articles from apfel journal volume 2

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Moreover, every orthodoxy or ideology requires a vanguard intelligentsia to articulate its guiding philosophy and to provide a legitimation of its claims for acceptance and credibility. The Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci has categorized the intelligentsia as constituted by two classes of intellectuals, the traditional and the organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals are those who develop and promulgate the orthodoxies that compete in the social-intellectual sphere for attention and space, while the organic intellectuals create a critical counter-culture that interrogates and destabilizes the hegemonic systems of thought and adherence. Gramscis polarization of the class of intellectuals is an ideal-typical postulate that often falsifies the social reality. For often within the welter of competing paradigms, the intellectual adopts an eclectic approach to the quest for knowledge and simultaneously maintains and deconstructs a given system of thought, even as he uses it as a polemic tool and a perspective to evaluate life and world as well as other competing ideological systems.

 

It is essentially this kind of intellectual that in my view can find a role within the church today, superbly exemplified by a Hans Kung, a Catholic theologian who has not only subjected his own chosen faith to the most incisive critique of both the institutional establishment and theological orthodoxies, but employs the massive philosophical system of Catholic theology as a launching-pad for his assault on a secular modernity hostile to the vision of the ecclesia. Without such a thinker within our midst it is easy for us to succumb to the charge of fundamentalism often ascribed to Adventism. In the unfolding of the historical process, any body of ideas that is intent on maintaining relevance and meaning must continuously be re-defined in response to the issues of the moment and in the language of contemporary man. It is in this sense that the Gospel becomes a living word, and so too does the church fulfill its prophetic role as Gods instrument of judgment over against a fallen humanity and world gone astray. With a solid grounding in a well-thought-out theological foundation, the Christian intellectual critically engages his society in a dialogical encounter oriented to a redemptive and liberating historical calling for his people.

 

If the Church, like Sartrean man, is an unfinished project, located in an evolving space-time that moves towards the eschaton of its eventual consummation and glorification, then clearly its insufficiency and fallibility are an incontrovertible given in the here and now, and its ostensive historicity entangles it in the fallen-ness and depravity of our collective humanity. Our doctrinal identification with the Johannine Laodicean church confirms the formal imperfection that registers our historical situated-ness and our undeniable institutional deficits. The church therefore, inheriting that covenantal relationship with God that was the privilege of ancient Israel, stands in need of both priest as intercessor for its culpabilities, and prophet to condemn, chasten, and guide on its pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God. It is he who pursues the traces of divine wisdom and providence in the cunning of history. Who but the contemporary Christian intellectual can play that role, whose knowledge base and spiritual commitment confer on him such an awesome responsibility?  In his capacity as cleric and theologian, he defines gospel and law in intelligible terms, resolves the anomalies and contradictions that history unfolds, and re-articulates the message with authority and appeal in the intellectual arena. The apologetic function, which has always been of paramount significance in Christianitys interaction with the diversity of religions and philosophies, is a central task of his particular calling.

 

But perhaps even more significant is the continuous moral critique that the Christian thinker must subject his society to, and the unending dialectic that he must set up in the ethical realm between Christian ideality and the pervasive banalities of the real world. It is undoubtedly within the realm of moral certitude that he gains his intellectual foothold for his forays into the public sphere. There are enough universally accepted moral postulates, framed within the guiding principles of the Christian faith, that can provide the criteria for an ethical evaluation of our institutions and ideologies, our political and social practices, our values and doctrines. Christs description of his followers as the salt of the earth carries a mandate for social action and engagement with the community of non-believers, and simultaneously sets up an inescapable dialectic with his caveat to love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. His peculiar modality of presence to the world therefore constitutes both a renunciation and commitment, a counter-cultural struggle against the oppressive, life-negating conditions of the social world even as he is involved as participant in the march of history. What distinguishes the Christian then from his fellows can only be the ethical standards on which he bases his praxis, standards which are an affront to the dominant ethos of a society at war with righteousness. It is therefore the moral challenge that his presence and praxis exemplify that defines his role and action in the social and cultural sphere.

 

It is therefore inconceivable that here in Trinidad, in our own historical situation, the Adventist community can preach the message of salvation without addressing the issue of the pervasive decadence of the society.  A post-colonial society in which most of its recorded history has been marked by the de-humanizing effects of slavery and genocide, the persistent traces of which still continue to color our behavioral and cultural practices. Many of our New World nations are in many respects pseudo-societies, constructed on the debris of history and the persistent features of the peoples culture and psyche reveal traces of negative memory and the damaged inter-subjectivity of an oppressed people. Jamaican violence can only be explained historically by the Maroon rebellions of the Blue Mountains and the swash-buckling lawlessness of the bucanneers of Port Royal. Here in Trinidad the marks of an internalized aggression are manifest in the distorted communication of the yard and in the manifold of destructive behavioral modalities in our social interaction. In Trinidad the diffusive slummification of the landscape in the residential shacks on the margins of townships and the inner-city business-front are no more than externalizations of an inner loss of a sense of personal self-worth and dignity. Like the Jamaican Dungle or the Rastamans unkempt hairstyle, such unfolding dimensions of a self-destructive psychic damage are testimony of centuries of a dehumanizing colonial experience and the colossal violation of collective spirit from which escape seems impossible. We have spawned and nurtured a culture which celebrates negativity and self-hate. Neo-colonial exploitation continues unabated in the more sophisticated forms of a technologized modernity and the consequent alienation becomes reified in the social institutions and cultural and social practices of the people. From government corruption to administrative ineptitude and non-commitment, to picong and the non-productivity of the work-place, the feeling of propertyless-ness and non-belonging, of the virtual marginalization of the majority, unwilling to claim the patrimony of their fore-bears, there is the pervasive organic negativity that stamps the cultural physiognomy of Caribbean man, especially the Trinidadian version. Social injustices and immoral acts do not create a sense of moral outrage, and there is no tension between a professed Christianity and a living denial of its ethics.

 

Colonial administrators ensured that their educational efforts in the West Indies would not eventuate in the creation of a critical intelligentsia who would turn their intellectual arsenal against imperial oppression. It was designed to create administrative assistants on the plantations and self-satisfied black Europeans assimilated partially into positions of prestige and powerlessness. Somehow after World War I a crop of anti-colonial thinkers emerged from the war experience abroad, and returned home to develop a politics of protest and innocuous resistance to white hegemony. With political independence, that ephemeral intelligentsia vanished, in the likes of a James, Williams et al, and the modicum of intellectual activity that followed is either employed in bolstering the systems of planned deficiency and impotence, or is squandered in partisan rivalries. Afro-West Indians, much more than their East Indian counterparts, are people who lack a memory of greatness and an imagination with vision, so ubiquitous has been the collective damage to self and being. Ensnarled in our own littleness and angst, we are unable to find a locus in world-history and a meaning to our experience of slavery. Social injustices abound and are accepted fatalistically even by our self-appointed leadership.

 

Within this vacuum there has emerged a place for the Christian intellectual, whose counter-cultural vision provides him with a splendid hermeneutic perspective for critique and leadership. A study of the Old Testament prophets provides a masterful exemplification of the role of the intellectual within a society on the road to self-destruction. The formidable critical challenges of an Isaiah and Jeremiah, confronting a nation-state bedeviled by injustice, corruption and pagan secularism and materialism, and threatened by military invasion from the super-powers of Assyria and Egypt, has left to posterity a body of critical work which is unsurpassed in the literature of political polemic and the rhetoric of resistance. In flights of transcendent poetic imagery and language, the Prophets lament the decadence of Israel and recall them to their true historical destiny in a covenantal relationship with Yahweh.  The wider eschatological implications of their writings do not detract from the relevance and contextual focus of their political and moral vision for the nation. They chart a historical direction that is redemptive and liberating. Here was the intellectual as prophet mediating Gods judgment upon a hard-necked people. They dared to critique under divine inspiration the formidable theological enterprise of early Judaism, which privileged the covenantal relationship between Israel and Yahweh against the claims of personal subjectivity on Gods infinite concern for his people. Out of that dauntless intellectual probing emerged the doctrine of individual moral responsibility for sin, a notion that centuries after was to become the bedrock of Christianitys focus on subjectivity and the personalization of the religious experience as well as the notion of covenant in the individuals vertical relation with deity.

           

What is needed therefore is for the Church to accommodate the Christian intellectual as he attempts to carve out a space within the intellectual marketplace and offer his unique perspective for the resolution of our world-historical problems. To the extent that the Church fails to produce such a class of reflective minds, committed to social transformation and personal repentance, it will continue to cheat history and pander to any temporizing ideology parading as the fad of the moment. The appearance of such a class of persons is not an administrative decision by a centralized jurisdiction, but a spontaneous outgrowth within a given social space when the intellectual-spiritual critical mass is achieved. The Conference office can encourage but not initiate such an undertaking. It is only within the atmosphere of intellectual freedom which should typify our university and college campuses and amidst the inter- and intra-departmental discourses that characterize the academic life of faculty members that such a spirit of free inquiry and critique can be intentionally nurtured. Here in the Caribbean CUC has a significant role to play in producing such a cadre of intellectuals. Largely our universities are failing us within and without the Church  in producing a liberal thinking that sponsors a tradition of critical public discourse. Tertiary institutions have foisted upon contemporary Western society a somnolent professional-managerial class devoted to the perpetuation of social institutions that bolster the capitalist system and the ideals of a consumerist society, convinced as they all are that we have arrived at a consumerist Utopia. It is a passivism and resignation within secular society which has virtually subverted the intellectuals role of oppositionality and resistance to the perceived ills of the social world.