When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the testimony of God to you with superior speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were made not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are being destroyed. 7 But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory 8 and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—10 God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For what human knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.
– 1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (NRSVUE)
During my youth in our local town in India, revival gospel meetings, often featuring well-known preachers engaged in evangelistic ministry, were a regular occurrence. These meetings were publicised through posters on town walls, on public transport buses, and in other prominent public spaces. One particular poster that I encountered proved especially striking. Unlike the customary practice, the organisers listed only the dates and venue of the meetings and identified the preacher simply as “Parishuddhatma Devudu” (a Telugu term meaning “Holy Spirit God”), without naming any individual. This unusual attribution became a subject of considerable discussion within our youth gatherings. We were unsettled by what appeared to be an implicit equivalence between the human preacher and the Holy Spirit, raising questions about the nature of divine agency, authority, and accountability in proclamation. The poster thus functioned not merely as an announcement but as a provocation, compelling me to examine the relationship between the Spirit’s work and the mediating role of human instruments in the act of proclaiming the gospel of Christ, as Paul discusses in his letter to the Corinthians.
Reflecting on this through a political-theological lens, the episode invites deeper consideration of how coloniality has shaped Christian kerygma, the act of proclamation itself. Within colonial Christian contexts, the boundaries between human wisdom and divine wisdom are frequently blurred, particularly when those who occupy positions of ecclesial or social power present their proclamations as the unmediated word of God. ‘Knowledge is power.’ Whose knowledge constitutes power? Historically, the knowledge of the powerful has been legitimised as authoritative and normative, while the knowledge produced by the powerless, particularly by our Dalit communities, has been rendered marginal, suspect, or illegitimate. Dalit proclamations of faith and Scripture have frequently been disregarded, and at times explicitly dismissed as unscriptural or unspiritual, precisely because we draw upon local, embodied, and culturally situated resources in contrast to the Eurocentric Western tools.
The colonial episteme functions to pacify, and at times effectively nullify, human agency in the act of kerygma, insofar as the powerful preacher’s proclamation is absolutised as the Word of God. In such a framework, authority flows unidirectionally, from the preacher to the congregation, leaving little room for discernment, contestation, or contextual interpretation. What is presented as pneumatic authority often masks the operation of power.
This dynamic is starkly evident in contemporary forms of Christian proclamations, for example, the self-styled tele-evangelists, where sound, spectacle, colour, and the theatricality of the stage dominate the act of proclamation. Here, the messenger increasingly eclipses the message, as performance overtakes proclamation. The gospel itself is reduced to themes of prosperity, wealth, glory, and a privatised vision of heaven, severed from the socio-political realities and suffering contexts in which people live. In this process, the name of Jesus is effectively appropriated and instrumentalised to legitimise personal ambition and ideological agendas, revealing a continued captivity of Christian proclamation to coloniality rather than its liberation from it.
Within such a context, the decolonisation of kerygma becomes imperative, as it calls for a liberative proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ that is rooted and grounded in the cruciform reality of his life, ministry, and death. Decolonising kerygma entails a decisive reorientation of proclamation away from triumphalism, spectacle, and hegemonic authority, and toward the vulnerability, suffering, and solidarity embodied in the cross. At the same time, decolonising kerygma affirms and celebrates the agency of the messenger. God’s self-communication is neither disembodied nor unmediated; rather, God chooses to work through and with creation, appropriating human voices, cultures, and histories in the proclamation of divine wisdom, word, and work. Such an understanding resists both the erasure of human agency and its absolutisation.
Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthian community, as articulated in 1 Corinthians 2:1–12, provides crucial signposts for a political-theological understanding of kerygma that remains deeply relevant in contemporary contexts. By foregrounding weakness, humility, and reliance on the Spirit rather than rhetorical mastery or displays of power, Paul offers a framework for proclamation that subverts dominant epistemologies and reclaims the gospel as a transformative and liberative word spoken in solidarity with the marginalised.
Paul was addressing the divisions and factions in the Corinthian church in the first four chapters of this first epistle to Corinthians, by calling on the need for unity in and through Jesus Christ. Each faction was trying to convince the Corinthian church to get to their side with their own oratory skills, rhetorical arguments and stage performances. Paul was contesting those factions and their glossy and lofty articulations by grounding his kerygma on nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified (3v). He explains to the Corinthian church that he was with them “in weakness, in fear and much trembling,” demonstrating his proclamation grounded on the cross so that their faith does not rest in human wisdom but in the power of God.
If God continues to disclose God’s self through divine self-revelation in creative and contextually situated ways across time, what, then, is the significance of Christian proclamation today? Karl Barth famously contends that God’s self-proclamation takes place in three interrelated forms: first, in the living Word of God, Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Word became flesh; second, in the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures; and third, in the proclaimed Word of God, as it is preached within the community of faith.
Within this theological framework, the incarnation precedes proclamation, and liberation follows it. Christian proclamation from a decolonial perspective is thus neither the origin nor the culmination of divine revelation, but a mediating act that participates in God’s self-disclosure already given and happening in Christ. Proclamation oscillates between incarnation and liberation: it draws its inspiration from the incarnation—the Word becoming flesh within concrete historical realities—and its telos is the liberation and transformation of the community in which it is proclaimed.
Understood in this way, proclamation is not a mere transmission of historical dogma, or a doctrinal content or a display of rhetorical authority, but a participatory event in which the Word, grounded in the incarnation, confronts oppressive structures and opens possibilities for communal renewal, justice, and freedom. Decolonising Christian proclamation, therefore, is measured not by the charisma of the preacher or the spectacle of performance, but by its fidelity to the incarnational logic of God’s self-giving and its capacity to engender liberative transformation in lived contexts.
When the proclamation of Christ involves the transmission of the Word of God to creation through creaturely agency, more specifically through human preaching, it necessarily passes through the frailties, fragilities, failures, weaknesses, and sinfulness of human beings. This mediation is, in itself, scandalous. It raises the fundamental theological question of how the divine Word can remain truly the Word of God when it is proclaimed through such compromised human instruments.
The apostle Paul addresses this paradox by locating the efficacy of proclamation not in human wisdom, rhetorical skill, or persuasive speech, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and the power of God. Proclamation does not derive its authority from the preacher’s oral gifts or moral capacity; rather, it is grounded in God’s gracious and generous action, whereby the Spirit appropriates human words for divine purposes.
In this sense, God chooses to proclaim through human agency for the sake of God’s Kingdom, while remaining both the subject and the object of proclamation. It is God who speaks through human beings, and it is God in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, who is proclaimed. Christian proclamation thus participates in the scandal of the incarnation itself, the divine self-communication that embraces human limitation without being exhausted or negated by it.
As mentioned in my opening illustration, where the preacher was named as “Holy Spirit God”, the preacher and organisers of that revival meeting seemed to suggest that God works only through the conditions of holiness and purity, as they were not bold in naming the person who was to preach. But Christian proclamation from the site of decolonisation happens through the weaknesses of human conditions, and God in Jesus Christ doesn’t shy away from working with and through the failing, falling and fragile humanity. In other words, proclamation of God is never one-sided, only involving God with a loudspeaker, speaking from transcendence to communities, rather God, by pitching God’s sanctuary amidst the world, proclaims the good news through and with the people of God in the here and now. The politics of kerygma is that the Word of God is proclaimed with the world of God by the wisdom of God for the witness to the world.
Paul adds on another layer to this scandal of kerygma by saying “he knew nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” where he explains how he is called to proclaim the cross of Christ, a folly to the perishing and which was considered “as stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles” (I Cor 1:23). At the heart of Christian kerygma is crucifixion of Christ, for the word not only became flesh in Jesus, but that flesh was also broken and crucified in Jesus, so that the proclamation resonates and identifies with the broken and crucified communities across histories and contexts, offering liberation and transformation through the power of God.
At this point, it is essential to attend to the lived testimony of my own Dalit Christian community. When the Christian gospel was proclaimed by missionaries to my grandparents’ generation, the proclamation of Jesus Christ and him crucified, it encountered them in their condition of social exclusion, structural oppression, and profound dehumanisation. Marked as “outcaste,” born outside the caste system, their lives bore the wounds of material deprivation as well as the psychological and spiritual injuries produced by caste-based humiliation. In this context, the gospel was not received as an abstract theological claim but as a liberative word that addressed their broken selves and wounded psyches. The proclamation of the crucified Christ offered them a renewed sense of self-dignity, self-respect, and belonging, inaugurating a holistic experience of liberation that enabled them to understand themselves as a new creation in Christ.
The “foolishness of the cross”, a symbol of public shame, degradation, and state-sanctioned violence, resonated deeply with our Dalit Christian experience. As a sign of God’s identification with those subjected to humiliation and exclusion, the cross functioned as both judgment and promise: judgment upon oppressive structures and promise of life within the values of God’s kingdom. Through the proclamation of this crucified Christ, our Dalit Christian communities were not merely consoled but transformed, becoming living testimonies to the redemptive and liberating power of God at work in history.
As I write this reflection, I am confronted by the cries and laments of the members of our Farsi-speaking Christians in my local congregation in the United Kingdom, who carry deep anguish for their families, friends, and communities in Iran, many of whom have lost loved ones in their struggle for freedom, peace, and liberation. Their grief renders the question unavoidable: What then is the relevance of Christian proclamation in such a context of suffering, resistance, and state violence? If the content of kerygma is Jesus Christ and him crucified, then its political-theological significance lies in discerning God’s self-revelation not apart from history, but within it. In this light, God’s proclamation is made manifest in and through the struggles, acts of resistance, and courageous protests of the Iranian people who continue to confront oppressive regimes in their pursuit of justice and liberation. Such a vision of kerygma calls global Christian communities beyond passive sympathy toward attentive listening, lament, and active solidarity. To proclaim the crucified Christ in this moment is to stand with those who suffer, to hear their cries as sites of divine disclosure, and to participate through prayer, advocacy, and embodied solidarity in God’s ongoing work of liberation in the world.
The second Sunday in February each year is observed as Racial Justice Sunday in the United Kingdom, and in 2026, the theme is “Love your neighbour.” From a political-theological perspective, decolonising kerygma in this context calls for a bold and uncompromising proclamation that white supremacy is a sin and Black Lives Matter. The Christian kerygma of loving our neighbour is only affirmed in our celebration of the dignity of the equal image of God among all people and in resisting all forms and any form of exclusion and discrimination in our society. Racial justice lies at the very heart of the gospel of Christ, compelling Christian discipleship to participate with the crucified Jesus in resisting and dismantling all forms of racial oppression and injustice in our world today. To love our neighbour, then, is not a mere sentiment but a concrete ethic of mutual accountability, care, and justice, a call to cultivate communities in which love and equity shape social, political, and ecclesial life.
In that pursuit for a just world in our midst, may we proclaim from roof and rafter the message of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion by offering hope, liberation and reconciliation to all the broken and crucified communities in our contexts. In such actions of justice and liberation, Christian kerygma comes alive and stays relevant.
