The Era of Transparency and Partnership in the Oneness of Creation
Professor Dr. Michel Abs
The Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC)
When the Lord created the universe, He created it for all the beings He brought forth, granting them the right to utilize the resources with which the Creator honored His creation.
The Lord created us equal in the right to exist, in dignity, in the continuity of life, and in the improvement of that life. He became incarnate so that we might have a better life.
Humankind, with its soul inclined to wrongdoing, in the early ages, before recognizing the existence of the Creator, before the Creator revealed Himself, and before understanding the essence of His message, spread corruption, plundering and brutalizing one another, practicing all forms of harm and torture.
It was the law of the survival of the fittest, where the stronger prevails, leaving no place for the weak, and the universe supposedly belongs to the powerful. Such justifications were fabricated by the sick human mind to excuse seizing another’s wealth and resources.
Christianity emerged as a remarkable shift in this grim human history. The incarnate Lord proclaimed new ways of interaction among people, ways unheard of before Him. This was intolerable to the soldiers of emperors and conquerors, as well as the guardians of old laws, so they crucified Him, unable to conceive of His resurrection after three days.
During His time on earth, the Lord taught principles contrary to everything taught before, often saying, “It was said to you... but I say to you.” These teachings shone in His eternal Sermon on the Mount, a sermon unmatched by humanity in the field of human conduct and cultural values. He, whose kingdom never ends, overturned millennia of greed, hatred, and savagery, raising humankind to a noble rank above other creatures.
Nevertheless, violence persisted among humans, and evil spread, taking on new forms with the development of destructive tools. Yet humanity, thanks to many enlightened groups who embraced the Lord’s message and adopted it as a guide, found itself at a dead end and began seeking new options.
The literature of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, legal scholars and experts in different fields of humanities contains extensive self-critical reviews by honest elites from societies that, propelled by the Industrial Revolution and the machine age, were able to colonize weaker peoples, seize their resources, and even wipe out or eradicate their civilizations at times.
From the early twentieth century, between the two world wars, these honorable intellectual elites increased their criticisms, since knowledge is truth, and truth set them free. Voices rose, demanding justice for oppressed peoples, to the extent that social sciences and anthropology were labeled as inherently colonial tools.
Christian values deeply influenced our minds and hearts, shaping our awareness and our capacity for analysis and judgment. As a result, noble humanistic directions emerged, aspiring first to self-criticism, then to establishing a culture of justice and equality, recognizing mistakes, embracing others, accepting diversity, rejecting hate speech, protecting the vulnerable, and aiding those in need. We can summarize these directions as “respect for human life” and all that follows, preserving human dignity and treating our partners in society and humanity in a manner worthy of the human being whom the Lord said He created in His image and likeness.
The movement to decolonize decision-making and mend society is part of a global yearning for justice and equality that has grown since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent justice- and equality-focused initiatives for all humankind. Although they are not always perfectly or consistently applied, these values have become firmly embedded in our culture, guiding our daily lives.
The ecumenical movement is not detached from this noble paradigm shift toward partnership rooted in a profound and genuine longing for justice. This is not new; for decades it has embraced a core value of sharing resources, seeking to overcome the donor-recipient paradigm. Justice and partnership are foundational to the culture of the ecumenical movement, which upholds “justice and peace” as its principal slogan, sending humanity the clear message that there can be no peace without justice.
When the Western “donor” church aspires to free decision-making from dependence, and grants its “recipient” partner a genuine share in this authority, it demonstrates the depth of the commitment of our Christian brethren to justice, an immense step toward mending the world. This removes modern forms of slavery, disguised and dressed up in polished, empty rhetoric.
Shifting from imposed decisions to shared decisions, where the receiving beneficiary can determine its own priorities rather than having them dictated by institutional policies tied to external development agendas, is a decisive step toward equality and transparency, which day by day occupy a prominent and priority position among global values.
Such partnership forms the framework for interaction among components of the human community. It fosters the mutual maturation of human groups and societies in an atmosphere of understanding and dialogue, leading to an ever-evolving noble civilization.
What we call “the international ecumenical family” is the haven that gathers us, providing shared values and perspectives, harmonized despite their diversity, on life, society, and the future of humanity, where the struggle between good and evil rages and which outcome will determine the fate of modern humanity.
In place of monopolizing resources, there is partnership; in place of concealment, transparency; in place of imposition, dialogue; in place of humiliation, the safeguarding of dignity. All these indicate progress in human minds and hearts toward the Lord’s values, which enable us to have a better life.