Third Congress Of Asian Theologians
Visioning New Life Together Among Asian Religions
August 6-11, 2001, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

CONCLUDING STATEMENT

The Congress of Asian Theologians (CATS), born in 1997 in, Suwon,, Korea, is an ecumenical venture of Asian Theologians to tread new paths of theologizing in Asia by struggling with the Asian realities and problems. CATS I set the agenda by its theme, "Asian Theology in a Changing Asia: Asian Theological Agenda Towards the 21" Century". On the eve of the Great Jubilee, CATS II in Bangalore, India, in 1999, was focused on the theme, "Celebrating Life Together", underlining the Church's mission of love and service to all, especially in our age of globalization where fullness of life is more and more denied to the vast majority of the people of Asia.

Here in Duta Wacana Christian University Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the Third Congress of Asian Theologians (CATS III, assembled about 120 participants from among most of the Asian Countries and from other parts of the world from August 5-11, 2001, to discuss the ways and means of "Visioning New Life Together Among Asian Religions". Human dignity, freedom, participation and fullness of life are today denied to the vast majority of our people. The process of globalization and market economy is marginalizing more and more people, especially, those who belong to the lower strata of society. The rise of fundamentalistic trends among all religions causes serious conflicts between believers of various religions. The emergence of religious and cultural nationalism in some Asian countries undermines the pluralistic and democratic foundations of Asian societies. At this critical juncture of Asian history, all peoples of Asia who belong to different traditions, religious and secular, have to join hands and walk together to envision a new life for all the people of Asia and for the whole world. The Third Congress of Asian Theologians was called for a common search and exploration to discover the liberative potential of the various religious traditions of Asia and to gather these vital spiritual resources for creating new Asian Societies and envisioning new life for all the people of Asia.

The Christian approach to the people of other faiths in Asia, in retrospect, is a live issue with all its inherent problems, ambiguities and conflicts. In the early history of the Church in Asia and its extension of mission to different parts of Asia, the St. Thomas tradition in South and North-west India, and the Nestorian mission in China are significant. Many Christian communities in Asia developed a harmonious and peaceful relationship with the communities of other faiths. In the course of this development many local and cultural elements both good and bad were assimilated and incorporated.

The political and colonial Impact from the west in the modern period came with the Christian community's association with the foreign powers, even though attempts were made for indigenization, inculturation and dialogue. The modern missionary era in Asia, in spite of certain success among the deprived classes for regaining their dignity, was to a great extent, a dismal phase with hostile, aggressive, and even arrogant attitude to the other faiths. The local cultures and religious traditions of Asia were often looked upon as inferior that have to be replaced by Christianity and western cultural traditions. The missionary praxis, in general, was one of converting and baptizing people of other religions and extending the churches at the cost of the social, cultural and religious values that constituted their inherent sense of dignity and identity. We do not however question the good intentions and the commitment of the missionaries to the Gospel and the tremendous hardships and heroism they had undertaken. We know that the missionaries were the products of their time. The existential realities of the world and our theological thinking have been radically changed today. We are now witnessing to a shift in the traditional paradigm of Christian relationship and mission to the people of other faiths.

This Congress aimed at consolidating and advancing the new paradigm of Christian life among the rich variety of religious traditions of Asia. We acknowledge that Christian mission in Asia has been to a great extent a failure if measured by its own aims. This failure emerged from its unhelpful theology of religions and its missiology. Our Christian insight that God lives and works in solidarity with the poor must be shared in Asia. However, the experience of God does not need to be imported, for it is already here. God lives and works in the great religions of Asia and also in the folk religions, which often pose a direct challenge to institutional Christianity. Christians now must humbly acknowledge that in these many ways God has always been savingly present in the continent. In its failure to acknowledge these facts, Christian mission in Asia was arrogant and colonialist. It denied the possibility of pluralism.

The emerging mission of Christians is to work with peoples of other faiths to fashion new understandings of community. People need to belong to religious community at two levels: first of the specific religion they profess, and second a wider community both religious and secular which welcomes many faiths and ideologies to enter into dialogue and relationship at the grass-root level. There is as yet no concept of a religious community of place, and as theologians we would wish to develop this understanding in the face of the forced uniformity and exclusion brought by globalization. There is an urgent need for the wider community to uphold diversity, to cry out for justice for all and to practice new forms of inclusion. As Christian theologians we wish to be engaged in such community building, for we know that such a work can really make a difference in our own lives and in the lives of the people of Asia. In our journey together with the people of Asian religions, we recognize the increasing phenomenon of violence in Asia and worldwide, and we commit ourselves to work together to overcome various forms of violence and to promote a culture of peace and justice. We reiterate that affirmation of life is the primary purpose of all religious vocation.

In this Congress, we tried to listen humbly to the living religious traditions of Asia and to discover their spiritual resources and liberative potential for new life in Asia. The accumulated wisdom of various religious traditions reminds us that we should not get trapped in the perversions of the present context. Prophetic traditions of all Asian religions provide a nuance to counter all attempts by hierarchical structures to preserve 'present' as eternal. This is manifested in the uncompromising approach of prophetic vision to all forms of oppressions, marginalizations and the forces that threaten life. Moreover these prophetic traditions lifted the concept of freedom to the 'beyond' as an ontological principle that history ever strives for. We have not yet discovered fully the liberative potential of the Christian Gospel. The uniqueness of Christianity is the uniqueness of Jesus' love, compassion and commitment to the poor and the marginalized and his preferential option for them.

Creation narratives allude to the notions that the realization of the face of God in the "other" is the essence of religious vocation. Islam reiterates this concept by encouraging everyone to go beyond a legalistic approach to human relationship by demanding strict justice to a God-centered spirituality in which people are invited and urged to treat the "other 'as God treats us.

Without our conventional language of divine, Buddhist principle of friendship correlates with a religious notion that critical solidarity with the victims to overcome ignorance which include among others poverty, hegemonical power structures, exploitative economic organization, oppressive gender relations, discriminative social and cultural formations is the principle of the divine. Such solidarity transcends all that that divided people in history. The principle of ahimsa calls for respect for and promotion of all forms of life, and thus to safeguard the integrity of all creation.

Solidarity within Hinduism aims at integration of the human with equality within the context of the cosmic community where everyone and everything is intertwined in an interrelated function. This cosmic community (rta) is the liberating principle of people and nature. Reconciliation of creator and the creation is the essence of rta.

At the same time we are aware of patriarchal practices of the traditional religions. The combination of patriarchy and capitalism today intensify the exploitation and destruction of the nature, the women and all the weak and vulnerable as "the other". The revival of the original "life vision" of the Indigenous/Folk religions accompanied by the resurrection of our dying Mother Earth will lead us to live together with all differences. It implies that the promotion of abundant life is the essence of the ultimate divinity of every religions including wisdom of traditions of folk and tribal religions.

While affirming the spiritual resources and the liberative potential of Asian religions, we also acknowledge that the institutionalized forms of all religions had certain built-in oppressive structures, and at times, instead of nourishing the fullness of life of individuals and communities, they became instruments of dehumanization, oppression and even destruction of life. Authoritarianism, male-domination and lack of proper democratic process in many Christian Churches, participation of Buddhist monks in the ongoing ethnic wars in Sri Lanka, the failure of many Islamic countries to respect religious pluralism, the role of Hinduism in providing a cultural and theological legitimating to the caste system and in denying the Dalits their rights to be human are some of the issues that need introspection and self-criticism on the part of Asia's religions.

Along with a new theology of religions we call for a new pedagogy of encounter. It is the question of actual human interrelatedness, not abstract ideas, and dogmas, which constitute the loci of encounter. This encounter calls for commitment to our continued struggles to overcome the forces that threaten the fullness of life. Exploring ways and means to ensure an enriched lived experience of harmony, justice, and well being with our neighbors is imperative. There is an urgent need to develop a different language of dialogue and to cultivate a culture of dialogue and new ways of learning about living religions in community. We reaffirm that life is to be lived at the local level where people of various religious convictions encounter in their day-to-day life and negotiate with the existential realities. Thus we underline the importance of involvement of local communities in the process of envisioning new life among people of various religions in Asia.

We thank God for this grace of having brought us together here in Yogyakarta for the third Congress of Asian theologians and for this very fruitful exchange among us. We have only begun our search in the conflicting and ambiguous existential realities of Asia, while holding fast to our precious of heritage of the Gospel. We renew our common commitment to struggle with all the peoples of Asia, believers of all religions as well as non-believers, in search of new life and abundance of life for all peoples of Asia and for the whole world.