Freedom from Colonial Bondage

Abstract

This article sets out the colonial legacies and realities which continue to dominate indigenous peoples’ lives, experience, communities, and capacities in Australia. It roots this colonial violence in the particular efforts of missionaries to convert and dominate indigenous peoples with a white colonial God. The Bible was a key weapon for this work, but it is also central to the decolonial work of reconstruction and reparation. While Aboriginal Christians are rereading the biblical texts in ways that push back against the colonial occupation that is at the heart of the church's biblical exegesis, the article is pointing to this as a task laid on all churches and Christians, who can and should decolonize the dominant biblical and theological narratives. Further, there is a deep need to see theological education as a key location for reparation by the colonial inheritors, so that indigenous Christians can continue to deepen and deliver the tools that will help liberate mission and theological education from their colonial legacies.