Relation without Relation

Illustrations

Tables

Table 6.1. The saving significance of Jesus in relation to other faiths

Table 6.2. Different models of pluralistic interfaith dialogue

Introduction

People still ask, “When will you go back to your homeland?” I have no answer, because I have no homeland to return to. I must find a way to make my dream a reality, and to help make this nation a promised land, where all kinds of people, small or tall, black and white, yellow or brown, male or female, can live in harmony.

–Jung Young Lee, “A Life In-Between: A Korean-American Journey”

In 2006, the year I began graduate study at Emmanuel College in the Toronto School of Theology, the United Church of Canada (UCC) declared at its 39th General Council that the “church must be intercultural.”¹ That vision was compelling to me and became the focus of my studies. As a member of a racial minority living in Canada, I often found myself feeling like a stranger in a largely Caucasian denomination. Once, I had even been advised by my Presbytery Pastoral Relations Committee to leave my Pastoral Charge; a committee member could see no way to reconcile a conflict which seemed to be related to my being of a different culture from that of the community and in particular from one family who had exercised power in the congregation for many years. I was concerned about the management of the pastoral charge, so I decided to strengthen the congregants and empower them to take on shared leadership roles. This way of doing ministry was not agreeable to the family, so they complained to the higher church courts. Upon hearing the complaint, the Presbytery and Conference took the easy way out: dismiss the newly settled pastoral staff. As soon as the people of the pastoral charge heard I was being dismissed, every member except the complainant’s family petitioned the Presbytery and Conference to rescind this action. In the process, the members empowered themselves to take responsibility for the mission of God in their own context. This experience enhanced my awareness of issues in church life, such as power, prejudice, racism, and attitudes towards difference. In this context, when I heard of the vision to be an intercultural church, I hoped it might address some of the realities I had experienced in my pastoral ministry. My painful experience led me to claim the church’s vision as my own.

Initiated by the Ethnic Ministries Unit of the General Council of the UCC, the vision was for a church “where there is mutually respectful diversity and full and equitable participation of all Aboriginal, Francophone, ethnic minority, and ethnic majority constituencies in the total life, mission, and practices of the whole Church.”² It imagined a church where all people, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, would be invited to participate equally in the building of mutual relations in its life and work. While the statement of its vision to become an intercultural church is exciting, there has been little research on how, as faith communities, to achieve the goal.³ Research is needed to clarify the intention of the vision and direct its practice.

Within the contexts of the church’s efforts to become an intercultural church and Canada’s integrative multiculturalism, the concept of difference is explored in order to contribute to the vision of the church in the practice of ministry. To build upon precedent, the study draws on the work of the UCC’s almost “forgotten” document, World Mission, approved at the 22nd General Council 1966. This report, then the most extensive mission consultation in the history of the church, became a salient foundation for its ecumenical relations and mission practice.⁴ Specifically, World Mission introduced a “mutuality model”⁵ of sharing concern for justice as the basis for working together with different communities: any individual or group which shared concern for justice in the local, national or world community was invited to dialogue and work together.⁶

In this book, the meaning of justice is drawn from the Levinasian concept of responsibility to the Other. In his book Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas defined the difference between his concept of justice and a conventional concept of justice called “the straight line of justice.” He writes:

In reality, justice does not include me in the equilibrium of its universality; justice summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice, and henceforth nothing can mark the end of this march; behind the straight line of the law the land of goodness extends infinite and unexplored, necessitating all the resources of a singular presence.⁷

According to this definition, the “straight line of justice” seeks an equilibrium or balance of fairness, which is similar to John Rawls’ concept of justice. Rawls coined the term “reflective equilibrium” in his classic, A Theory of Justice (1971), as the desired state of the principle of justice.⁸ Whereas Rawls defined justice as fairness, Levinas makes a move “beyond the straight line of justice” towards exploring the “land of goodness.”⁹ He suggests that the concept of justice is to be found in the infinite unknown realm of the relationship to the Other: “Justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master.”¹⁰ This locates justice not in equilibrium or fairness but in a “dissymmetry of intersubjective space” that marks a fundamental obligation and responsibility for the Other.¹¹ Without disparaging Rawls’ theory of justice, this book takes a different path to develop its main argument. Here, the concept of justice signifies more than the straight line of the law as relevant to the court; instead, it highlights the lived reality of the Other as having the right to live without discarding his or her cultural heritage.

In this book and my other writings, I try to avoid using the word “ethnic.” The word has become a derogatory term and has a nuanced meaning; the root of ethnic means Gentiles or foreigners (for further discussion, see Chapter 4). Werner Sollors says, “The English language has retained the pagan memory of ‘ethnic,’ often secularized in the sense of ethnic as other, as nonstandard,” or in Canada, as not fully Canadian.¹² So, instead of using the word ethnic, this book employs “different cultural heritage.”

1 The United Church of Canada, Record of Proceedings of the 39th General Council (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2006), 748.

2 UCC, ROP 39 (2006), 580. When the Ethnic Ministries Unit presented a vision of being an intercultural church, one of the presenters used the metaphor of a “salad bowl” to describe that vision. The image of a salad bowl is similar to that of the “Canadian mosaic,” a key metaphor for the Canadian policy of multiculturalism from the 1970s. The metaphor of a salad bowl has the attraction that, since each culture keeps its own distinct values, there is no forced merger into what Edward Said calls a “metropolitan centre” (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 9). However, the salad bowl metaphor sounds static and does not suggest what happens with the mix: is it only for show and then to be devoured? The salad bowl metaphor seems inadequate when used as an image of an “intercultural church” where participants would be invited to open up their boundaries and be freed of power differences in order to fulfill the vision of the Church.