BIBLICAL THEOLOGY AND DIALOGUE WITH THE POOR
Keywords:
Biblical Theology, Covenant, Cry as Prayer, Cry of Mother Earth, Dialogue as Inclusion, Dialogue as Participation, Exodus, Jesus and the Poor, Prophets, Poor in the Bible, Poverty in the BibleAbstract
If the Bible can be understood as a written document of the revelation of God’s nature, then an important task of biblical theology is to understand and interpret various aspects of the Divine nature revealed in and through the biblical texts. When we consider God’s selfcommunication in the Bible, we must pay attention to His unfailing attention and involvement in human history, especially in favour of the poor and the marginalised. Any theology to be relevant needs to dialogue with the context. This is true also of biblical theology. Asia, being a continent of diversities and divides on various levels, for a biblical theology understandable and meaningful for her, we need to initiate a dialogue with these pluralities and problems. The Bible, both the OT and the NT, recounts the story of God’s listening to the cry of the poor. Of course, the term “poor” is understood as anyone, including nature, which experiences any kind of deprivation and marginalization. Since Asia is a continent with a huge number of poor people experiencing exclusion, a study of the biblical approach topoverty as a dialogue of inclusion vis-à-vis exclusion and of participation in the cry of the poor, would help develop a biblical theology for Asia. In this article I try to look at the idea of the poor in the Bible as a dialogue of inclusion and involvement, identifying various models and connect it to the FABC documents, and more specially, apply it to the Indian scenario of poverty and inequalities.
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