Justice and Faith, a Panentheistic Reflection on Experiences of Minjung and Dalit 1)

This paper discusses a possible way to speak of justice that illuminates painful experiences of the oppressed. Within the legacy of minjung theology, this paper adapts panentheism as a more refined theistic lens to develop the theological tradition. The panentheistic approach is needed to break up the ill marriage of Asian political theology with the traditional super-naturalistic theism, a transcendental deism that is now unbelievable and too bad to believe. In this paper, panentheism comes to be a way of radical ‘dissenting’ from ‘the root cause’ of numerous misunderstandings in biblical interpretations and doing contextual theologies. In this paper, panentheism and its non-dualistic ideas are not only used for interpreting social phenomena but also for establishing a theory of subject in faith. Especially, the issue of justice must be approached from the perspective of the oppressed and further to seek a way of establishing the oppressed as the subject of their own destiny. In that point, Christian faith takes its role. This paper first interprets the issue of justice from below and discusses biblical and theological schemes in which justice is related to faith. Then, the role of faith is explained as the establishment of the subject, a subject whose justice is based on discernment and spirituality.