This writing does not aim to be a direct response to Pope Francis’ jubilee proposal to “forgive the debts of countries that will never be able to repay them”. However, we do agree that many countries in the so-called “Third World” should have their debts to rich Western nations and transnational finance capital like the IMF and World Bank canceled and freed from their suffering. I also recognize that the decolonialism and post-colonialism arguments are convincing, not only in terms of the origins of that debt, which is rooted in colonialism, but also in the fact that we are still suffering from its effects today.
In the case of South Korea, it has been 70 years since the end of Japanese colonialism, but the remnants are far from being liquidated, and this is clearly experienced in the current situation where the former colonial collaborators, dressed up as anti-communists during the US military regime, still wield economic and political power. Here, the Korean Catholic Church has a shameful history of being an active pro-Japanese collaborator under the colonialism succeeded by its pro-American anti-communist, helping to establish a unitary goverment in South
Korea and the subsequent division of the country. Not only in Korea, but in many countries in Asia that experienced colonization, the Catholic Churches were not on the side of the people and their nation, but rather in the pocket of the colonizing power. With this in mind, I would like to reflect a theological issue related to that, more specifically, the implications of Christian eschatology as a possible obstacle to liberation. I will do this by discussing briefly the theology of Fr. Tomas Halik, an internationally renowned Czech theologian.
Last year, Woori Theology Institute (WTI) in Seoul which I belong to jointly organized a nationwide lecture tour by Fr. Halik, who has several books translated into Korean already for the Korean audience including Catholics. I had the opportunity to coordinate the event in which I shared and examined his theology firsthand. I remember him describing himself as “not an optimist, but a man of hope” and emphasizing that there is always hope, even when things are difficult. WTI organized a study group of his four books translated into Korean before his lecture in Seoul so that more members could understand his talk better.
On the day of the lecture, around 100 people attended it, and I could feel the enthusiasm from the participants’ active response, so I felt encouraged after a long time since the Covid-19 outbreak. However, during the study group and the lecture, I felt that the ‘hope’ that Fr. Halik emphasizes underlies his eschatological tendencies, which made me feel a little heavy instead of lighthearted. Of course, the hope was certainly not ‘let’s just wait and see’ attitude, and there was also a practical aspect in which he suggested his own methodology to make the church in crisis into a mature Christianity by actively participating in the synod as a ‘synodal journey’ promoted by Pope Francis. He also distinguished that the modern church must be ‘vigilant not to become a belligerent institution by resisting the temptation of triumphalism in the Middle Ages or modern imperialism’, perhaps conscious of the burden of such eschatology.
His intention to remind me that such hope is not derived from the struggle for a ‘heavenly triumphant church’ normally seen in the medieval era, is justified, and his theological and practical proposals certainly have a different appeal from other theologians. However, his proposals were largely ceremonious and it was not clear what he would do or how he would do it. At the risk of being overly ambitious, if not a kind of “torture by hope” that invites us to ignore the suffering of the present in favor of a hope for a future that never comes, Fr. Tomas Halik describes Christianity as being in the afternoon of its waning days, in a time of crisis.1)
One is left wishing that the book had gone further to ask what God’s people, especially the laity, should do and how they should strive to accomplish it.
The “Church militant” (no.7), which has traditionally been circulated in ecclesiastical area, but which Fr. Halik seems to be quoting from Pope Francis’ papal exhortation ‘Rejoice and Be Glad’ (Gaudete et Exsultate), is not to be understood in an apocalyptic way, but rather as a “struggling Church” that is focused on “moving forward day by day” (no.7) in order to transform church structures and the entire life of the church into a collaborative process.
I have critically approached Tomas Halik’s theological tendencies above, especially his theological idea of ‘eschatological hope’. there is a difference between not giving up hope and enduring for an unclear future rather than overcoming the root causes of suffering of the ‘here and now’, and in that sense I was wary of his theology seen as a message of the latte. It was because I wanted to remind us of our possible enslavement to the idol of material things under neoliberalism, which forces us to sell human bodies and souls as commodities. Clearly, the Christian faith is incompatible with the current capitalism driven by neoliberalism, which makes “structural sin” inevitable by making unlimited competition and commodification its inherent self-logic. The God of liberation, experienced through individual and collective efforts to overcome it, should be the ALL Forum’s understanding of God and its confession of faith. The realization of “hope” should be the daily striving for a good heart and a true life in solidarity with those who suffer, which is incompatible with the current capitalist system imposed by neoliberalism. From this perspective, the ‘abolition of debts’ is not just a charity or forgiveness of Western fund, but a path to liberation from the idol of money, a right as it should be, and a defense of human dignity.*
Ref:
1. See especially Chapter 6, “Darkness at Noon”, in his recently published book, The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change, University of Notre Dame Press, 2024. Here Halik addresses the current crisis in Christianity in light of church history.
