Since this book is about dissent, I want to wrestle with the very notion it has proposed. The hope to “depart from an understanding of contestation as an ‘extraordinary’ phenomenon in a church that is ‘normally’ stable and cohesive,” is already very elusive. All the loaded words in quotes show that what is said might not be what it was meant. Even the word “normally” in quotes, plays with the presence and absence of normalcy, less than posing the problem, the word keeps the notion of normalcy as a fundamental part of the contestation frame. Contestation is set under the thread of extraordinary which plays both with its constant and elusive presence. However, contestation is the very reason stability and cohesiveness is in place. The notion of normalcy often means truth and contestation and that is at the very core of the building up of a cohesive unified tradition. That means that the departure from contestation as an extraordinary phenomenon serves to establish contestation as part of the main core of tradition, not to highlight the contestation historical efforts and effects, but rather to highlight normalcy by way of its negative notion.

Dissent in Christian Churches

The Christian church is born out of dissidence. It began as an “extraordinary contestation” within the Roman Empire. Jesus himself is killed by the Empire as a dissident. It is with Constantine that Christianity loses its kernel of contestation and becomes the apparatus of the empire.Footnote 1 From then on, the struggle between contestation and normalcy ensued. Thus, the church, if we think of early Christianity, before Constantine, is a site of contestation, moving in a thousand directions with people and other traditions left aside from the normalcy of the church. So much of the history of Christianities were dismissed, destroyed, shut down. Christian ecclesiology, theology, spirituality, rituals, and so on have fundamentally been a history of contestation turned into normalcy. A history of dissent that we tried to settle under confessions, dogmas, rituals and the ecumenical movements, an endless movement towards normalcy.

From that perspective my argument is that, against normalcy, the church has always been a movement of “extraordinary contestation.” The church is seen as a dissident community, a utopian community praying and toiling for a new day on behalf of those who have been destroyed, exploited, colonized, vilified. The church carries an anti-colonialist agenda despite navigating the waters of colonialism. The church, from its grassroots beginning, carries a kernel of non-conformism, a fundamental dissidence that once lost, turns the church into an institution. Although in a certain way the church had been institutionalized for a long time. One can see this even in the Pauline corpus.

Even in my tradition, proud of its motto: reformed church always being reformed, is a principle that is grounded in folding back to the Scriptures which is to go back to that contestation movement. Thus, it could also mean: dissent always, normalcy is the death of any religious movement. Paul Tillich’s “Protestant Principle”Footnote 2 also runs through the same veins since it is a reformed way of going against the temptation of idolatry or the sitting of a sense of normalcy (tradition). Perhaps another way to say it is to remind us of the fact that we are bound to an illusion that the church is already a liberated and liberating community. No, we are caught into a normalcy that hides the fact that we lost not only our ability but our divine demand to be dissident. Entangled into so many forms of normalcies that prevent us from being free agents of liberation we turn everything into a normal pattern of living that is often so detached from the daily lives and suffering of the people. One reason of this detachment/distance is the way we are wrapped up into a self-enclosed theology where only the inside of the church has the proper criticism to itself.

The ecumenical movement, however, can be in different ways, a form of awakening us from this self-enclosed theological normalcy. While it can be seen as a method of absorption and consolidation into that very form of theology, it can also be a constant push towards that liberation, that freedom, that awareness, that undoing of this self-enclosed theology and mission. With the help of the ecumenical movement, the dissenting church must continue to dissent from its own practices (critica ad intra) and in relation to “the world” (critica ad extra), as our ecumenical ancestors wanted. The decolonial approaches nowadays can be a powerful continuation of these same threads.

One more thing about the dangers of normalcy: usually normal language or language of best practices side with hegemonic centers of power, their many forms of violence and imposition, be it ways of understanding what human is about their enforcement by guns, papal bulls, king’s decrees. What we call universal normalcy was once local thinking from men living in their own villages and cities in Europe that were turned into universal truths by the imposed notion of normalcy destroying resistances, contestation, and defiance.

I want to wonder a bit about the relationship between Christian churches in Europe and the United States in regard to my upbringing in Brazil, Latin America. The positionality of oneself tells the social historical situation in regard to the pair normalcy/contestation. In my upbringing, Calvin’s thoughts wrapped up in United States culture came to Brazil as a machine that devoured contrary positions encompassing the cultural/religious knowledge of the Gringos over the forms of knowledge in my family and village. While there was very little conversation and dialogue there was a lot of subversive contestation. Nonetheless, Protestantism was itself a contestation to the hegemonic power of Roman Catholicism. Growing up I was very embarrassed to carry the Bible in my hands for that sign was already a sign of contestation.

Within Catholicism there was popular Catholicism and afro-religions subverting the normalcies of the Catholic faith. These groups lived under endless forms of contestation even putting their lives in danger. When we compare the evangelization/colonization of the United States and Brazil, we see the mercilessness of Protestantism crushing so many forms of religious diversity while in Brazil, Afro-Religious groups could find their own place under the shadows of the Roman Catholic Church. Today, with the uprising of the most conservative Pentecostal churches and the alignment of Protestantism with them, there is very little room for contestation which is often met with violence and death. Nonetheless, contestation is everywhere as a form of keeping life alive!

I remember growing up in Brazil and learning how liberation theology challenged the status of European theology. However, in order to understand liberation theology, I had to read many white, male European theologians to understand why we were contesting their thoughts. Karl Rahner was fundamental to Leonardo Boff, Paul Tillich was extremely helpful to those of us searching for a dialogue with Brazilian culture and later I learned that Karl Barth was fundamental to James Cone and his black theology. The universality of (European) theological claims were not working. Liberation theologies were a contestation from below against the European theologies from above.

However, the universal notions and doctrinal claims about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin, salvation, the church, and so on were all challenged by local ways of living and thinking. Liberation theologies started to break down these universalisms and by ways of starting with experience and contesting the overarching Christian grid of dogmatic theology. Nonetheless, the contestation of liberation theologies also became somewhat normal and is now lived out in so many ways by Pope Francis.

So, for me, contestation is the norm of the theological landscape. Since the book of Acts, contestation and conflicts mark the history of the church. Nothing has been normal, if normal means an inconstant place of assertions and assumptions. So much theology from the margins, such as peasants, blacks, indigenous and women’s movements are ways of discovering what was not viewed as normal in the history of the church.

Used to the crumbs of the sideways of history, thought, belief, and feeling, with occasional invitations to the center, the defiant histories of the church have actually been a fundamental aspect of the unity of the church. For there is no unity without division, no cohesiveness without defiance, no purity without mixings, and no center without margins. That has been the trap of alternative discourses of contestation.

The colonization process works in this way too. It establishes margins so that there can be a center and margins. Hierarchy is at the heart of it so one can centralize power in the hands of a class, race, and form of sexuality: white male heteropatriarchy. In this movement, it closes in what is supposed to be oneness and purity, so the catholicity of any Christian church can be sustained.

Here is the contradiction of the Christian churches with which we must wrestle. When Christianity became a religion that could not tolerate open canons, fluid forms of knowledge that gave themselves to change, it formalized ways of dealing with dissent. Dissent (and dissenters) were recognized not only as a threat to the norms and the power that was increasingly centralized but also served as a device to maintain and protect the rules: pluribus unum, which is also the formula for nation-states.

Well, is there an outside of this self-encompassing system? Let me propose two ways of finding a path to an outside. First, the dissent of interreligious dialogue and second, the dissent of the land. These two things are only embryos of a thought that needs to be further developed.

Becoming a Different Christian: The Dissent of Interreligious Dialogue

If we are to actually talk from a place of defiance, it has to be done from a place where what was inside was thrown out. Dissent is that which normalcy cannot agree, believe, think, or do. That is the place of dissent, conflicted powers and disagreement. Which might also be a place of disgust, repulsion, or abrasive contradiction to somebody’s own precepts. This self-enclosing of beliefs that turns everything into a mirror of ourselves can be contested in many ways. One of the forms of contestation can be found in the Brazilian Anthropophagic thinker Oswald de Andrade who said: “Only what is not mine interests me.”Footnote 3 The centrality of something or somebody else as the always unstable center is the real notion of defiance. Like offering hospitality to those I will be endangered by. Is that even possible? That would mean that the history of the church, or any colonial or decolonial Christian thinking must engage with that which cannot relate with and be shaken and transformed. For it is this impossibility that is the very outside of contestation if we are to deal with normalcy.

Let me mention a Quilombola community in Brazil called Quilombo Saco Curtume, a place that I have never been to but heard from Antonio Bispo dos Santos, one of its leaders. Quilombo Saco Curtume, like all quilombos, is a place of resistance to slavery in Brazil that exists on their own terms, their own work with the land and their own religions.

Antonio Bispo dos Santos, a black quilombola thinker from Brazil says that when Christianity arrived at his doorsteps their community welcomed it. We are polytheists, so one more would make us better. However, what they didn’t expect was to see that what was once open fluid ancestral forms of knowledges, ended concealed under Christian thought. This is a trademark of several monotheist religions that live in fear and call anathema anything that doesn’t look like them.Footnote 4

On the other hand, Antonio Bispo dos Santos carries Jesus in the midst of his traditions, in dissented ways, ways that we might call an external form of Christianity, since it does not hold Christianity in its organizing axis. What would we do with a dissent that places Jesus as “just” one more God to be believed and praised? Would we live with this form of dissent? We might be living beyond a borderless border that I wrote about elsewhere.Footnote 5

Thus, to get into what is not mine, I have to venture into the dangerous and mined place of interreligious dialogue to be transformed. For only a knowledge that is placed between many Christianities and other religions is what really matters. But here I am not talking about building relations between dogmas, belief systems, historical laws or ritual practices. Instead, I am looking for what cannot be placed in confluence but must live together. Would the Jewish-Christian identity struggles or Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus be a hint?

It has to do with the notion of confluence, a key term for Antonio Bispo dos Santos who says that confluence is a way to relate and live together amidst differences. We all benefit from this living together; we all keep who we are but we also change and become somebody else. Like a tree who bears fruits and animals will eat it and then will pollinate its seeds elsewhere. Bispo says:

Confluence is the law that governs the relationship of coexistence between the elements of nature and teaches us that not everything that joins mixes, that is, nothing is the same. As such, confluence also governs the processes of mobilization stemming from the pluralist thinking of polytheistic peoples.Footnote 6

Thus, if I want to live with the quilombola community that is not Christian in my own terms but might also be Christian in their own terms, I will live in the aftermath of a certain form of Christianity. It is that part of Christianity which might not be mine, since it doesn’t fit my set of beliefs in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, is what interests me. A part of me that developed beyond the limits of my acceptance. If I am to live in that quilombo, I will have to become a different Christian. Can I live in that dissent?

We can also say that throughout the world we see very mixed forms of Christianity with different forms of theological developments—the cultural appropriations that demand our faith and allegiance such as neo-liberalism. The problematic side, so to speak, of these developments for me would be the neo-Pentecostal forms of mixed Christianity that are mostly a mix of several sources oriented towards a neo-liberal economy and self-enclosed in codes of profit, disconnection, and deregulation of any form of life. The good side is Popular Catholicism that is already happening, in the forms of Umbanda, the presence of Christianity within the Quilombola’s place as a sign of a certain kind of Christianity that is more fluid and malleable to what the people need to live more fully.

I wonder what the Christian Eucharist would be if paired with the African offerings to the Orixas. I wonder if we can realize how the notion of transubstantiation also belongs to so many indigenous religions in so many natural modes and theological valances. Or when we can see the trance/possession in Afro-Brazilian religions and in Pentecostalisms and how it carries dissonances, contestations, and similarities within these forms of dances and movements within these traditions.

What I am trying to say is this: the best way to talk about dissent is to take the notion of truth as always in relationship, as a dialectical movement. Monotheist religions tend to see truth in one place, one thinker, one community, one tradition. For non-monotheist religions, pantheist or animist religions, truth is always in between things: between the action and the rock, the spirit and the environment, the trees and the gatherings, the spirits and the bodies. If that is to be considered, then a liturgical confession would sound something like this:Verse

Verse Don’t mess with me for I don’t walk alone I don’t walk alone, I don’t walk alone I have Zumbi, Besouro, the Tupi chief, I’m Tupinambá I have the Eres, Caboclo Boiadeiro, healing hands Morubixabas, headdresses, rainbows Blowguns, war bonnets, arrows and altars The speed of light in the dark of the darkest forest Where we have the silence, the waiting I have Jesus, Mary, and Joseph All shamans in my company The little Jesus plays and sleeps in my dreams

We Have Not Landed Yet: The Dissent of the Land

The second proposal is a way of wrestling with a dissenting church by way of bringing forth the earth as the fundamental way of being in the world. Here I want to pay attention to a historical dissent, even if hidden for the most part, but which is now placing us in a situation of calamity and catastrophes. That is a dissent between the Christian theology, ecclesiology and liturgy, and the earth. We have dissented from the earth for far too long. The knowledge of the earth was present in the Christian liturgy with the alignment of Jewish festivals, but we slowly lost the knowledge of the land. And by knowledge of the earth, I mean the ways the earth organizes itself in patterns and systems and creates its own laws of living.

Surely, we also have a rich history of what we might call eco-theology: Saint Francis, Ivone Gebara, Richard Rohr, Rosemary Reuther, Wendell Berry, Thomas Berry, Sallie McFague, Catherine Keller, Nancy Cardoso, and so on. But they have been marginal theologies to compose the vast notion of theology.

One example: Mark WallaceFootnote 7 reminds us of God as an Avian God, the Holy Spirit becoming a dove. While this is a memory inscribed at the heart of the relationship of God and the earth, we have turned the dove into a metaphor and the Holy Spirit as a person of the trinity. Instead of a deep connection with the earth, Enlightenment made us so afraid of the natural world.

Thus, our Christian thinking has become a theology for humankind alone. We work from a human exceptionalism and that exceptionalism makes everything fall flat into the same ground of cement we are standing on. The human species’ exceptionalism is about humanity above everything, imagining that its reasoning has grasped the truth of all and understood almost everything. Human exceptionalism is the thinking that our human species is more important than any other, the most important species. After all, God came to the world as a human being and everything has to do with humanity. There is no breath from any other species in our theological, liturgical breathing/thinking. We are becoming more and more afraid of other species. In fact, we are so afraid that we are only allowing a few species to live, like corn, soy, cattle, cats, dogs, some fruits…. The whole diversity of the earth doesn’t really matter. That is why we only talk about the love of God for humans, the purpose of God for humans, the healing of God for humans.

The earth as the body of God,Footnote 8 as Sallie McFague puts it, is never to be considered. We still carry this medieval and later modernist thought that we humans are the crown of God’s creation. In our hierarchical thinking, God is above everything and humans (mostly white men) come after. For secular people, “reasoning” is above it all. And then, under the human species, all the more than human, the rest of creation: animals, plants, oceans, rivers, etc.

In most of the normalcy of theology making, there is an earthless theology. This landless theology is not the struggle to fight the ownership of the land by some people and with and from those who don’t have the gift to live on the land but rather, our landless theology stands as a form of defiant relationship to the earth and a continuous process of support of John Locke’s notion of private property.

Another example: I just read a dissertation on liturgical theology based on symbols and architecture. In its 400 pages there was an enormous breadth of knowledge of the tradition, of space, of symbols, of church architecture. But there was not a single word on the land where the church was built. It was as if that writer was talking about a church that was hovering somewhere, a church that never landed anywhere.

In fact, as Bruno Latour says, we moderns have not landed yet,Footnote 9 We live off the land but do not relate to the land. And from that utter distance and ahistorical abstraction, we have become averse to the patterns of the land and antagonistic to other species. Our time is not the time of the land. The ways the earth offers such abundance to us are not the ways we extract everything without concern or care. Our dissent is such that we have even opposite views of the land. Even the notion of nature was a concept created by Europeans to deal with that which they had no idea how to handle.

Our dissent turned the land into a place of erasure, a place of annihilation. We have turned the earth into a monolithic category and have turned the earth from a place we belong into a place we own and search for profit. Coloniality has been the stealing of the land everywhere around the world. Capitalism has turned what was common into patented rights for individual profit. This form of ruling, of commodifying the earth, has annihilated other species and communities who carried other forms of knowledge and relations. The more we devour the earth the less diversity we have. If we think for a moment, this pattern of living has a strong parallel with Monotheistic theologies who can’t deal with diversity either. In that way, Monotheistic theologies can be related to monocultures, agribusiness, and contestation as a form of keeping the diversity forms of life alive.

Thus, my quest here is to call us from the notion of center and margins or cohesiveness and dissent and issue a call to us all to move towards those places where Christianity has always been a dissent so that we can figure out what forms of life and death come out of those forms of dissent. But that would require us to be fluid and open to be contaminated with other forms of animist relations of divinities in the places we live. Also, I would like to issue a call for us all to dissent from our human, all-too-human theological discourses and start to listen to the birds, honoring the ancestry of trees, care for the waters, protect the diversity of seeds, care for the plants and the biodiversity of our biomes.

To dissent means to look for life elsewhere, a different form of feeling-thinking with the environments we live. To turn the trees as our condition to love God just as Russian Saint Nikiphoros of Chios (1750–1821) said: “Men will become poor because they will not have a love for trees…. if you don’t love trees, you don’t love God.”Footnote 10 I would like to see the rivers be as sacramental as the baptismal font, the fields of wheats and grapes as holy as the altar. And a prayer/homily like this:Verse

Verse The Queen of the Sea goes hand in hand with me Teach me the dance of the waves and sing, sing, sing for me It is from the gold of Oshun that the armor that guards my body is made secure my blood, my throat The poison of evil finds no way In my heart, Holy Mary turns on her light and shows me the way I sink in the wind, I ride in the radius of Iansã I turn the world, turn, turn, I’m in the Recôncavo, I fly among the stars, and I play by being one of them I trace the Southern Cross, with João Menino’s hands keeping the bonfire torch I pray with the three Hail Mary’s I go beyond, I gather in the splendor of the NebulaeFootnote

Maria Bethânia, Carta de Amor Ato 1, (Rio de Janeiro: Biscoito Fino, 2013).

Conclusion

As I finish, our true abyss today is not the unity/dissent paradigm of Christian discourses. Our abyss is elsewhere, it is the abyss where our worlds end. It is at the edge of that abyss between humans and more than humans (plants, animals, rivers, rocks, oceans, and so on) that our religious crossings must be and do something else. Perhaps there, at the abyss, we can think with what Polish poet Wisława Szymborska told us in her poem Autonomy: “The abyss doesn’t divide us. The abyss surrounds us.”Footnote 12

My wrestling with the theme of this volume has led me to argue for the importance of reclaiming dissent at the heart of religious faith, which should be lodged at the beginning of every interreligious dialogue. Both the contestation that is always a part of our faith communities as we seek to find ways to live as people in specific places, with particular narratives, a variety of neighbors, and multiple identities. But also, to accept the contributions of contestation that comes from our neighbors of other religious traditions who in their dissent may provide us with new ways of seeing ourselves and help us become somebody else. And finally, to hear the cry of the earth as a dissenting voice in our human species theologies, and the ways our practices of exploiting the riches and goodness of the earth are incompatible with the call to care for the earth as God’s precious creation.

This, I believe, can only be done by Christians continuously seeking unity for the sake of the world. Becoming what we are: earth people, sharing the gospel, praying with one another, caring for God’s creation under the immensity of God’s freedom, which bounds us all, including the earth, tightly together. As a Protestant, I continually call for the Spirit to help us always dissent: Come Holy Spirit, Come!