Collaborating with subalterns: dialectical explorations for a just and inclusive church
Eapen, Viji Varghese
(2023)
Collaborating with subalterns: dialectical explorations for a just and inclusive church.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
This thesis argues that a dialectical methodology that acknowledges subaltern primacy while permitting non-subalterns to collaborate with them can make subaltern discourses theologically and politically inclusive while retaining their methodological exclusivity. This methodology could shape the contours of a subaltern public church as a just and inclusive church that engages with secular counter-publics in effectively resisting caste and other forms of discrimination.
It proposes a co-constitutive epistemology that combines subalternity and human dignity; human dignity via negativa is exploitation and via positiva is affirmation. Subalternity and human dignity function as both exclusive and shared epistemai. Further, it suggests a subaltern and non-subaltern ‘deep-rooted solidarity’, shaped by biographical-intellectual, universal-particular, and sacred-secular dialectics. Moreover, it conceptualises subalterns and non-subalterns in sacred and secular publics as political subjects collaborating to achieve and preserve human dignity as a counter-hegemonic political task.
This dialectical and political engagement necessitates churches to practice a subaltern ressourcement hermeneutics that retrieves subaltern memories as agential resources. The subaltern ressourcement of memories, which offer a living vision for the renewal of ‘common sense’ that is hegemonically shaped by oppressive metanarratives based on caste and other factors that deny the liturgical life-world — the service of public work within and without the churches — enriches the secular and theological explorations regarding subaltern hermeneutics. Consequently, this thesis proposes subaltern public church with its politurgy, that is, liturgy as political enactment, and shaped by its dialectical and political ecclesiology, as a just and inclusive church that is subjective-collaborative, affirmative-transformative, narrative-enactive, and inclusive-subversive.
Drawing insights from subaltern, public, and political theological discourses, particularly from Ethna Regan’s theological engagement with human rights, this thesis enhances subaltern discourses in India to be dialectically collaborative and politically co-liberative, a distinct approach. It envisions a communion of political subjects who collaborate to transform ad intra and ad extra church just and inclusive.