Episcopal Press and News

Theologians Ponder Challenges of New World Order

Episcopal News Service. May 29, 1992 [92128L]

"The church must be the radical edge of politics, saying what the politicians can't say," said Dr. Allan Boesak, in characterizing the role of the church in South Africa as he opened a consultation on the new world order, held in New York, April 29-May 1. Boesak, a South African theologian and anti-apartheid negotiator, told the gathering of 150 theologians and pastors that the Los Angeles riots lent an urgency to the notion that legislation alone will not eradicate racism. "This is no time for cautious theology," Boesak told his audience, "because cautious theology is poison." Gabriel Habib, general secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches, also addressed the wide-ranging consultation, sponsored by the National Council of Churches' Project on a New World Order and the Theology in Global Context Association. Habib said that the United States had undermined its credibility in the Arab world by applying what he called a double standard in resolving injustices in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In underscoring the global nature of contemporary problems, Professor Larry Rasmussen of Union Theological Seminary in New York said that "social justice must embrace eco-justice and vice versa." Both affluence and poverty are taking heavy tolls on the earth's resources, Rasmussen asserted.