© 2006. Used by permission.
BARRANQUILLA, Colombia — The questions kept coming from the audience at the close of the Rev. John Sinclair’s reflections on Reformed theology in the context of globalization, one of the opening lectures at the four-day celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia.
Sinclair, a former Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) missionary to Latin America and retired secretary of the church’s Latin America Office, kept taking the questions, one-by-one and applying five tenets of the Reformed faith to his analysis.
“Do you find the principals of globalization compatible with Reformed theological thinking?” one man asked. His answer? “The sovereignty of God is opposed to recognizing how the world hands the majority power. And those with the economic power have no interest in those who lose (out).”
That was countered by a question from a pastor who said it is scary to talk the politics of economics from the pulpit in Colombia’s violent context, to which Sinclair agreed, but spoke a hard word. “For me, the Christian work is the path of the cross where the church doesn’t live for itself, but for others.” The church lives to die in a sense, Sinclair said, lamenting that northern missionaries often taught an individualistic theology that abetted consumerism in the name of progress. That mindset did not prepare southern hemisphere Christians to analyze the economic and political realities that daily affect their lives.
“Your Latin America theology helped us,” he said.
It was a sobering morning conversation, but not a hopeless one. Sinclair asserted that the problems created by globalization may “awaken the Christian church” on behalf of creation as nothing ever before.
The analysis began when Abilio Pena from Bogota, a Catholic theologian, claimed that the endless global push for profit escalates violence in Colombia — where dissent is punished with terror. Pena argued that multi-national corporations are selling off Colombia’s resources, like oil, in a reckless way that is insupportable over the long haul and is deadly in the short-term. Requiring massive militarization to maintain. Destroying the ecology to produce. And pushing the already poor into ever-deeper misery with no end in sight.
Pena cited John 2, where Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple, as a parallel for the church seeking to address how industry is pardoned for abusing the earth’s resources and its people.
He called attention to tactics such as legalizing illegal seizures of land, granting unreasonable mining rights, and failing to protect the most vulnerable citizens. The introduction of palm oil and rubber agribusinesses into regions where the plants are not native is irreparably wrecking their delicate local ecology, he said.
In Colombia, he added, more than 3.5 million farmers are displaced, with the last million added during the last four-year term of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who was recently re-elected.
Pena argued that the escalating military buildup — which includes U.S. troops — in Colombia is development-driven, rather than security-based.
He said at the end of 2005, 16,000 forces were incorporated into the Colombian army, which now totals 95,000 soldiers. He said the U.S. government wants to up its military presence from 400 officers and 400 sub-contractors, some of them mercenaries, to 800 and 600 respectively. “These forces are not for combat, but strategic, for development purposes. And since they have nothing to do, they create problems for and control the civilian population,” he said, citing an escalation in drug use, prostitution, and crop-theft in the areas where the military is stationed.
Pena said the construction of a Pan-American highway linking Panama to Colombia and a gas and oil pipeline from Venezuela to the Pacific are the investments driving much of the loss of personal property, the repression of the population, and the violent collusion between of government and business.
With that backdrop, Sinclair built his analysis around what he called five non-negotiable Reformed tenets:
“¢ the sovereignty of God;
“¢ the fidelity of the Word of God;
“¢ the obligation of the Christian life to witness to Jesus;
“¢ the inviolability of the human conscience; and
“¢ the affirmation that the church protect the most vulnerable in society.
He said that the tradition requires that the church work to restore the creation that God calls good and, in order to be faithful to Scripture and to the witness of Jesus, must work to protect the most vulnerable and to respect the dignity of human beings. Doing so, he said, is part of the cosmological vision of restoring the earth.
Now, Sinclair said, the global market ruptures the goodness of creation.
Three ecclesial concepts, he said, provide models to theologically mend the mess: oikos, or, living privately and publicly as the community in which God dwells; pacto, or covenant, to live obediently in God’s precepts; and kenosis, which means abdicating your own needs to save the wider world, as Jesus did.
He said Reformed people are irrevocably concerned with the wellbeing of the human creation and the ecology of the earth and ought to be confronting these challenges. God is the “great economist who anticipated the needs of all His creatures,” he said. “Is it possible,” Sinclair pondered, that the “storms of globalization are a prelude to a great awakening of the Christian church and possibly human society? Could it be the dawning of a commitment to all of creation that is about to come?”
Sinclair and Pena spoke after an official from the U.S. embassy who reported that there has been an overall reduction in assassinations and forced displacements in Colombia during the last two years, but that Afro-Colombians and indigenous populations in remote areas live still with high risks of violence.
Sinclair commended the embassy’s efforts to redeem Colombia’s deplorable human rights record, but asked forgiveness of his listeners for what he described as the U.S.’s contradictory policy of aiding the cause of human rights in one part of the world while violating human rights in another, alluding to the conflicts in the Middle East.
Alexa Smith is a freelance journalist living in Louisville, Ky.
