Reading the Old Testament in the Context of HIV/Aids
I have made my opening point before (West 2003), but I will make it again because it is so important. I worry when well intentioned people who are not HIV-positive prescribe what kind of theology there ought to be or how we ought to read the Bible for people who are HIV-positive. The questions of how we read the Bible (specifically the Old Testament) in the context of HIV/Aids, the subject of my paper, must be substantially constituted by actual collaboration with people who are living with the virus. We are all affected, and we are all being partially constituted by the daily realities of HIV/Aids, but we are not all infected. Alongside the other liberation theologies that have shaped our African contexts ? and I speak here specifically of liberation theologies that have centred around race, class, gender and culture ? HIV/Aids must now take its place (see for example Maluleke 2001; Nicolson 2000). And what an HIV/Aids liberation theology demands is that we grant an epistemological privilege to the experience of those who are infected. Per Frostin is correct when he says that the distinguishing characteristic of liberation theologies is not content but methodology (Frostin 1988:11), and key to the methodology of liberation theologies is the epistemological privileging of those who experience that particular marginalisation. Those who know the lived reality of HIV/Aids, must become the primary interlocutors of theology (see Frostin 1988:6-11).
