Abstract

Since 1966 an impasse has emerged within the ecclesiastical and theological circles of the ecumenical movement. The dividing lines are drawn on a North South basis, and the point at issue is primarily the question of justice. ;In this dissertation we trace out the genealogy of this impasse by doing an archeology of the ecumenical movement, and comparing the movement with its surrounding context. We show that initially the ecumenical movement was started, and dominated by the Anglo-American Churches, and that with the emergence of the Continental Churches in the 1920s, the nature of the movement changed. Whereas it was initially dominated by Progress oriented theology, in its Continental moment it was dominated by a critical theology. ;Though the Continental input was initially resisted, it became dominant till 1966 and the World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, when the Third World Churches with their Liberation/Political theologies focusing on justice came to the force. This recent challenge has still not been thoroughly incorporated in the ecclesiastical and theological circles, and is usually seen, in negative terms, as the disruptive cause of the stalemate. ;In contrast to this view, we argue that the cause of the impasse in the ecumenical movement is the Eurocentric pseudo-universals, which were imposed on the ecumenical movement since its foundation, and which thus have become in themselves a major concern for a theory of justice for an ecumenical praxis with broader ramifications. This approach also criticizes the understanding of distributive justice as the sole understanding of justice. We look at the two recent popular theories of justice in political philosophies, both from the U.S.A. context, and both committed the "liberal" entitative heritage with two different ontologies. These theories, as is the case with most of the ecumenical history, are located well within the Eurocentric pseudo-universal and are, therefore, unable to develop a genuine understanding of justice. In our final chapter, therefore, we begin to construct our own theory of justice. We propose that a theory of justice has to start with, and focus on, the pseudo-universalizing process, and take the Other, the Outsider as its center for this theorizing if it is to be a theory of justice at all