Father Themistocles
is an inspiration to many people in many parts of the world.
He has led an extraordinarily colourful and rich life, one
that reflects his own colourful and buoyant personality.
Unfortunately, very little of his fascinating life is known
to people, who are usually aware only of his current passionate
commitment to serving the poor and oppressed in Africa.
But underlying this commitment is a wealth of experience
and knowledge that few of us can hope to match.
| I first came into contact with
Fr Themistocles as a theology student in Sydney over
ten years ago, where ‘Brother Themi’ (as
he was affectionately known to students) would guide
us through the intricacies of New Testament scholarship,
Hellenistic philosophy, the Hebrew language, and the
academic world in general. My friendship with Fr Themistocles
has continued to grow since then, and I have always
thought it worthwhile that the life and adventures
of ‘the polytropic Themi’ (to borrow a
phrase he likes to apply to his great mentor, the
apostle Paul) should be more readily known than they
presently are. I hope, therefore, that the interview
that follows goes some way towards fulfilling this
objective (though I also hope that a more detailed
account of Fr Themistocles’ life will someday
be written, preferably by Fr Themistocles himself). [1]
|
Fr Themistocles with former "Flies" band members, Ronnie Burns (left) and Hank Wallis (right). |
1. Childhood and family background
Your parents, both of whom were well-educated and multi-lingual,
immigrated from Alexandria (Egypt) to Melbourne (Australia) in 1956. How did
your parents handle life in Melbourne in those years?
Greeks immigrated to Australia from various parts of the
world. Most, of course, arrived from Greece, but there were
also Greeks of the 'diaspora' who were different from the
Greeks coming from Greece. For example, the Greeks of Egypt
were probably more educated and linguistically richer due
to the cosmopolitan life of Egypt at that time. So in a
sense my parents had difficulty identifying with the Greeks
that were already in Australia as well as with those coming
from Greece. They could only really relate to the Greeks
coming from Egypt or to other ethnic communities, such as
the French community. To some degree, therefore, my parents
were socially isolated. They did attempt to, as it were,
connect with the general Greek community, but the attempt
was fairly unsuccessful. At that time even the Greek Orthodox
church in Australia, except for its spiritual dimensions,
couldn’t really accommodate in its social thrust many
Greeks from Egypt. They were really the odd fish in the
pond.
Fr Themistocles with his father, Eleftherius, and mother, Helen. |
But to summarise, it was a nightmare for my parents in the beginning. One
has to understand that the Greeks who came from Egypt had
a comfortable middle-class existence, perhaps like the Greeks
living in Athens who were professors or judges. My mother,
for example, was a headmistress of a school, and my father
was already an author of a book and very successful in his
work in banking, with a double qualification in chemistry |
The tragedy I saw in my parents was that they went from being, as I can recall
as a young child, very happy-go-lucky and confident people
in Egypt, to being broken by a harsh Australian reality
that at that time could not differentiate between immigrants.
They were all lumped together as ‘the Greeks’.
And so my mother was forced for a while to work in factories,
which she did for a year or so, and my father became a labourer.
That broke them. I remember seeing my mother crying every
day. They went from living in a beautiful villa overlooking
the Mediterranean to one room housing all of us in St Albans.
[2]
So, we wondered why we came to Australia!
As a child I didn’t really appreciate the sacrifices
my parents had undertaken because, really, if they had stayed
in Alexandria their life would not have been much affected.
But they thought of the future of their children, and to
that degree they were right. There would not have been much
of a future in Alexandria.
Why was there not much of a future in Alexandria?
Egypt at the time was under the whimsical rule of King
Faruk, who was a playboy and a fairly corrupt leader.
[3] Naturally, the Egyptian people wanted a more accountable
government. And in their attempt to get rid of the monarchy,
somehow foreigners were identified with the monarchy and
the status quo. So, there was a purge of foreigners from
Egypt. The Greeks, however, were among the least to be affected,
but the writing was on the wall that the day would come
even for the Greeks – and that day did come.
So how did your parents find their feet again, so to
speak, after arriving in Australia?
Well, if you put a leopard among tigers eventually the leopard will be recognised
as a leopard. It was inevitable that their training and
learning would be recognised. It was a matter of time before
my mother was recognised by Melbourne University, and it
was a matter of time before my father’s qualifications
were recognised by local industries. So they both rose to
the level that they had achieved in Egypt. My mother became
a teacher at Presbyterian Ladies College, a very prestigious
girls’ private school in Melbourne, and my father
eventually became an industrial chemist. After a few years,
then, they managed to regain the social status they had
in Egypt.
What are some of your most vivid memories as a
child and teenager, particularly as you were growing up
in a multi-lingual home and, at the same time, in a society
which was struggling to come to terms with its new multicultural
character?
That's a very difficult question because there are
so many impressions one has. But perhaps my greatest angst
was to be Australian and somehow to discard my former 'Greekness',
or whatever one wants to call it. I was obsessed almost
with a rejection of what I thought was a socially undesirable
group of people at that time. If I had back then the Christian
outlook I now have, I would clearly have taken a different
approach.
But at the time when I was growing up in Australia, the
Greeks were often thought to be socially undesirable, they
were viewed as money conscious, they worked in Milk Bars
and small shops, they appeared to be the labourers of Australian
society, and I didn't wish to associate with that at the
time. Undoubtedly that was a wrong feeling to have, but
that was the thought of a teenager at the time.
You did your secondary education at Williamstown High School.
[4] Can you say something about your high school experience?
Well, it was interesting. Compared to the schools of Egypt, for example,
Williamstown High was an average government school which placed much stress
on sport. I was more gifted in the academic field and while I excelled in
this area, the high school culture was such that one’s popularity would be
based not so much on academic performance but rather on sporting performance.
And though I found it relatively easy to get good marks at school, I found
it very difficult to do well at sport – poor eyesight didn’t help. So I think
the highlight of my high school days was when I finally managed to get a game
with the school reserves football team!
2. University life
When and where did you begin your university studies?
What, then, was happening to your studies at university?
Well, compared to studying, say, Keynesian economics, the music world was
far more exciting. So I applied to defer my studies for one year, which then
became two years. After a very creative period playing music, I decided that
that kind of life would not be my permanent vocation. Since I already had
a university place, I thought that I ought not to lose it. I therefore decided
to return to university, but this time not to do accounting or commerce but
to do something more intellectually stimulating, for me, not necessarily for
others. So I took up a Bachelor of Arts course, studying philosophy, political
science, history – and that really challenged me.
What were some of the books and authors you were reading or influenced
by at this time?
Particularly in political science, I was coming more and more under the influence
of the New Left: Marcuse, Marx himself to some degree, and also the famous
intellectuals of the time, people like Christian Bay, who might not be well-known
nowadays, but was one of the first to talk about the university as the vehicle
of the values of the middle-class, and so he thought that no authentic, critical
thinking can come out of the universities.
[7]
The crucial question of the time was whether ideology ought to enter into
university studies (whether it be philosophy, politics,
literature, or something else), with some arguing that these
studies ought to be pursued in an objective or neutral manner,
in accordance with the principles of logical positivism
or behaviourism. The new school, however, was completely
undermining this idea of neutrality, arguing instead that
everybody has an agenda and that the university ought to
take up the Socratic role of being the outsider looking
onto society and freely expressing what it really saw. At
the same time there was the phenomenon of Timothy Leary,
a Harvard professor who was experimenting with hallucinogenic
substances (such as mescaline and LSD) as a path towards
spiritual consciousness [8] All these things together were fomenting in the late sixties
and early seventies, coupled with the beginnings of the
modern feminist movement (Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer
[9] , etc.). So all this was all around us at university.
I would even say that this was probably one of the most
creative intellectual periods of the twentieth century.
I was fortunate enough to be a part of it and undoubtedly
I was influenced by it. Even today I would say that my Christian
perspective is very much affected by issues of human rights,
issues of social justice, issues of toleration for minorities
and so forth, as opposed to extreme authoritarianism and
extreme conservatism, which I also see in Christianity.
So my brand of Christianity has very much been affected
by the sixties and seventies movements of social equality
and social justice, and these were influential in my decision
to serve in Africa.
What was your attitude towards God and religion during this time?
Like any ‘normal radical’, I believed that there was no God.
I was very much affected by the Nietzschean ‘God is
dead’ school, yet I could not see my way past the
following contradiction: on the one hand, I held to the
critique of rationalism, the idea being that there is only
a myth of rationality and that at bottom everything is subjective;
but on the other hand when it came to God I applied rational
critiques. That was my philosophical contradiction. The
perspective I had, then, was the traditionally Marxist view
that there was no God and that Christianity was basically
“the opium of the masses”, a tool of the bourgeoisie
to oppress the proletariat by the myth of the kingdom of
heaven.
Was it Marxism, therefore, that mainly shaped your thinking at this time?
No, it was eclectic. Marx was there somewhere in the background,
but there were other influences as well. The sixties and
seventies were not really about Marxism; they were an eclectic
critique of bourgeois society, and you drew from every possible
angle. You drew from Mahatma Gandhi, you drew even from
Jesus, you drew from Marx, you drew from Mao Tse-Tung. It
wasn’t just political, it was also philosophical –
you drew from Nietzsche, you drew from Proudhon, you drew
from Tolstoy, etc.
3. Conversion to Christianity
What was it that led you to consider God and religion in a new light?
A critique of society may lead eventually to introspection
and a critique of oneself. The changes in my understanding
of God and religion were initiated by the fact that, parallel
to political critiques of society, there were radical critiques
of conventional spirituality and the spiritual bankruptcy
of the time. The Vietnam War, of course, mobilized the critique
of society and its power elite structures (such as the military,
the corporations, and so forth). Another and more surprising
aspect of the New Left was its unlikely alliance with the
Timothy Leary group. Perhaps this was possible because we
were always open to new ideas and we were the ones most
likely to hear from people who were dissenting from the
established academy, from the established polity, from the
established society – anybody who was dissenting,
you wanted to know about them. That created what was known
as the ‘counter-culture’ movement, which would
draw inspiration from all sorts of places.
But Timothy Leary became the guru of a generation now ready to experiment
not only with political or philosophical concepts, but also
with religious concepts. Does religion have something to
say after all? What about the mystical experiences that
we had read about and heard about, whether they be in Buddhism,
such as in Tantric Buddhism, or whether they be the experiences
of medieval Christian monks and nuns, or whether they be
the experiences of the Hindu mystic? That brought a new
focus to some members of the New Left, who would now ask:
“We’ve seen what happens when we want to create
a new social reality, and we know what agenda to follow,
but what about this new spiritual quest that we’re
hearing about? Can there be something in that that we need
to know about and therefore incorporate in the new society
of the future?” We knew that women should have equal
rights, we knew that the environment should be kept unpolluted,
we knew that workers should have full control over their
destiny, we knew that there had to be equal distribution
of income – all these things we were aware of. But
we didn’t really understand how to draw the spiritual
radicalism that was now being spoken about into this synthesis
of the new eclectic and utopian society.
I myself was eventually drawn into this spiritual radicalism.
I wanted to know more about this new frontier. Was it true
what Nietzsche, Russell and the logical positivists had
told us, that there is no God? Was it true what the Marxists
told us, that the only reality we could know was political
reality? I personally was drawn towards exploring these
questions. In a way the New Left had its scouts to seek
out the new frontiers of reality and existence, and then
to report back and say, “Hey listen! This is good!
We need to incorporate a spiritual dimension into our utopian
society of the future.” So in a way I appointed myself
a spiritual scout to go and find out what exactly this was
all about. I began, then, to experiment with my concepts
of reality, questioning everything and seeing whether or
not there were truths in Buddhism, in Hinduism, and in Christianity.
I would therefore go to Hare Krishna temples and Hindu shrines,
I would explore transcendental meditation, and I would even
read St Augustine’s City of God and the Bible.
How, then, did you come to be a practising member of
the Christian church?
The discovery of Christ came during this period of experimentation, consciousness-alteration,
and self-analysis. Eventually, I underwent what you might
call a ‘Christian mystical experience’. But
I wasn’t looking for it, and by inclination I would’ve
preferred a Buddhist kind of explanation of reality, as
that would have fitted in much better with the culture and
trends of the day. But I found that this Christian experience
was overwhelming, and I really had no choice in the end
but to be honest to myself and to what I was feeling even
though it might not have been so popular among my peers.
So, through these ‘mystical experiences’, I
came to believe in Christianity as the authentic road to
God and the ultimate truth.
Given my background, I immediately turned to my peers on
the New Left with the pronouncement that Christ is the truth.
This, however, did not go down too well with them! But I
was coming from the perspective that this was a genuine
discovery, just as we had discovered, say, the writings
of Marcuse or Nietzsche or Marx. But at that time Christianity
was equated with the Methodist Church of Australia or the
Church of England or with churches that had a history of
oppression, and Christianity was also associated with such
things as holy wars and crusades. So I was really out on
a limb, but I didn’t let go. For I had found a side
of Christianity that seemed to be ignored – viz.,
the existential, mystical and sensitive side of Christianity.
But what led you to the Orthodox Church as opposed
to some other Christian denomination?
A sense of pity! Allow me to explain. I could not identify with the Greeks
of Australia at that time, as I mentioned earlier. I must
also mention that I was excelling academically at this time,
and I was awarded a position at Melbourne University as
a tutor in political science at the age of 22. I then decided
to go through the catalogue of churches to see which one
could really understand my experience. I was reading the
Bible, I began to sell my property and give to the poor,
and I was fascinated by the life of St Francis of Assisi.
As a sign that I had finally decided to follow the teachings
of Christ, as a final expression of my dedication to this
new-found philosophy (I didn’t want to call it ‘religion’,
given that word’s unfortunate connotations), I even
decided to give up my career as an academic at university.
Needless to say, my friends and relatives thought that there
was something going wrong.
Going through the different churches, I didn’t think
that the Greek Orthodox church could understand what I was
experiencing. I did speak to one or two Greek Orthodox priests
in Melbourne. In my broken Greek I would ask them about
God, only to be told, “Just leave God where he is!
Don’t concern yourself with these things!” It
seemed to me, therefore, that the Greek Orthodox church
of that time didn’t have a deep appreciation of God.
So I went to various other churches, and I found in the
Presbyterian church a fairly interesting group of people
who were willing to discuss God and to accommodate my past
experiences. Pretty soon I found myself not only accepted
by them, but even respected by them. It was at that point
that I questioned my identity: Given that I now believe
in God, why was I born a Greek? Why is it that God allowed
me to be baptized in the Greek Orthodox church? So I decided
to look afresh at the whole phenomenon of Orthodoxy.
I can now return to my earlier statement that I joined
the Orthodox church out of pity. What I mean by this is
that what I saw at that time (I’m talking now of the
early seventies) in the Greek Orthodox church led me to
pity it – for there was no teaching of Christ, there
were no Sunday schools in the local parishes, and there
were no youth groups or Bible study groups. The church was
basically an ethnic enclave of immigrants who were rejected,
by and large, by Australian society, coming together on
Sundays to find a common identity not so much as Christians,
but as Greeks. That, of course, did not appeal to me at
all, but I felt sorry for them in the sense that I, from
my own limited experience as a Christian, knew more of the
Bible than these people who had been Christians all their
lives. I particularly felt sorry for the youth. So I asked
the local Greek Orthodox priest to allow me to be part of
the church. Of course, being Greek gave me automatic entry.
There were no questions such as, “Have you found God?
Do you believe in such-and-such?” It was more like,
“If you’re Greek, you belong here”. I
also asked my priest whether I could lead a Sunday school,
which he allowed. Suddenly I found myself teaching the youth
of the Greek church – I who only a year or so ago
was an atheist. Eventually, of course, the pity turned to
a better appreciation of the history of the Orthodox church
and its theological relevance and depth.
What was happening academically at this time –
did you return to your university position?
No, I decided that I needed to stop being an academic because I considered
that to be a vanity of vanities. I decided therefore to
immerse myself amongst the common people, so to speak. My
New Left tendency was to identify with the oppressed and
now I found myself in a church amongst people who, on a
social level, were the oppressed of Australia – they
were the factory workers, the petty shop owners, etc. And
so here I was, a former university tutor, now mingling and
identifying myself completely and in total solidarity with
people who were primary school dropouts. But I felt inside
a great sense of well-being that I was identifying with
them.
I was considering, however, doing a course in medicine
or education, as I wanted at this stage to reject my political
background and to become a useful member of society. I decided
to enroll in a Master of Education, which would allow me
to work with immigrants as a teacher or to do some kind
of work helping immigrant children within the Ministry of
Education. Even though I was admitted into the Masters program,
I thought I was being too vain and not humble enough, and
so after about two weeks I dropped out of the program and
took up a Diploma of Education [10] – not a Diploma of Education
for high school teaching, as I considered high schools to
be elitist, but a Diploma of Education for teaching at technical
schools, since they catered for the working-class.
[11] So there was always this New Left identification
with the working-class.
Did you end up teaching?
Yes, after I finished my Diploma I began working at Richmond Technical School.
From there I went to Essendon Technical School and then
to Preston Technical School. Those people who know Melbourne
would understand immediately that these schools are situated
in the heartlands of the working-class.
But given that I had now committed myself to Christ, I
felt that I had to proclaim this, for as the New Testament
says, “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will
also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever
disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father
in heaven” (Matthew 10:32-33). And so it became a
struggle of trying to keep my position as a legitimate teacher
in government schools while also acknowledging Christ in
the classroom and the staff room. I therefore incurred the
wrath of the administration of these schools, who reminded
me that these are secular schools and that I had no right
to speak about Jesus in the classroom. I, however, continued
what I was doing, for otherwise I would have seen it as
a denial of Christ, and as a result I found myself being
transferred from school to school, eventually ending up
at Lalor High School. But in the end I had to resign, as
I found it impossible to continue teaching while having
my freedom of speech restrained in this way.
And what did you do then?
At this stage I felt it was time to do theology, to take
a more intellectual approach to God, rather than just having
an emotional affiliation with a people who were downtrodden.
I wanted to know more about this God I had experienced.
So I took up studies in a Catholic theological school, mainly
because there were no Orthodox seminaries in Australia at
that time. We had at this stage a new Greek Orthodox Archbishop
of Australia, His Eminence Stylianos [12] , who was sympathetic to my need to study
theology and who advised me to study in a Catholic seminary
in Melbourne called Corpus Christi College. Over the next
few years I studied theology there and was exposed to Catholic
spirituality, Catholic organization, Catholic theology,
and Jesuit intellectualism. It was fairly contagious and
from then on my love for theology just blossomed. Subsequently
I went to the United States to study at Holy Cross
[13], where
I completed a Master of Theological Studies while concurrently
studying at Harvard Divinity School, and then I undertook
a Master of Theology at Princeton Divinity School. And finally
I completed a PhD at Brown University.
4. Doctoral research
The title of your PhD thesis was Endurance,
Greek and Early Christian: The Moral Transformation of the
Greek Idea of Endurance, From the Homeric Battlefield to
the Apostle Paul. Can you say something about how the
idea of endurance, as it was understood by the ancient Greeks,
was transformed in the hands of the apostle Paul?
I might begin by pointing out that, for some time, it was widely thought
that the military metaphors and the military language found
in the New Testament were adopted from the Old Testament.
The spokesman of this view was Adolf von Harnack, the eminent
German theologian of the early twentieth century. [14] When I was at Brown I came under the influence
of what was known as ‘the Yale school of Pauline studies’.
This was comprised of scholars such as Abraham Malherbe [15] and Wayne Meeks
[16] from Yale, Stanley Stowers from Brown [17] , and many others, who were
arguing in the mid-eighties that we need to understand Paul
from a Greek philosophical background. This view wasn’t
new, it had already been defended by the Germans, but it
had been ignored. At Yale, then, there was a resurgence
in the attempt to examine the Greek philosophical background
to the New Testament, and this also made an impact at Brown
through Stowers, who was a student of Malherbe.
The view, in outline, went like this: Paul was a Jew, but
in essence he grew up in a Greek environment. And while
he was trained by rabbi Gamaliel [18] , it is necessary to understand
that even Israel, or Roman Palestine at that time, was far
more Greek than we thought. The writings of Martin Hengel
had already suggested this.
[19] So this dichotomy, exemplified by the entries
in Kittel’s New Testament Dictionary [20] , was now being exploded by the Yale school, which was arguing
that it is artificial to speak of Greek versus Hebrew, that
the Hellenistic period was a synthesis of all currents,
and that the Greek current was just as vivid in Palestine
as was the Hebraic current. Look, for example, at the names
of the high priests – they are Greek names.
My PhD thesis, which was very much influenced by the Yale school, was intended
as a critical examination of von Harnack’s understanding
of Paul. My aim was to criticize Harnack by showing, clearly
I hope, that the concept of υπομονη
[21] iin Paul, when used in a military context, finds
its natural locale in a Hellenistic philosophical setting
such as the Cynic philosophical writings of that period.
The conclusion of my thesis, then, was that ‘endurance’
is a Greek idea which starts with Homer as a philosophical
concept and eventually finds its way into Paul’s writings.
But the essential difference between the Cynics and Paul
is that endurance for the Cynic philosopher is something
achieved by him, by his own training, whereas for Paul it
is not achieved through one’s own training, but is
a gift of God in Christ.
What was the academic environment or culture like at Brown during your
doctoral studies in the 1980s?
Compared to the late sixties and seventies, when I was doing my undergraduate
studies, I found that the idealism of the earlier decades
had now gone away. Students at university, certainly in
the Ivy League schools (such as Harvard and Brown), were
there to get a career, whether it be an academic career,
a business career or some other career; they weren’t
there to critique society or to critique capitalism. It
had become a very conservative period. Nevertheless, I found
the intellectual standards very high. At Harvard and at
Brown the level of intellectual sophistication was probably
the highest I have ever encountered.
5. Kenya and Africa
You have, for several years now, been involved in missionary
work in Kenya, but what led you to take an interest in Kenya in the first
place?
Fr Themistocles during a service in Kenya. | I had been involved so much in the academic world by this
stage – in fact, I had been involved in the academic world
nearly all my life. In Sydney I was teaching at St Andrew’s [22] , but I also had some lecturing
appointments at Macquarie University and the University
of Sydney. But I suppose things come in cycles in my life,
where I go through almost a burnout period, and in this
case I began questioning the purpose and motivation of the
academic life, particularly with respect to theology. I
wondered whether being a practitioner of theology was better
than being a theoretician of theology. I remembered the
words of Plutarch, who in his Life of Alexander writes that
Alexander was once asked, “Who would you rather be
Alexander, Homer or Achilles?” And he replied, “Undoubtedly,
I would rather be Achilles, because while Homer thought
about it and wrote about it, Achilles did it.” So
I sort of had my Achilles period, where instead of just
talking, writing or even teaching about it, it was about
time somebody did it. |
I was, I must confess, influenced by Mother Teresa, who
by all accounts was not an academic or systematic theologian,
and yet of all the theologians I know none of them has had
as great an impact on world history as her. I was engrossed,
of course, in theological and particularly early Christian
research, but the impact I was making through this work
was minimal. I grew dissatisfied therefore with my situation
and decided to make a radical break. I guess it wasn’t
difficult for me to make radical changes in my life, because
from the very beginning I would go through periods of questioning
and rejecting the past for the sake of a new future –
it happened in the seventies, it happened in the eighties,
and now it was happening in the nineties, where I needed
a new direction. Through Mother Teresa’s influence
(though I never met her), I decided to apply theology in
a practical context, to become the Achilles of theology.
And since I was born in Africa, I sensed it was God’s
purpose for me to return there. I chose Kenya specifically
because I knew there was a seminary in Nairobi, and I thought
that I may as well continue with my theology but now in
a Third World setting. Once again there was a need to identify
with the oppressed, but now on a grand scale.
Can you briefly describe the kind of work you are now
doing in Kenya?
As a priest, part of my work involves conducting liturgies
and preaching in various parishes in Kenya. But my work
also involves fighting poverty, and this is done by empowering
the local people, by training them – in other words,
charity through empowerment, or as the old cliché
puts it, “You can give a man a fish, but it is better
to teach him how to fish”. We try, therefore, not
to repeat the mistakes of the charity of imperialism or
neo-colonialism, according to which I give you food so that
you can depend on me. Our aim, rather, is to teach people
how to get their own food. I thought therefore that for
the Orthodox mission in Kenya to succeed we would need to
set up structures of empowerment. And so with the help of
God and the blessings of the local archbishop (Makarios),
I set up a school for women who were unemployed, to give
them tailoring and dressmaking skills so that they would
not need to sell themselves in order to feed their children.
This was followed by the establishment of a computer school
for unemployed youth, then a pre-school and a primary school
which take in children from the slum areas and give them
a free education, free food and free clothing. Eventually
I also established a teacher’s college where we train
young people who hitherto could not afford to attend university
(due to prohibitive fees), and we charge them minimal or
no fees at all. And now I am in the process of creating
a nursing and pharmacy school.
6. Poverty and Theology
In a brochure on your philanthropic program in Kenya (entitled
“Charity Through Education”), you write:
A depressing spectre is currently haunting our planet.
This spectre is Third World Poverty. This is the most destructive, urgent
and bewildering paradox facing our globe. While a small minority of humans
on the planet live more or less in a fantasy world of material prosperity
and comfort, the overwhelming majority are experiencing life on the basis
of an uncertain and painful day to day existence.
Some statistics might help to reinforce your point. It is estimated that
30,000 children die from poverty each day. World trade has
increased tenfold since 1970, and more food is produced than
ever before; but the number of people going hungry in Africa
has more than doubled. The three richest people in the world
control more wealth than all 600 million people in the world’s
poorest countries. To put in place a system of universal primary
education, ensuring that all boys and girls complete primary
schooling, would cost $10 billion a year, less than the U.S.
spends on ice cream.
[23] The list could go on and on. You, of course,
witness such injustice and poverty on a daily basis, as your
Philanthropic Centre is situated in one of the most economically
disadvantaged areas of Nairobi. What do you think has brought
about massive poverty in African countries like Kenya?
World poverty is a huge topic, and what causes poverty
in Africa may well be different from what causes poverty
in, say, Asia. Looking at the history of modern Africa,
one obtains some clues as to what it is that has caused
that region to be one of the most disadvantaged economic
regions of the world. There are many factors contributing
to poverty in Africa. One would be colonialism: the colonialists
divided Africa along geographical lines, rather than ethnographic
lines; they were creating political unities which, by ethnographic
criteria, could not work. It would be like placing Greece,
Turkey and Syria into one block and calling that a ‘country’,
but whether or not the Greeks and the Turks will get along
and whether or not the Turks and the Kurds will get along
is deemed irrelevant. The colonialists, similarly, were
only interested in dividing the land of Africa into neat
geographical parcels. I suspect that one of the reasons
behind the social disturbances in Africa right now is directly
linked to the artificial boundaries that were imposed during
the colonial period. So that’s one reason that must
seriously be taken into account when attempting to fight
poverty.
Another reason is, unfortunately, the tribalism and corruption that occurs
in sub-Saharan Africa, which to some degree is a natural
progression from the colonial period. For if one tribe is
more dominant than another in some particular region that
might be dubbed a ‘political unity’ (e.g., Uganda,
Cameroon, etc.), the dominant tribe will seek to have its
own leader in power and to only assist its own people. And
this leads to the problem of tribalism, which to some extent
is the product of colonialism. So, the people of Africa
might be independent of the white man, but the legacies
of the colonial period are still with them. Also, independence
has come to Africa only within the last fifty years, and
so a lot of money has come into the hands of people who
hitherto were not handling large sums of money. The temptation,
therefore, is to use this money in a selfish rather than
an altruistic or patriotic way, to put one’s own interests
before the interests of one’s country.
Furthermore, in some parts of Africa the natural terrain
and climate is not on their side, as in Chad and Niger,
which have a hot, dry climate. On the other hand, most African
countries have very fertile soil and are rich in minerals
– the Congo, for example. Yet the Congo is currently
under very serious economic and political distress.
In short, then, there are a variety of factors responsible
for poverty in Africa. All we can do is to fight poverty
a step at a time, particularly by education. For it is through
education that we can instill a new attitude in people,
that we can instill concepts of fair play, morality, and
transparency to young children, who will hopefully carry
this with them for the rest of their lives. Education is
certainly one of the most important ways of transforming
society, but it has to be education with morality. That
is where we as a Christian church can play a very important
role in the transformation of the Third World into an economically
viable society that has, at the same time, a sound moral
underpinning.
As part of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty,
Nelson Mandela said at Trafalgar Square in February 2005
that, “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not
natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated
by the actions of human beings.” Do you agree that,
just as we have made slavery and apartheid ‘history’
(more or less), it is reasonable to expect that poverty
can also be made a thing of the past? Or is poverty an inescapable
feature of the human predicament?
Jesus’ perspective on this matter is somewhat pessimistic,
as he said that “The poor you will always have with
you” (Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7; cf. John 12:8). But
I don’t think that Jesus here had in mind nations
that are thoroughly poor. Rather, I think what he meant
was that in any society you will have some poor people,
but not necessarily the majority. We can therefore say that
we can and should fight poverty, that it is part of the
teachings of Christ himself, who identified with the poor
– “I was hungry and you gave me something to
eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink”
(Matthew 25:35). I would say that any Christian who believes
seriously in the words of Christ has a moral obligation
to fight poverty. So I think (mass) poverty can be fought
and hopefully we might eventually be able to eradicate it;
but at the moment I cannot say when.
The imperative to eradicate poverty is, of course,
one of the great themes of liberation theology, which grew
out of the barrios or slums of Latin America. Given your
New Left background, do you have any sympathies with liberation
theology, particularly with its call to the church to become
engaged in a revolutionary struggle on behalf of the poor?
I am drawn to some degree to the writings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian pedagogist
who speaks about the empowerment of the dispossessed through
education. [24] However, I cannot agree with the idea of
violent overthrow of government – on this matter I
am more of a pacifist, adhering to the words of Jesus that
“all who draw the sword will die by the sword”
(Matthew 26:52). I think that we can transform society through
the education system. In fact, as Max Weber pointed out,
once the charismatic leader of a revolution has passed away,
you witness the ‘routinization’ of the revolution,
and then the revolution itself becomes the status quo and
you have a new elite. You can see this, for example, in
the Soviet Union and in China. For a revolution, therefore,
to be successful, it must be generational, it has to transform
a whole generation of people and the way they think, and
not only one generation but perhaps two or three. So the
transformation of any society in a positive direction should
come through education and by drawing awareness to social
injustice, the oppression of people, the need for justice
and equality, but also the need to understand the spiritual
dimensions of the human being.
The so-called ‘father of liberation theology’, Gustavo Gutiérrez, has
stated that, whereas the focus of western theologians has been the question
of how to speak of God in a secular or unbelieving world, the task facing
Latin American theologians is how to speak of God to the ‘nonperson’, by which
he means those who are not considered fully human by the present social order
– for example, the exploited classes, marginalized ethnic groups, and of course
the poor. As Gutiérrez puts it, “Our question is how to tell the nonperson,
the nonhuman, that God is love, and that this love makes us all brothers and
sisters.” [25] Do
you find yourself in this situation in Kenya?
To begin with, I cannot agree with the anthropological
category of the ‘nonperson’. I would prefer
to approach the matter from the Christian anthropological
perspective that all humans are made in the image and likeness
of God, and that there is no such thing as a ‘nonperson’.
But having said that, and having accepted the unfortunate
reality of the oppressed in our societies, particularly
in the Third World, I would say that Gutiérrez is
right in the sense that we do not address a secular society.
A lot of the topics I would deal with in an Australian seminary
– such as issues in biblical archaeology, whereby
one attempts to support the historicity of the Bible through
archaeological artefacts and data – don’t appear
to be so important to seminarians in Africa, for whom the
historicity of Jesus or the Bible is not an issue. We are
not dealing there with a secular phenomenon as much as we
are in the First World. Certainly, the major problem we
face is preaching to people who are suffering and disenfranchised
by society, and giving them a sense of dignity and empowerment.
A further theme in liberation theology is ‘God’s
preferential option for the poor’, the idea that,
although God loves all people, he identifies and sides with
the poor in a special way. This is not to say that the poor
are somehow morally or spiritually better than the rest,
but that God always sides with the poor against those who
seek to exploit and dehumanise them. Is this a view you
hold yourself, and if so, what implications do you think
this has for Christian missionaries in poor countries –
for example, does it merely entail living in solidarity
with the poor or does it entail something stronger, such
as the attempt to transform or revolutionise society?
I think all theology has to be evaluated eventually in
the light of the Bible, particularly the New Testament.
And it does appear quite clearly in the words of Jesus and
in the writings of St Paul that there is almost a preferential
treatment of the poor in the love of God. The poor themselves,
however, might be against God, or might lead a life that
is far away from God, or might turn away from God the minute
they achieve economic independence. Nevertheless, it remains
the case that God’s love of the poor is a firm principle
of the New Testament, and in the case of exploitation it
is clear from the New Testament that the exploited (regardless
of whether they are pious or not, or Christian or not) are
always favoured by God. Given these theological principles,
my main goal in the projects I have been privileged to run
in Kenya is to transform the poor that I come in contact
with by empowering them through accessible and free education.
Do you think that in time there will arise in
Africa a truly indigenous Christian theology that is quite
different from the kind of Christianity you have lived and
experienced in the western world?
Yes, but not completely different because Christianity
has certain non-negotiable elements. However, having taught
theology both in the First World and in the Third World,
one of the major differences I have noticed in the theological
institutions of the two regions (and here I will use the
example of the seminary we have in Nairobi) may be put in
terms of demographics: unlike seminarians in the First World,
the typical African theology student does not come from
a middle-class background, is likely to have suffered greatly
early on in life, and probably comes from a very poor background.
And so for an African student to understand the crucifixion
or the pain of Christ is not such a great leap of faith
as it would be for a middle-class Greek boy from Melbourne
or Sydney studying theology, or a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
from Baltimore studying theology in a New York seminary.
To that degree African theology has an advantage over its
First World counterparts, for it lives in a crucified context
and thus the theology of the Cross is very much an existential
as opposed to a merely theoretical reality.
7. Australia and Orthodoxy
Although you now live in Kenya, you return to Australia
every year for a few months at a time. During these return trips to Australia,
what kinds of things strike you or make an impression on you?
The first thing I notice when I return to Australia from
my experiences in the slums of Nairobi, having lived
there for ten months of the year, is the relative
wealth of Australia. Other things that strike me include
the cleanliness of the streets, the order of society,
and the efficiency of government offices. On the other
hand, upon my return I am also affected by the triviality
and superficiality of conversation. People seem to
be very much interested in the latest football results
or the England vs Australia cricket scores, when the
world I know of is crowded with people suffering from
AIDS, with people who are not sure whether there will
be any food the next day or whether tomorrow they
will be kicked out of the bungalow or tin shed they
live in because the landlord is impatient with them.
So, coming back to Australia is always a double-edged
sword for me: on the one hand, I feel relieved to
be back amongst the comforts of the First World, but
on the other hand, I feel troubled and discomfort
at the superficiality of many of the concerns of the
average person.
Since you first left for Kenya nearly ten years ago, have
you noticed any significant changes in Australian society?
I have noticed some social changes. I see, for example,
a far greater tolerance toward European migrants, whereas
twenty or so years ago it was not easy to be Greek or Italian
in Australia. I have noticed, however, that there is some
bias against Asian immigrants, and there certainly appears
to be a complete turnaround against the Islamic community.
These are some changes I have seen in popular opinion. On
another level, on the level of the mass media, I see in
the reporting of the news an almost complete absence of
a critical analysis of Australian society. The media is
no longer acting as a social critic, but is going down the
American path (in contrast, I might add, to the European
media) of almost embracing the official policies of the
time. Another change I’ve noticed, this time in the
area of entertainment or popular culture, is a thorough
decline in morality: what was completely unacceptable on
television ten or so years ago, is no longer so. Right now
anything goes. In particular, the preoccupation with the
flesh, with nudity, with physical appeal and with youth
is almost obsessive. I see that as a decline in our moral
standards.
