Culture-Specific and Cosmopolitan Aspects of Christian Coexistence. A Postcolonial Perspective on Ecumenical Relations

Abstract

This article wants to shed light on some of the cultural complexities of the ecumenical movement by putting it in conversation with postcolonial theory. It argues that the academic discourse of postcolonial theory and the ecclesial movement of ecumenism are siblings of sorts in as much as they both deal with the lingering consequences of past violence and with the tensions between particularity and universality. A growing awareness of the problem of postcolonial conditions in the ecumenical movement is briefly documented with reference to the journal VOICES/VOCES and Simón Pedro Arnold’s suggestion of an ‘inter theology’ sensitive to the power dynamics and cultural intermingling in global Christianity. In a similar vein, Claudia Jahnel is arguing for an intercultural theology that takes processes of hybridization seriously and therefore needs to develop forms of ‘vernacular ecumenism’. It is an ecumenism that materializes in countless Christian migrant communities around the globe. To understand and recognize the complexities in these postcolonial Christian identity formations, some kind of ‘cosmopolitan ecumenism’, as André Munzinger calls it, needs to be developed. This way, hybrid cultural and theological formations can be recognized, and hegemonic universalisms resisted.