A time to speak?
Rev'd Dr Peniel Rajkumar, USPG's Global Theologian
Amidst the escalating violence in Ukraine, it has been hard to miss how certain countries and churches have politically employed their speech, or alternatively, their silence. Whether one speaks in contexts such as these are often tragic revelations of how political expediencies can shape one’s ethics.
In her book, Listening to Grassshoppers, the Indian author Arundhati Roy calls attention to the 'theft of language'. What she implies is a technique where the powerful usurp words like progress, freedom and justice and deploy them like weapons ‘to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant’. According to Roy, 'This language heist may be the key to our undoing'. Such language heists seem rife both amidst the empire and the ecclesia.
Words can often act as a window to one’s identity. There is a certain theological dimension to this. In the very first chapter of Genesis, the identity of God as the ‘God of life’ is revealed through God’s words. If we trace the subsequent development of this link, political implications emerge. The life-giving word mentioned in Genesis assumes an identity in John’s gospel as the incarnate Word (logos) and chooses to pitch its tent among human beings in an act of radical solidarity. The political nature of this solidarity becomes more specific in Hebrews when Jesus chooses to suffer outside the city gates – itself a space invested with political meaning, signifying exclusion and execution by the empire. To take sides is integral to the economy of the divine Word. In the context of the current world (dis)order it may be worth questioning where our words have pitched their tents today.
The politics of speech is also related to the politics of silence. Often we seek to make a virtue out of silence in an indiscriminate manner. Once someone told me that the church’s political vocation was not so much to raise its voice as it was to be silent. A connection was made between Christian silence and the Sabbath which eluded my comprehension.
Genesis chapter two, which introduces the concept of the Sabbath, can offer counter-intuitive insights to such arguments in the light of God’s silence. Given that all that God did so far was to ‘speak’, when the text states that God refrained from work on the seventh day, what seems implied is that God was silent. An important aspect of this ‘silence of God’ is that God could afford to be silent because God saw that ‘everything was very good’. In a context where everything is ‘very good’, silence can be a hallowing act. However, the strategic silence of the powerful in the face of violence and violation of the powerless is morally dubious.
Not every silence has moral credibility. Often, the test of this credibility lies in why and when one refuses to speak, and what it does to one’s self-interests. In the context of the present politics of silence and speech, one wonders whether moral leadership today means mastering the art of refusing to engage with our conscience!