IN SEARCH OF A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC THEOLOGY IN THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT TODAY

: This article deals with the contemporary task of Christian public theology in constructing a contextual model that is able to maintain the dialectic of commonality and particularity. Such a model must pay attention to the search for common ground among many cultural-religious identities, while at the same time it must respect those identities in their own paticularities. The sensitivity to and solidarity with the victims of the New Order’s’ regime must also be fundamental elements of such a model. To do so, this article discusses two competing theories in social philosophy (liberalism and communitarianism), and their parallel theories in theology (revisionism and post-liberalism). The necessity to construct a more balanced third way between those theories is needed, if Indonesian Christians want to be open to their social and political call and faithful to their Christian distinctiveness.


INTRODUCTION
As one of the most complicated countries in the world, Clifford Geertz states, Indonesia is "the product of an incredible stream of warring mindsets." 1 He continues by saying that the task of articulating the spiritual anatomy and unifying identity of this country is, although impossible, "one that anybody who has seriously to do with the place, either from within or without, is inevitably constrained somehow to attempt ."2 Geertz himself has dedicated his scholarly expertise to this task. His interest in Indonesian studies, particularly his research on the Javanese culture, has resulted in voluminous works. The purpose of this article is to do the task Geertz has already given, from my perspective as an Indonesian Christian who has been struggling with the socio-political reality of my society.
Geertz is right in saying that in the Indonesian case the heart of the matter is "the way in which, and the degree to which, the contrasting aspects of the overall conglomerate are to be represented in the formulation of Indonesian identity." 3 In other words, the task of defining the common identity should be focused on the dialectic between recognizing particular identities of its members and finding commonalities among diverse communities. Overlooking one aspect of the twofold task could make the discovery of the common identity implausible.
Geertz wrote the article in 1995, three years before the collapse of Suharto's regime. The era after Suharto has been parodoxical; it has been colored not only by a fresh hope for an authentic democracy, but also by while in Suharto's rule the cultural and religious particularities had been abandoned for more than three decades, the aftermath of his downfall showed a rejection of any "canopied pluralism," to borrow Robert Hefner's words. 4 Hefner's "canopied pluralism" should be understood in the perspective of his fundamental thesis: The Western world did not pioneer cultural pluralism, nor was such pluralism an invention of the modern Indonesia.
Rather, Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia "have their own rich histories of diversity and participation." 5 Hefner uses the term "canopied pluralism" to describe the fact that the cultural diversity during the pre-modern era had been canopied by a trans-ethnic Malay-Indonesian civilization.
In Suharto's modern era, however, it is the strange mixture of Javanese cultural hegemony and economic developmentalism that canopied Indonesian ethno-religious diversity. Both cultural and economic dominations were closely intertwined, guarding the political power that Suharto had held for thirty-two years. The cultural hegemony was obvious in the way the New Order government employed the Javanese culture as the underlying grammar for articulating political discourse. The result was easily predictable, that is, the fears of "Javanisation," so to speak, The context-forgetfulness of liberalism is also unavoidable when the proponents of this position apply their principles to the notion of self. For them, there should be a common nature of the self independent of any context. This is to say that the image of the human being in this theory is so atomistic and abstracted from any particular context that one could find oneself together with others behind a "veil of ignorance," through which they would not know their particular identity such as race, gender, religion, etc. Their communitarian interlocutors call such a self "unencumbered" (Sandel), "ghostly" (MacIntyre), or "neutral" (Taylor).
On the contrary, communitarianism's context-obsessedness appears in the way this theory overemphasizes the importance of community as the authentic locus of values. Those values become the "normative horizons" 9 that constitute the identity of its members. Thus, in this theory we find a strong notion of self dependent on and situated in a particular context. Apart from community the self cannot find its identity and the meaning of life.
These two major theories have dominated the contemporary political and philosophical conversation, especially in the West. Nevertheless, it is also true that the fundamental problem that they deal with is significantly present in the theological polemic between the revisionists and the postliberals, to which we now move.

THEOLOGY BETWEEN PUBLIC AND COMMUNITY
The revisionist theology of David Tracy agrees in general with the standpoint taken by philosophical liberalism that there should be certain universal values transcending particular contexts. Yet, to some extent he is also critical of modern liberal theology, whose basic faith is the same faith shared by its secular contemporaries. The revisionist theology, on the contrary, emphasizes its twofold commitment that critically challenges both the self-understanding of secularity and the selfunderstanding of Christianity. By being faithful to this commitment, revisionist theology can perform its task as "philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human experience and the meanings present in the Christian tradition." 10 These two dimensions characterize Tracy's correlation method that maintains both Christian tradition and common human experience as sources for theology, investigated through a hermeneutic process. Although in the majority of cases such a process yields similarities-in-differences or analogies, sometimes it can also result in either identical or conflicting visions of religion and the wider public.
All of these possibilities could happen insofar as we endeavor to discover "mutually critical" correlation. Thus, this particular method of interpretation enables us to come to certain commonalities among different traditions-or, more precisely, between Christian tradition and wider publics-without either denying the otherness of others or abandoning our own integrity.
Furthermore, Tracy argues that Christian theology should always be public discourse, which addresses all people by using a commonly acceptable criterion, i.e., "common human experience." However, any public theology also becomes a philosophical reflection on the very center of Christian tradition, which is God. He forcefully argues that if theologians, "are not involved, at least implicitly, in speech about God, then they are not involved in public theological discourse." 11 In other words, the public character of theology comes from its radically theocentric nature.
The distinction of the three types of public in Tracy's theologychurch, society, and academy-could also be relevant for our discussion.
A public theologian should not be an individual external to these public environments, since the theologian, "like any other human being, has been socialized into a particular society and a particular academic tradition and has been enculturated into one particular culture." 12 The strength of Tracy's revisionist model lies precisely in its ability to deal with the pluralist reality. The model enables theologians to put the Christian tradition into a conversation with modernity as well as with other religious traditions. But he also suggests that our engagement with the pluralist reality is supported by our own tradition that is focused on the notion of "classic." For Tracy, a classic is a person, text, symbol, or event, which embodies and discloses truth. It is Jesus Christ that is the paradigmatic classic in the Christian tradition and also the central piece of Tracy's proposal for a public systematic theology.
Moreover, the notion of classic becomes the key to understanding Christian "publicness" in the pluralist culture, because every classic necessitates a pluralism of readings and interpretations. In dealing with the necessity of a pluralist of the classics and their interpretations, Tracy comes closer to the Habermasian notion of consensus. He is optimistic about public discourse, where people can engage with the task of inter-preting the classics and defending their arguments, in order to reach consensus. In this sense, consensus is "not a failing but the hope of the public realm." 13 We may conclude that Tracy's revisionist model seems to be suitable in both the modern and postmodern realms. On the one hand, he commits to the notion of universal experience and the apologetic task of theology.
On the other hand, he is interested in the postmodern struggle with the issues of difference and otherness. However, post-liberals such as George Lindbeck, accuse Tracy of being a modern rather than postmodern theologian. In Lindbeck's terms, Tracy is an experiential-expressivist who bases his theology on the modern core experience and therefore fails in defending the uniqueness of Christian tradition. On the contrary, Stout's proposal tries to maintain the equilibrium of Christian tasks, that is, to engage with the public sphere (democracy) and preserve the identity of their community (tradition). These tasks should not be done sequentially, but simultaneously. Stout's model of democracy holds that "people who differ on such matters can still exchange reasons with one another intelligibly, cooperate in crafting political arrangements that promote justice and decency in their relations with one another, and do both of these things without compromising their integrity." 25 Stout's democratic model, therefore, is focused on the reason-exchanging process between people from different backgrounds and traditions. Using Seyla Benhabib's dual-track approach, the official and unofficial public spheres, 26 Stout's democracy opts for the primacy of the unofficial over the official public sphere. What is important for him is not nation-state but "nation" that is understood as "people." 27 In such a "community of reason-giving," democracy is understood as "a sort of practice, one that involves and inculcates virtues, including justice, and that becomes a tradition, like any

THE REDISCOVERY OF INDONESIAN IDENTITY
This article begins with a brief description of the complex problems that Indonesian people have been facing during and after Suharto's era. I have argued that the issue of recognition and commonality is most central.
Also, the rediscovery of Indonesian identity that pays attention to the dialectic between recognition and commonality should also be sensitive to the suffering-self, the victims of injustice and human rights violations.
Nevertheless, I limit myself to the possibility of public theology informed by the philosophical debate between liberalism and communitarianism. My primary thesis is that the debates between revisionists and post-liberals, as well as between liberals and communitarians, should not push us to a certain point where we have to make an either/or choice. The particular-universal and the self-social pairs of issues are simultaneously present as parts of our identity. Of course, to some extent, we have to begin somewhere and we cannot merely adopt the detailed explanations provided by each group. In this article, I want to focus on two specific themes.

SELF AND OTHER, PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL
The communitarian notion of self that is situated within a specific context is more convincing for me than that of the liberal unencumberedself. It enables us to understand the importance of the particularity of selfidentity within community as the point of departure for theology.
Hauerwas has applied this notion to the Christian community, combining it with the idea of virtuous-self. The strength of his theology is that it provides the answer to the basic needs of human beings: community and 28 Stout,Democracy and Tradition,p. 152.   An excellent example of the importance of retrieving local classics is given in Dieter Bartel's article, Your God is No Longer Mine (2001), telling about the Nunusaku religion in the Ambonese belief, long before the bloody war between Muslims and Christians in this area. Bartel  to construct a more contextual Indonesian public theology. By discussing two focal themes-self and other and democracy and locality-I believe that Indonesian Christians are enabled to construct more contextual third ways and, in so doing, we could participate in global discourse by sharing our contextual perspective.