THE FUNCTION OF THE OTHER IN RECENT GERMAN MISSION CALLS

Abstract

Introduction and outline My subject -- the discovery self makes of the other -- is so enormous that any general formulation soon ramifies into countless categories and directions. We can discover the other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogenous substance, radically alien to whatever is not us.... But others are also s: subjects just as I am, whom only my point of view--according to which all of them are out there and I alone am I n here -- separates and authentically distinguishes from myself. I can conceive of these others as an abstraction, as an instance of any individual's psychic configuration, as the Other -- other in relation to myself, to me; or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the normal; or it can be exterior to society, i.e. another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral historical plane; or else unknown quan tities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own. It is this problematics of the exterior and remote that I have chosen -- somewhat arbitrarily and because one cannot speak of eveything all at once -- in order to open an investigation that can never be closed. (1) If the church is to fulfil its primary task of mission, it has to concern itself with the other. In the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), its Landeskirchen (regional churches), as well as in the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, we have heard an increasing number of calls for mission and/or evangelism at our own front door. (2) These calls are intended, amongst other things, to reinforce the image of a confident church and are almost always made without any consultation whatsoever with anyone from missiological circles. In my view, they are prompted less by a sudden upsurge of solidarity and interest in our fellow citizens than by the undeniable crisis of institutional Christianity in Germany. The proliferation of calls using the rhetoric of mission is an indication that the theme of mission is being taken over at present by groups and institutional sectors who use it for their own purposes, but not for missionary purposes in the original sense. (3) Despite so many calls for mission, it seems that the other plays only a marginal role. Yet the semantic of mission demands that we take up the theme of others, those to whom, on the surface, at any rate, the mission called for is addressed. I want to ask about the perception of these others and about the function they serve for mission, or the intentions that lie behind the language of mission. I do not, therefore, intend to say anything about the others who are strangers to us themselves but to ask how the other is perceived in calls to mission and what function this perception then fulfils, My interest here will not be to develop my image of the others but to examine the image that is constructed of them in order to establish its function or functionalization. Our others In what follows the question of others is posed as the question of our others. Let me begin by explaining what I mean by the term our others. I see three interconnected aspects of this concept: 1) Our others are the others whom we as church-Christians see as other on account of their different, or to us no longer perceptible, religiosity. Our others are those who are other in terms of our own understanding of religion. 2) In the context of our secularized society, characterized by the institutionalization(4), individualization, pluralization and privatization of religion, our others are to a large extent people who were once numbered among ourselves. Today, many of our others are our others, even with the common history of our separation and the heritage that, in one way or another, we share in common. …