Beyond Innocence, Towards Ambiguity: Developing a Political Theology of Coloniality

This article offers a critical-constructive intervention into current theological engagements with Christianity’s entanglement in colonialism. While much scholarship has critically examined theology’s historical complicity in empire, it often begins from normative assumptions of theology’s inherent liberative nature, framing colonial expressions as distortions of an ‘authentic’ Christianity. In contrast, this article argues for a theological methodology that takes Christianity’s political ambiguity as a starting point for theological construction. Drawing on postcolonial theory, it proposes a reorientation of theological reflection that resists claims to theological innocence (i.e. the presumed moral purity or redemptive essence of Christianity) and instead develops constructive trajectories rooted in theology’s historical entanglement with power.