Raj Bharat Patta
BIOGRAPHY
Raj Bharat Patta is a minister of the Andhra Evangelical Lutheran Church (AELC) in India and currently serves as Recognised and Regarded minister of the Methodist Church in the UK at the United Stockport Circuit. He completed his PhD with a thesis on “Towards a Subaltern Public Theology for India” at the University of Manchester, UK. Prior to this, he served the Student Christian Movement of India (SCMI) as its national general secretary and the National Council of Churches in India (NCCI) as one of its executive secretaries for the Commission on Dalits and Adivasis. He also worked as an Honorary Chaplain at St. Peter’s Church and Chaplaincy ministering the higher education University communities in Manchester.
His publications include: Listening to Living Stones – Towards Theology of Kairos Pilgrimage (ATG: Bet Shahour, 2014) Commissioned by the Alternative Tourism Group in Palestine to write a theology of pilgrimage, and which was later published as this book. A Violent Sight on a Silent Night – Missiological Discourses on Violence against Dalit Christians, (ISPCK/NCCI: New Delhi, 2009) He is married to Shiny and they have two sons Jubi and Jaiho.
ABSTRACT
“Brit(ish) Public Liberation Theology: An Im(migrant’s) Proposal”
Around thirty years ago in an editorial comment published by New Blackfriars, Fergus Kerr remarked that, “it is Liberation theology that Britain needs.”[1] This requirement of a liberation theology for Britain has called on some serious discussion, and David Jenkins public lecture on “The God of freedom and the freedom of God” in 1985 pioneered a theological enquiry into this project. Mark Corner on reflecting Bishop Jenkins lecture explains that British liberation theology will certainly be different from that of the third-world, for it will address the particular needs of the British context. However, he remarks that those British needs cannot be isolated from the needs of the other nations, as issues are inter-related and inter-dependent.[2] Corner therefore, explains that “It would be reasonable to expect a British theology of liberation to adopt terminology familiar from elsewhere, as it sought systematically to think through the implications of God’s identification with the poor and deprived in British terms.”[3]
This paper attempts to discuss the Brit ‘ish’ ness, where diversity of identities is affirmed in the context of post-Brexit. As an immigrant from India, now living in the UK, I bring in my theological locale of Dalit theology as a theology of liberation, for it offers certain sign posts in terms of epistemology and methodology in the pursuit of explaining a liberation theology for Britain today. It then brings in the context of hunger, racism and Brexit, as theological issues that needs theological engagements and propose Brit(ish) public liberation theology as anti-hunger theology, as anti-racism theology and as anti-empire theology. This paper will argue that Brit(ish) public liberation theology is the most needed and a relevant theology for a 21st century multi-ethnic Brit(ish) public sphere.
[1] Fergus Kerr, “Editorial,” New Blackfriars 68, no. 807 (1987). P. 319
[2] Mark Corner, “Liberation Theology for Britain,” New Blackfriars 69, no. 813 (1988): 62–71. P. 70
[3] Ibid.