Networking

Our Discussions Retraced, Our Challenges Ahead

Abstract

From these papers we can recognise four ongoing paradigm shifts, namely:
1) From faith seeking understanding to faith seeking transformative understanding.
2) A movement towards Empathy, Vulnerability, “Ubuntu”, that is, to relational responsibility.
3) It is becoming clear that inter-disciplinarity is not enough – the process is more than the content.
4) And finally, the question arises: can contextual theologies be understood and practised only in seminaries, or do we need to live and experience people at the edge of society - for instance in India theology students would not live isolated in seminaries but in contexts, with living in tribal communities perhaps, then moving on to more Hindu environments and so on to other related contexts.
Also, in reflecting on God’s mission, we are being drawn to a new way of listening, to “transformative listening”. Here faith seeking justice, equality, and harmony are at the heart of our theologizing in each and every context. This leads us to appreciate diversity, which in turn necessarily leads to a transformation of our systems and structures.