ came to meet people in their own houses and to sit at their own tables, and to go to die on their own streets. When he calls his disciples to leave everything behind and to follow him, he expects the same things to happen to them when following and imitating him (Imitatio Christi). Jesus Christ takes his disciples out from their own villages and cities, but he wants to send them back after his resurrection to serve the people by sharing the good news and by working for the fuller realization and the visibility of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Discipleship is to be realized by following Jesus Christ in living and striving for others, in family, in community, in loneliness, in worry, in agony; through injustices, through humiliation, through carrying one’s (and very often others’) cross, even until death. Facing the realities and needs, the Northern Luzon Report stated that spirituality is “a dynamic but painful process of development of a person or of persons, eventually becoming a channel or venue of faith expression, i.e. putting faith in action.” It is a journey that requires commitment and persistence and includes experiencing the very depth of human life. The fact that through the life of Jesus Christ, God became part of the unclean, painful and feared side of human life, gives a different perspective of all suffering and even of death. There is nothing

and no one on this Earth which would be far or alienated from God. Moreover, the way of suffering can be shared with God and can lead to unique revelations about the divine mysteries. The way of the Cross, however, is not an end in itself. Life does not stop at the stage of death and grave. The steps of suffering and death are temporary but necessary ones to be able to experience and to live out in its paradoxes the victory of Jesus Christ, life in its fullness, since historical liberation is a share in Jesus Christ’s resurrection as well.

The Kingdom of God Western missionaries presented Christianity as a religion that has its main focus on the Other World. They claimed that though the earthly life may be spent in struggles and in humiliation, when one bears these in patience and endurance, there will be a reward after death. Raising the questions of injustice, inequality and oppression did not make any sense in this kind of missionary setting. The eschatological aspect of worship was to create a hope in the unknown future, rather than to talk about the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God in people’s everyday lives. The newly emerged theologies started to talk about the Kingdom of God as a hope for this life. The already-present reality of God’s Kingdom was to be the starting point for the divine entering into earthly realities. The picture of a God Who wants people to suffer was rejected. They introduced God Who wants people to have a whole and happy life, a life in abundance. The understanding and the existential recognition of the Kingdom of God therefore meant a forceful call for repentance and a renewed conversion, implemented into deeds and action for social justice. Both conversion and forgiveness became essential elements of this spirituality, as “to pardon means not to fixate the past, but to create possibilities for persons to change and to realign the course of their lives” (Gustavo Gutierrez). The Kingdom of God, which calls for conversion, strives to be expressed in

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liberating practices, in the discernment of the signs of the times, and in a greater love. Love has gotten a renewed meaning as well: as it must involve response to others’ objective needs, thus bringing objective results. Everyone is called to be perfect and holy (Mt 5,48). This call includes all the spheres of life, and thus politics as well. In our era characterized by the worldwide presence of various news agencies, one cannot fight for justice locally but has to take into account the global concerns and needs of others as well. Committed discipleship is the main criterion for Christian life. It is necessary, as Leonardo Boff said, “to join our passion for God with a passion for the people.” Political holiness is also needed today, to be contemplative in liberation, manifesting Jesus Christ, who came not only to preach about liberation, but also to liberate. Political holiness involves prophetic courage, historical patience and responsible action. This revolutionary understanding supplanted the previous understanding of spirituality, which was claiming that one’s own faith is one’s own private business and has nothing to do with the actual social and political structures and systems, which are God-given realities to be maintained and not to be changed or challenged. The new theologies stated that Christian life does not happen only in the spiritual spheres, but it involves one’s social context as well, because conversion has always to be personal, but it is never to be just private. Gustavo Gutierrez introduced and developed this lifestyle, which used the Kingdom of God as a model of contemplation in action.

Contemplative Discipleship “�� Only holiness will win the battle of the true Church” (Jon Sobrino). Holiness can be experienced through the spirituality of the poor both as tremendum and fascinans. The encounter with the most vulnerable ones on the one hand reveals the dignity and sanctity of every single person.

Suggested Readings Boff Leonardo OFM, Faith on the Edge. 1989. Casmore Gwen − Puls Joan, Clearing the Way. En Route to an Ecumenical Spirituality. Genève, 1990. Religion and Society: Towards a Theology of Struggle. Manila, 1988.

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2006/1 On the other hand, it shows the depth of loneliness and isolation by its plain cruelty. That is why, without making a life commitment and having an intensive and intimate relationship with God, we cannot serve Jesus Christ in the poor. Dealing with poverty is not only a question of analysing and changing socio-economic tendencies, but it has several spiritual implications as well. To enter into solidarity with the poor calls for friendship, love and tenderness. It teaches the essential and basic human values in desperate situations. In order to embrace the totality of this spirituality, one has to see clearly oneself as part of the creation and humanity in its wholeness. One’s body is not one’s own property any more, but the body of the poor, which is hungry, humiliated and longs for both material and spiritual salvation. One’s self-awareness has to be transformed through the spirituality of solidarity and identification with the oppressed. This process enables one to experience and understand the essential value of Jesus Christ’s liberating power, and to implement it in the people’s everyday reality. Following Jesus Christ means walking with the poor, in a life for others. Sharing life with the poor makes one rediscover the meaning of human dignity and the reality of daily-experienced closeness with God. To walk with the poor means to walk with God day by day. We can witness an unusual process, when an active and practical life leads one to a contemplative life. Paradoxically enough, love is not only the source, but the finality of spirituality, because it presupposes, includes, and fosters contemplation and gives motivation for responsible action. “�� I believe that the contemplative, the monk, the nun, and even the hermit, is really a revolutionary. She or he is also bringing about social change. And she or he also bears witness that as well as social and political changes, there is a transcendent reality, beyond death” (Ernesto Cardinal). The correlation of human beings

makes the concrete relationship with God intimate. Discipleship, meaning following Jesus Christ among the poor and living out hope, joy and trust in God’s grace, is among the main emphases in the Latin American and other liberation theologies. Black theology and ecumenical theology used discipleship in a wider sense and talked about the Gospel as Good News for the oppressed and little ones. In these instances, the centre of spirituality is hope, which makes joy possible in this life and gives place to solidarity: solidarity with God’s little ones, a notion which became one of the most important Christian virtues.

Rozs-Nagy Szilvia is an Evangelical-Lutheran pastor and an ecumenical theologian from Hungary, and a board member of KÖD (Magyar SCM). Currently she writes her Ph.D. on ecumenical and interreligious liturgies. She was a member of the Executive Committee (ExCo) of the Ecumenical Youth Council in Europe (EYCE) from 2001 till

2003, and currently she is the chairperson of the WSCF Central European Subregion (CESR). Her email address is szilvianagyhun@yahoo.com.

The Poor Latin American liberation theology was the first to listen to and hear the voice of the poor, and to advocate that the Gospel in its very essence is Good News for the Poor. Receiving the Good News into their life, the poor have the deepest joy over it. Passing the test of misery, they realize through the words of the Gospel that the source of joy is hope, and the opposite of joy is sorrow and not suffering. The poor are the new apostles, calling us to trust in the God of the Poor. Some theologians did not want to be one-sided, and they wanted to talk about the Good News for the rich, which means offering forgiveness for their sins. But Jesus Christ does not offer us the luxury of two gospels, one for the rich and one for the poor. The Good News for the rich can be reached through genuine repentance, and through new life realized in solidarity with the poor. According to the Gospels, God took side with the oppressed in Jesus Christ and revealed their divine dignity. The oppressed and the poor are in a special relationship with Jesus Christ, because they are his manifestations for the world today (Mt 25,40 and 45). Filipino theology brought back into our focus the authentic humanity of Jesus Christ, which means a life lived in transparency for God’s work, and a life making present God’s Reign by working for justice, fullness of life, and peace.

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“�� The presence of God’s Spirit in Jesus Christ did not turn him into a supernatural being, but rather served to realize his potentials for full humanness, animating him and making him fully alive, alert and sensitive to the world” (Everett Mendoza). The poor cry for overall changes in the world, because they really know and feel that little changes will make a difference neither in their personal lives, nor in their social and political systems.

Until Death The God of Life incarnated into the presence of death and made death a way of sanctifying and leading people to life. Jesus Christ, with a will to face suffering and death, became very essential in liberation theology. The pilgrimage to him and also with him is always to be renewed and remade, as Ernesto Cardinal puts it: “There should also be people to remind

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humankind that the revolution goes on also after death.” It was mainly Latin American and the Filipino spirituality which valued highly the virtue of being ready for the red martyrdom, for death. It originated also from their experiences of the consequences of their commitment. “�� To be ready for death simplifies one’s life, purifies one’s soul, and gives one tremendous courage”(Levi V. Oracion). Though it appears in scandalous and paradoxical forms, involving both the paschal and the festive dimensions of the liturgy, the penultimate nature of God is existential and personal. This spirituality arose from necessity. Based on concrete reality, this kind of theology and liturgical celebrations are able to confront all people with their own lives, deaths and hopes, and they are able to lead one to experience the deepest sense of solidarity and joy when being part of the Populus Dei (God’s people).

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Homo Socio-Spiritualis These discoveries made way for the birth of a Christian who is deeply spiritual and socially sensitive, the Homo Socio-Spiritualis. This Christian is informed and educated (keeping the newspaper in one hand, the Bible in the other, and a rucksack full of books on her or his back). The Christian is also compassionate and fighting, contemplative and sharing the fruits of her or his contemplation, being ready to take active part in the formation of her or his smaller and wider community, be it the Church or the society. The Homo Socio-Spiritualis believes that the three essential ingredients of a revitalized and renewed faith are openness, connectedness, and earthedness, even if they lead one through the valley of pain, suffering or death on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Jooa Vuorinen

This worship is basically formed according to the structure of Orthodox vespers, containing traditional Orthodox prayers. Yet some parts of the vespers have been left out and ecumenical elements from WSCF-E worships are included. Inspiration for this worship has been sought from the daily worships of the WSCF-E solidarity conference, “�� I Was a Stranger and You Invited Me In: Homelessness and Poverty Housing in Europe Today,” held in Cluj, Romania, 3–9 May 2006. �

For the peace of the whole world, the welfare of the holy churches of God, and for the union of all, let us pray to the Lord.

Leader: � God, our Creator and Saviour, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.

For the victims of trafficking; for those who face domestic violence and abuse in their daily lives; for those who live under fear and terror, insecurity and hopelessness, let us pray to the Lord.

All: Glory to you, our God, glory to you. O Heavenly King, Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, who are everywhere and fill all things, the Treasury of blessings and Giver of life, come and abide in us, cleanse us from all impurity, and in Your goodness, save our souls.

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Orthodox vesper

What if God was One of Us?

Song suggestion: “Nada te turbe” 1st reading: Psalm 142 All: O Jesus Christ, You gentle light of the holy glory of the immortal, heavenly, holy, blessed Father. Now that we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the evening light, we sing in praise to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For You are worthy to be praised at every hour with songs of worship, O Son of God, giver of life. Therefore the world glorifies You. (This ancient hymn from the IInd–IIIrd century is either read or sung. At the same time candles are lit as a symbol of Christ, the Light who came into the world.) 2

Reading: Genesis 18,1–8

Song suggestion: “O Lord Hear My Prayer” Intercessions (“Kyrie Eleison” is sung between the prayers): For the peace from above, and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever, and to the ages of ages. Amen. All: Lord’s Prayer

For travellers by land, sea and air; for migrants and refugees far away from their families and home countries; for the sick and suffering; for the homeless and the hungry; for the victims of wars and violence; for captives and for their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.

For those who love us and those who hate us; for those who help us and those who need our help; for all who have gathered here together and for all our sisters and brothers in Student Christian Movements, let us pray to the Lord. Hear us, O God our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of those far off upon the sea, and show mercy, O Master, upon us sinners, f�� or You are a merciful God, and love mankind, and unto You we ascribe glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and unto ages of ages. Amen. Leader: Lord, now You let Your servant depart in peace, according to Your Word, for my eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared before the face of all people: a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of Your people, Israel. Holy God, holy Strong, holy Immortal, have mercy upon us. (3 times) Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever, and to the ages of ages. Amen. All-holy Trinity, have mercy upon us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your name’s sake. Lord, have mercy. (3 times)

Song suggestion: “El mensaje que hoy proclamamos” 3rd Reading: Luke 24,13–35 (After the Gospel reading an Agape Meal can take place; it is a good way to close the worship, reminding us of and linking us to the charity of Abraham, the apostles, and Christ Himself.) Leader: God, let us always keep in our hearts our sisters and brothers who are in need, and be ready to serve them in all possible ways, remembering that any stranger we meet might be an angel or even Christ. Let us become instruments of your transforming salvation and mercy in this world. Let this common prayer increase our mutual love, understanding, tolerance and unity, so that one day we all could be One. All: God, our Creator and Saviour, have mercy on us and save us. Amen. Song suggestion: “Jubilate, Everybody” Jooa Vuorinen was born in Tohmajärvi, Finland, in 1981. She graduated as a Master of Theology from the University of Joensuu in 2005. Currently she is the Links Coordinator of WSCF Europe and works as a choir conductor – cantor – for the Orthodox parish of Helsinki. Her e-mail address is jooa.vuorinen@ort.fi.

1�� Roughly described, the Orthodox vesper is �� built around four themes that are repeated in every vesper: Creation (psalm 104, which here is excluded); the Fall of Man (psalms 141&142); Salvation (Christ’s coming to the world; as a symbol of this a procession with a candle, the evening light, is made just before the hymn “O Jesus Christ, You Gentle Light”); and Conclusion (the prayer “Lord, now You let Your servant depart in peace” and conclusion of the worship). This way the whole salvation history is brought back to our mind every evening. The Agape Meal used to take place after the liturgy, a worship where Eucharist is celebrated, in the early Church. It does not belong to Orthodox vespers, and in the ecumenical encounter it does not replace common communion, but it can be a beautiful, concrete action expressing our mutual love.