Gifts from the world: bringing Dumitru Staniloae in conversation with some prominent themes in majority world theologies

Abstract

This thesis engages the theological topic of the “gift” and “gift-giving” that has become popular within Euro-American theological discourse. While the academic discourse is traced back to an anthropological work that highlights the nature of gifts outside the West, the theological conversation remains mostly isolated to Western assumptions, concerns, and questions. I argue that this lacuna in the conversation can be partially attributed to the term “contextual theology.” The term contextual theology is commonplace within contemporary Christian theology. The term possesses both a methodological and a descriptive value, meaning contextual theology is both a way of doing theology and also a way to describe the nature of all theologies as being products of their respective historio-cultural locations. In the twenty-first century, it is not always clear what is different about contextual theology other than it is often used to distinguish theologies developed outside the “Western tradition” (Euro-American). This thesis then argues that the term contextual theology, while at first useful, has now unintentionally assisted in siloing theologies developed in the Majority World from theologies developed in the West. To alleviate this gap, this thesis attempts to undertake a theological experiment at pursuing an intercontextual theology that seeks to treat all theologies explored as equal dialogue partners. To do this, it identifies a gift theology that is both absent from the wider discourse and provides the grounds for theological construction as found in Romanian Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae’s “World as a Gift.” The thesis then explores Staniloae’s World as a Gift and argues that it can be supplemented by placing it in dialogue with various Majority World theologies from a wide variety of geographical contexts due to these theologies’s foci on the particular gifts found within creation due to their deep concerns that arise from particular geographic contexts. These particular gifts of matter, space, and time operate as the three themes around which the dialogue of this thesis takes place. In engaging in this exercise this thesis is able to engage four overarching transcontextual themes: 1) a relatively strong emphasis on human responsibility; 2) the interdependency of all creation; 3) the primacy of the past and present; 4) the lack of a stark division between the spiritual and material. Hence, this thesis moves in the direction of an intercontextual theology that offers the beginnings of a future “global theology” of the World as a Gift. Finally, by leveraging these themes found through dialogue, this thesis attempts to broadly apply these findings to the author’s context of North America.