National and ethnic identity

Subsection 2.3

Ambiguities of belonging
Ethnic conflict
The predicament of the church
Biblical and theological perspectives
Challenges and tasks
Confession

"Precisely because a Christian community is placed in the larger human community and is called into the world to be God's witness, it is inevitable that it has to engage with the problems of human society. Reformation leaders taught that the Christian community shares responsibility for the coexistence of all humankind because God does not want to abandon the earth and its inhabitants to evil."¹

In 1989, with the end of the Cold War, WARC and its member churches were faced by rapid sociopolitical and economic changes in central and eastern Europe. What would be an appropriate Christian response in this and similar situations of struggle elsewhere in the world? To provide some tentative answers from Reformed perspectives, a consultation on Christian community in a changing society was held in Pensier, Switzerland in November 1990.

One of the negative outcomes of the end of the cold war and the breakup of the Soviet Union was the eruption of ethnic conflicts, adding to the number of such conflicts which had already been going on in different parts of the world. WARC once again planned to assist the churches by addressing the issue of national and ethnic conflicts in a consultation, jointly organized with the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, in Colombo, Sri Lanka in November 1994. This text draws upon the findings of this consultation.²

Ambiguities of belonging

Roughly 5,000 ethnic groups live in 200 states in our world. Around the globe today we are experiencing a resurgence of what has been called a "new tribalism" - a reaffirmation of group identities. How are national and ethnic groups to live together? How are we to protect the integrity of human community in all of its diversity? How does our understanding of the Christian gospel help?

God has not created humanity for monochrome uniformity, but desires it to flourish in its diversity. God calls us to respond to the gospel, each of us, in our own language, and to worship God in and through the multiple forms of our own culture.

There is a growing realization that the Enlightenment ideal of abstract humanity is truncated; we encounter people not simply as "humans", stripped of their culture, their colour of skin or gender, but as Hutu or Tutsi, as Buddhist or Hindu, as red or yellow, as men or women. Group identities offer us homes in which to belong, spaces where we can be among our own and therefore be ourselves, universes of meaning that structure our worlds. They provide us also with bases of power from which we can pursue our goals or engage in the struggle against oppression.

At the same time, group identities can be deeply troubling. The homes which group identities provide can be stifling, suppressing the difference and creativity of their non-conformist members, universes of meaning can degenerate into insular, stifling and oppressive ideologies. Bases of power can become fortresses into which we retreat, surrounding ourselves by impenetrable walls dividing "us" from "them". In situations of conflict, they serve as encampments from which to undertake raids into enemy territory. Group identities are profoundly ambivalent: they are havens of belonging as well as repositories of aggression, suffocating enclosures as well as bases of liberating power. They are part of the history of divine creation and redemption, but they are also part of the history of human sin.

Notice the location at which the blessing of group identities slips into a curse. It is the desire for purity, for homogeneity, for a monochrome world without the other: non-conformist members must be repressed, outsiders must be kept at bay, even destroyed. What compounds the trouble is that pure communal identities are so many pure illusions, the dark dreams of people unwilling or unable to face the colourful social realities. There are always strangers within our gates, and we ourselves never belong completely to a given group but only in part. We live in overlapping social territories, belong to overlapping traditions.

We wish to affirm not only the unity of humanity but also the cultural diversity that ethnic groups bring to our societies. One of the tasks of the church in a given culture is to contribute to the flowering of that culture, as well as to make sure that the salutary sense of ethnic belonging does not turn into ethnic aggression towards the "stranger who is within the gates" or towards neighbouring ethnic groups. It is therefore the responsibility of the church to work towards genuine community, in which each ethnic group remains faithful to its dynamic and changing identity and yet is enriched by and enriches others. In this way, the churches must seek to contribute not only to the development of each culture but also to harmony among all.

Ethnic conflict

In more than fifty places around the globe, violence has taken root between people who share the same terrain but differ in ethnicity, race, language or religion. These conflicts are embedded in the struggle of ethnic groups over land, economic resources and political power. Rapid population growth, diminishing resources, unemployment, migration to shantytowns and lack of education are steadily increasing pressures along many social fault-lines. Conditions seem ripe for more Bosnias, Rwandas or Sri Lankas.

No two situations of ethnic conflict are the same. Each situation evolves out of specific historical circumstances, with which those from outside are often unfamiliar.

Some cases

• involve ethnic groups of relatively equal size or power, each struggling for dominance in a national state;
• arise because of the historical movement of people, as refugees or as migrants, into the territory of another nation state;
• arise because an ethnic group, nation or part of a nation finds itself within the borders of a nation state which it did not choose, whether because of boundaries drawn by colonial authorities or as a result of earlier treaties;
• arise within nation states in which a large majority is of one ethnic group and one or more minority groups struggle for recognition of rights which, because of their minority status, they are not able to achieve through democratic means;
• arise when a minority ethnic group achieves and maintains dominance over the majority by economic, political and military power;
• involve indigenous peoples who have been marginalized, reduced to a minority and threatened with extinction by the colonial powers and their descendants or by other ethnic groups brought in to serve the economic interests of the colonial powers;
• are described as "interreligious" or "intrareligious" because each of the parties is identified with a different religious or "sectarian" affiliation, even if it is clear that the teachings and religious practices of both sides have little if anything to do with the dispute.

Many ethnic conflicts are complicated by the deep convictions held by ethnic groups about their place in history and in their region. Conflict is exacerbated when the general perception is of the other as inferior, or threatening, or demonic. As tensions grow, people increasingly act according to their distorted images of the self and the other, without any serious attempt to verify these images.

From each side in the conflict many voices may be heard, offering divergent explanations of the issues at stake and different proposals for how they are to be dealt with. Frequently it is difficult to verify which, if any, of these voices is speaking for those who are most vulnerable.

No situation is insulated from outside forces, who act out of various interests. Frequently it is the past actions of outside forces which have created the present tension, as in the case of colonialism; but similar intervention from outside comes with the expansionist policies of neighbouring nations and with the economic domination of "neocolonialism". Often the action of outside forces is overt and evident, but they may also intervene covertly, creating further suspicion and mistrust.

There is a Ghanaian proverb: "If two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." The perpetrators of conflict pursue their goals with scant regard for others. The victims of conflict predominantly are women and children.

The predicament of the church

The role of the Christian community in any situation of ethnic strife is always difficult and often ambiguous.

In some situations, church leaders use the church as a platform for their own ethnic bias. As a result, the church identifies with one group against the other. In other situations, the church leadership is divided, with leaders having conflicting ethnic loyalties. Consequently, the church is silent. It may preach a theology of love but, because it does not address the issues at stake in the conflict, this theology becomes a cloak for continuing strife. In both cases the church is vulnerable, because it has not demonstrated that it can help its members to transcend their ethnic loyalties.

A church may also find itself in a genuinely ambivalent position, caught in a tension between loyalty to the gospel and loyalty to the group. It does not wish to be identified with an ethnic group. But, for historical reasons (the history of missionary work in a country, for example), it draws its membership predominantly from that group, which has a legitimate claim on its nurture and pastoral support. If it ignores the hurts and pains of its members, then it becomes irrelevant to them. If it gives in to the pressure of the ethnic aspirations of the group, it loses its identity as a church.

As we face the ethnic conflicts that are surfacing around the globe today, our first act as churches and Christians must be to repent for the fact that too often we have been accomplices in ethnic wars rather than agents of peace. The diabolical and dehumanizing powers that are at work in economic and political systems and in the sociocultural construction of others all too often infiltrate the churches. Finding it difficult to distance themselves from their own culture, churches too often echo its reigning opinions and mimic its practices, sometimes to the point of repeating nationalistic slogans and propaganda.

"If salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?" asked Jesus (Mk 9.50). Yet his very warning about being thrown out calls for "the bitter cry of repentance", invites a turnabout. What the church should turn away from in the context of ethnic strife seems clear. It is the captivity to its own culture, coupled so often with the blind self-righteousness that feeds enmity. But what should the church turn to? How should we live as a church today faced with the new tribalism that is fracturing our societies, separating peoples and ethnic groups and promoting bloody conflict? If the church is to be an agent of peace and reconciliation, it must begin with critical theological reflection on its identity and mission.

Biblical and theological perspectives

God the creator has made humankind in God's image; all human beings share equal dignity and are owed equal respect (Gen 1.26-28). This image of God is expressed in relationships of equality between those who are different (Gen 1.27). The image of God is marred when the relationship between two or more people or peoples is broken (Gen 4.1-16).

The story of the tower of Babel (Gen 11.1-10) is about a false unity of humanity placed at the service of a wrong goal; humanity employs "one language" and "the same words" to build the imperial city whose tower reaches the heavens and to make a name for themselves in order not to be scattered abroad. God's response is to confuse their language and to scatter them. This response is both a judgment against sin and a gracious provision to prevent sin being repeated. It is on account of God's providence, therefore, and for our own good that we have come to speak different languages and inhabit different cultural spaces. God is the author both of our common humanity and of our cultural and ethnic diversity.

Estranged from the God of peace, human beings have made wholesome ethnic differences a source of deadly conflict. In greed for wealth and power, land and its fruits, one ethnic group oppresses another, excluding it from the things that rightfully belong to it, suppressing its cultural distinctiveness, plundering its material goods, sometimes even threatening and obliterating its very existence.

In response to the history of human conflict and sin, God called Abraham out from his native country to live as a stranger among other peoples (Gen 12.1). The God who called Abraham and elected Israel is not one deity among many, chosen by a people to give them religious legitimacy and to help them in the struggle against other peoples. The God of Abraham and Sarah is the God of all peoples. Israel is a strange people because it belongs to no other god but the God of all peoples. Israel is required to be different for the sake of the others. The very purpose of Israel's existence is to be a blessing to all peoples (Gen 12.3) - to bear witness to the peace promised by God, in whom each people can be different without being separated, each faithful to itself without being an enemy to the others.

Jesus came to Israel and into the world as a stranger who was rejected and died on the cross. Nevertheless, "he came to what was his own" (Jn 1.11). He was a stranger to the world because the world into which he came was estranged from God. He lived, died and was raised to reconcile those who are estranged from God and from one another: "For he is the peace... putting to death that hostility through [the cross]. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God." (Eph 2.14, 16-19)

By sending Jesus Christ into this world, God the redeemer calls the whole of humanity to respond to the proclamation of the good news of the reign of God, of the coming new creation of God. The promise of the new creation is that people from every tribe and nation with all their cultural goods will be gathered around the throne of the triune God in a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21-22). Before this promise is received, a note of judgment is struck (Rev 21.27): that all cultures will be refined and renewed.

Pentecost, the day the church was born, harkens back to the tower of Babel. Yet it is not a reversal of the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel, but the healing of rifts between peoples who speak different languages and belong to different cultures. Before Babel all of humanity spoke one language; in Jerusalem at Pentecost the new community speaks many languages (Acts 2). When the Spirit comes, all understand each other; yet each speaks his or her own language. Pentecost is not a reversion to the unity of cultural uniformity; it is an advance towards the harmony of cultural diversity.

This Pentecost vision of unity in diversity is reflected in Calvin's view of the church. According to Calvin, the visible church is first of all local: the church in a definite region of the world where it can act responsibly, because it is small enough to be manageable. The church in its region is not, however, separate: it is in this region the one Christian church. It is immediately in contact with other churches in their regions, tied with them in federal communication. Without imposing its confession or order on the churches in the other regions, it is connected with them in the same faith. The church is in this way an ecumenical church.

Called, transformed and empowered by the Spirit of God, the church is to follow in the footsteps of Abraham and Jesus Christ.

To the extent that one's own culture has been estranged from God, distance from it is essential to Christian identity. The proper distance from a culture, however, does not take Christians out of that culture. Rather, they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their culture while the other remains firmly planted in it; they are responsible for it.

Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys; distance without belonging isolates. Distance from a culture must never degenerate into a flight from that culture. The church does not have its own culture, peculiar to itself; to be church is a way of living the life of the new creation in a culture and for a culture. The reign of God is not of this world, but it is in this world and for this world (cf. Jn 18.36).

Reconciled by the cross of Christ, Christians in a "world" of estranged and aggressive diversities are freed to go another way: a way that springs from and shows forth the forgiveness and love of God. They are called not to repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse (1 Pet 3.9). They cannot pray, "forgive us our debts", without forgiving those who are in their debt (Mt 6.12). The love of God strengthens them to love their neighbour, and shows them that "love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth" (1 Cor 13.6). Touched by a God who "makes his sun to shine on the evil and on the good", they may love even their enemies (Mt 5.44f.).

Sent by God, churches, in seeking to find harmony with others in the Spirit of love while remaining faithful to the gospel, must strive for justice and truth. A peace between ethnic groups without truth is a false peace; harmony without justice is an unjust harmony. Yet the search for truth and justice must be a common search in which all parties in conflict participate. If each ethnic group simply insists on its own account of truth and justice, conflict will continue. As each group seeks peace and communion with the other, each must not only be faithful to its own account of justice and truth but be willing to have these accounts corrected by the convictions of other groups.

For Reformed theology, the state is a gift of God, appointed to care for the various groups coexisting within its borders. It is called to promote peace and the common good on the basis of freedom and justice. To do this, it must restrain the powerful and defend the weak. It must restrict the power of the majority and protect minorities. This demands that the power of the state itself is controlled by the people. The church's task of witness includes its office as watchman or sentinel in relation to the state, for Christians can reckon the state as a just state only when it performs its task in a way that is analogous to God's saving justice. Inversely, the task of the state includes its responsibility for the freedom of the church to fulfil its own duties as a witness of God.

Challenges and tasks

At heart the Christian church is to be a welcoming and open community to all. It lives in the hope of joining in that "great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Rev 7.9) in the worship of the one who was slain to bring them peace.

Our churches are challenged to search the Scriptures and pray for God's guidance, opening themselves to new insights and honestly acknowledging where we have abused Scripture to justify ethnic prejudices.

Task: to develop prayers and liturgies that reflect ethnic diversity, and to incorporate in worship prayer for those with whom they are in ethnic conflict.

Our churches are challenged to reassess critically their own history and evaluate their own involvement in ethnic conflicts and in nationalistic desires for power. Self-criticism may take different shapes in different parts of the world. Where churches have been over-identified with their culture, they need to criticize the "paganism" in their Christianity. Where churches have been excessively distanced from their culture, they need to rediscover the richness of their lost and stolen heritage and find the courage to speak with their own voice.

Task: to support on all levels the exchange between peoples of different cultures and ethnic groups; to develop programmes through which church members can become politically and economically well-informed, historically aware and culturally sensitive, and can listen to the groups in conflict.

Our churches are challenged to help nurture people who, in the context of ethnic conflict, can imitate the self-giving love of Jesus Christ on the cross, people who can search for truth and justice in the light of their central belief that Christ died for us when we were still his enemies.

Task: to study the political significance of forgiveness.

Called to live as a prophetic sign of the new creation and servant of the reconciliation of God, our churches are challenged to confront structures and practices of economic, political, sexual, racial, ethnic and other kinds of oppression, recognizing the intersecting nature of these oppressions. They should carefully analyse conflicts which arise, paying special attention to those who are particularly vulnerable to the denial of political or economic power.

Task: to help church members to engage in the struggle for the rights of vulnerable groups; to train them in peace education and in how to act with ethnic minorities; and to encourage the media to present accurate and objective information.

The churches as sentinel are challenged to call governments to account; to represent peoples before governments, standing with and for them in their desire for peace and justice; and to oppose policies that produce victims of power.

Task: to encourage church members to act responsibly in politics; to support politicians who defend disadvantaged minority groups; and to be critical of groups and movements fighting for liberation that violate human rights.

The church is challenged to examine its relations with people of other faiths, moving beyond mere tolerance to creative dialogue with them. This is important whenever religion is mobilized in an ethnic conflict, especially when nation states seek to meet their need for legitimation by exploiting the beliefs and traditions of religious communities.

Task: to promote encounter with people of other faiths and to work with them for practical aims and a peaceful coexistence; to support non-church organizations working for the wellbeing of disadvantaged ethnic groups.

Confession

Standing in the tradition of the Barmen declaration, made in 1934 in the face of the demonic ethnicist National Socialism of that time, we invite the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and its member churches to affirm the following statement:

"You were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation" (Rev 5.9). "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3.28).

All the churches of Jesus Christ, scattered in diverse cultures, have been redeemed for God by the blood of the Lamb to form one multicultural community of faith. The "blood" that binds Christians together as brothers and sisters is more precious than the "blood" (the language, the customs, the political allegiances or economic interests) that may distinguish them or separate them from each other.

We reject the false doctrine, as though a church should place allegiance to the culture it inhabits or the nation to which it belongs above its commitment to brothers and sisters from other cultures and nations, servants of the one Jesus Christ, their common Lord, and members of God's new community.

Notes