Category: Liberation Theology

The First Religious War of the 21st Century (Sixth in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

That liberation theology dared from 1968 on to enter the arena of religion which the right had long dominated virtually without rival astounded and infuriated the keepers of empire. Peasants throughout the subjugated world found entirely empowering the new explanations of God, Jesus and the gospels which this Friday series of blog posts has reviewed. Everywhere throughout Latin America they formed biblical circles, and those circles issued in social movements for justice.

In response, the Rockefeller Report of 1969 already identified liberation theology as a threat to the national security of the United States. By 1987, the Latin American Military Chiefs of Staff meeting in conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, devoted several pages of their final report to liberation theology and the threat it posed to regional stability.  In between, in 1979 the first Santa Fe Document advised the incoming Reagan administration that it had to do something decisive about the threat posed by liberation theology. The administration heeded the advice, and responded both militarily and ideologically.

Reagan’s military strategy against liberation theology issued in what Noam Chomsky describes as the first religious war of the 21st century. It was the war of the United States against the Catholic Church in Latin America whose bishops, as noted earlier, had together dared to affirm a “preferential option for the poor” as their official position. To combat that commitment, the U.S. did exactly what Rome had done in the first three centuries of our era – and for the same reason: faithfully following Jesus who called empire into question and motivated the poor to assert their rights in this world as children of the God of life.

And both the Roman response and the U.S. response to Jesus and his followers resulted in blood baths. Many of us are well acquainted with the best-known martyrs: Camilo Torres, Archbishop Romero, the Salvadoran team of liberation theologians killed at San Salvador’s Central American University in 1989, the U.S. women religious murdered years earlier in that same country, and Che Guevara. (Yes, Che. His spirituality was secular, but it was no less spiritual or liberationist than any of the others.) And then the unending list of martyrs in this war against the Catholic Church – 200,000 in Guatemala, more than 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and literally untold killings and disappearances in Honduras. In every case, the carnage was a response to social movements inspired by liberation theology. Again, as Chomsky points out, official U.S. military documents show that liberation theology was a major target of those wars. In fact within those same official documents, the Army boasts specifically about defeating LT.

As for Reagan’s ideological response to liberation theology . . . .  On his accession to power, CIA psyops began funding conservative alternatives to liberation theology in Latin America and in the U.S. So did business concerns that saw the leftward drift of Latin America as a threat to their presence there. Domino’s Pizza and Coors Brewery were prominent among the cases in point. As a result, evangelicals throughout the region grew rapidly in number, and the recipients of those funds in the United States increasingly identified with Republicans, the “hand that fed them.” So the television programs of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and others were beamed into every poor barrio, población, and favela. Right wing churches sprang up everywhere feeding and expanding an already robust evangelical presence in areas once completely dominated by the Catholic Church. The message was always the same – a depoliticized version of Christianity whose central commitment involved accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior and rejecting communism including the type allegedly represented by the theology of liberation.

All of this points up the extreme importance of LT. In effect liberation theology was not only responsible for spiritual and political awakening throughout Latin America, it was also indirectly responsible for the rise of the religious right in the United States, and ultimately for the Tea Party.  

In fact, the rise of evangelicalism as the dominant contingent in the Republican Party was the result of an offensive against a powerful U.S. form of liberation theology. According to Chip Bertlet, who has been researching right wing populism for the last 25 years and more, the energizing force behind the offensive was the political right’s project to capture and channel the angry reaction of large numbers of white Southern Christians against the Civil Rights Movement animated by a nascent form of black liberation theology closely identified with Martin Luther King. In that context, the Reagan administration’s offensive against LT (and the Civil Rights Movement) took on a particular U.S. embodiment paralleling the Latin American form just referenced. The U.S. form also involved assassinations, F.B.I. surveillance, and identification of civil rights leaders as “communists.” Since the zeitgeist following the legislative and social successes of the Civil Rights Movement made overtly anti-black campaigns impossible, the U.S. form could not simply call for a repeal civil rights legislation. It took on instead a campaign against “Big Government” seen as responsible for implementing those legislative reforms.

Just like the Latin American campaign against LT, the U.S. counterpart took off in 1979, and achieved real prominence over a brief period of 18 months. Since “Roe v. Wade” represented an instance of “Big Government’s” power, abortion was adopted as a trigger issue masking the racism just below the surface. The issue was adopted as pivotal even though prior to 1968 no protestant denomination had an official position on abortion. (See “Right Wing Populism in the U.S.A.: Understanding Social Movements of the Right in America Today,” Talk delivered at the Z Media Institute, Woods Hole, MA, June 8th, 2010. See also the PBS film “With God on our Side.”)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, we currently have in the White House the first U.S. president directly influenced by liberation theology. For 20 years, Barack Obama was part of the congregation of Jeremiah Wright – identified by James Cone, the father of black liberation theology, as the black liberation theology’s foremost contemporary embodiment. LT’s importance was illustrated in the 2008 debate about Jeremiah Wright’s influence on Candidate Obama which nearly derailed his run for the presidency. 

In other words, liberation theology has been far more influential than most are willing to recognize. In a sense, it has shaped U.S.-Latin American relations for a half-century. It has changed the face of Protestantism in the United States.

In addition, Ronald Reagan’s ideological strategy against liberation theology changed the Catholic Church. Reagan’s offensive involved allying himself with a conservative anti-communist Polish pope, John Paul II, who proved to be an inveterate enemy of liberation theology. The apparent agreement between the two was that John Paul would be silent about the war against Latin American Catholics, if Reagan would help him in the pope’s campaign against communism in Poland. During his reign of over 20 years, John Paul was to gradually replace Latin America’s pro-liberation theology bishops with conservative pre-Vatican II types. He did this throughout the world – mostly in direct response to liberation theology.

Even more virulently set against liberation theology was John Paul’s lieutenant, Joseph Ratzinger, whom the pope appointed head of the Sacred Congregation for the Faith (formerly the Office of the Holy Inquisition). In that capacity, Ratzinger penned an official warning about liberation theology in 1985. Basically, it rejected the movement because of its association with Marxist analysis of third world poverty. Of course, Ratzinger succeeded John Paul II in the papacy. He’s now Pope Benedict XVI. So the onslaught against liberation theology continues with no end in sight.

Sadly, Reagan’s two-front strategy worked. Revolutionary gains in El Salvador, Guatemala, and most prominently, in Nicaragua were halted and reversed. Militarily, the “Guatemala Solution” was the template. It entailed using military and paramilitary death squads to kill everyone remotely connected with guerrilla movements. According to the Reagan strategy, that included priests, nuns, lay catechists and ministers of the word influenced by liberation theology. The theological strategy worked as well. The slogan promulgated by the Salvadoran military said it all, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.” 

But despite the carnage, and despite the claims of victory by the U.S. military, liberation theology remains alive and well in grass-roots movements for solidarity. And in general, social movements inspired by liberation theology bore fruit in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They continue to bear fruit today. More specifically, it is possible to say credibly that apart from the theology of liberation, it is impossible to explicate Allende’s rise to power in 1973 or the triumph of the Sandinistas in 1979, or the power the FMLN in El Salvador had and continues to enjoy today. The Zapatista movement in Mexico is also intimately connected with liberation theology. Even more, without reference to liberation theology, it’s impossible to fully understand the rise of new left governments throughout Latin America. All of them are indebted to liberation theology and its power to motivate the grassroots. (Evo Morales’ rise to power in Bolivia might be an exception. But even he used Andean myths of liberation to mobilize indigenous grassroots forces on his behalf).

That same power to motivate is evident in the ongoing “Arab spring.” There the power derives from the liberation currents undeniably present in Islam. In fact, as Gandhi saw in changing the face of India, similar currents are found in Hinduism. Again, it is possible to credibly assert that liberation theology has at its roots elements found at the center of all the religions of the world. In this light, the world-wide offensive against Islam represents the latest phase of the now Thirty Years War against liberation theology under wherever form it may appear.

Next Friday: Series Conclusion

Liberation Theology and the Left in Latin America (Fifth in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

 Unlike its counterpart in the United States, the left in Latin America has not lost its sense of mythological reason – i.e. ability to connect the profound truths of ancient myth and story with contemporary problems. Instead, LT has fostered among the third world poor the understanding of Jesus and Paul described earlier in this series. That is, over the last 45 years, LT has used the insights of the poor themselves coupled with those derived from the scripture scholarship of the last century and a half to nurture social activists and social movements, and to sow the seeds of profound social change. 

That’s exactly what happened beginning in the 1960s, especially following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the meeting of Latin America’s National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ in Medellin, Colombia in 1968.

The Second Vatican Council was a precursor of liberation theology. Largely inspired by the loss of the working classes in Europe to communism and socialism, Vatican II attempted to connect with the European left to regain lost terrain. So the church re-presented itself as the servant rather than the opponent of the world. It owned publicly as its official teaching the “best kept secret of the Catholic Church,” viz. its progressive social teachings that first took shape with the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum in 1891. Those teachings endorsed labor unions, higher wages for workers, and government social programs on behalf of the working classes. 

The impact of Vatican II was immediate. Catholics everywhere representing the largest Christian denomination in the world, at last felt free to join in common cause with communists and socialists. The resulting praxis cannot be disassociated with the social revolutions that followed in Europe and in the United States throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s. The near toppling of the French government in 1968 cannot be disassociated from Vatican II and the Catholics it inspired to join students, labor unionists, atheists, socialists and communists marching, demonstrating and rebelling in the name of social justice. Similarly, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement in the United States cannot be explained without taking account of the Catholics who swelled their ranks as a direct result of Vatican II. The same can be said for the women’s liberation movement, the environmental movement, the gay rights movement, the American Indian Movement, the prisoners’ rights movement and others. None of them can be fully explained without prominent reference to the Second Vatican Council and the resulting appropriation of religious mythology by the activist left.

In fact, the civil rights movement itself expressed a kind of black liberation theology – a politicized theology in the black evangelical community. Without the black churches the achievements of the civil rights movement would never have happened. Even Malcolm X who rejected Christianity realized that any social movement that refused to connect with the spiritual is doomed to failure.  He used the teachings of Islam to mobilize African-Americans the same way Martin Luther King Jr. used the Christian tradition as understood in the African-American community.

Meanwhile, in Latin America, the earlier referenced Medellin meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM), sought to apply the teachings of Vatican II to their region. They shifted even further to the left than the Catholic Church in general. In fact, they adopted a liberation theology understanding of the Gospel. They reaffirmed that understanding at Cancun, Mexico in 1973 and at Puebla five years later. In all three cases, they appropriated the LT term, “preferential option for the poor.” That is, they agreed that God’s chosen people are the poor and oppressed, and that the church’s primary mission is to serve the poor in the interests of their liberation – politically and economically as well as spiritually.

More to the point, what had happened with Vatican II and even more so with liberation theology is that for the first time, the left had confronted the right with an extremely powerful alternative mythology to counteract the mythology of what Marx referred to as “the gods of heaven” and the “gods of earth.” Those gods were responsible for keeping Latin America’s poor not only impoverished, but (in Marx’s terms) humiliated, subjugated, abandoned and despised.

The gods of heaven challenged by liberation theology are familiar enough. They can be met at any hour of the day or night on the religious programming so prominent on radio and television. The myths belonging to the gods of heaven rationalize poverty in terms of God’s will. The poor are especially dear to God, of course. But what pleases God is not their struggle for liberation, but patience in this life for the sake of reward in the life to come. 

As for Marx’s “gods of earth,” they are most prominently money, capital, law and market. Traditional prophetic language would refer to them as “idols.” In this 21st century, they are absolute in their power. Ironically, despite their “scientific” and “secular” pretensions, they are no less religious than their heavenly counterparts. For example, there’s something quite revealing about the chairman of Goldman Sachs using theological terms to describe the firm’s mission. “We’re doing God’s work,” he said recently. In Popper’s terms, the dogmas of these gods of earth are entirely un-falsifiable and hence “religious” not scientific in nature.

In other words, the rumors of the dawn of a secular age are vastly exaggerated. Hopefully secularization will be achieved by our children or grandchildren; it has largely eluded our generation. In any case, the myths underpinning the gods of earth include the myth of progress, that of the “Invisible Hand,” the “trickle-down” myth,  as well as the one summarized in Margaret Thatcher’s famous mantra, “There is no alternative” (to corporate globalization).  These gods of earth are unquenchably blood thirsty and demand those 30,000 child sacrifices each day. They demand as well a $2 billion per day U.S. war budget against the infidels who would resist the empire that serves the gods of earth. Those infidels, by the way, are invariably the Third World poor.

Next Friday: The First Religious War of the 21st Century

Liberation Theology and the Imperialization of Christianity (Fourth in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

If it’s true (as claimed here last week) that both Jesus and Paul proclaimed God’s Kingdom in such stark contrast to imperial Rome, how is it that by the fourth century Christianity found itself allied with Rome? Historical analysis makes it clear that the alliance was the result of the imperialization of Christianity rather than of the Christianization of empire.

To begin with, there are many indications that Jesus resisted empire specifically. Much has been written about this. However, the simplest illustration of Jesus’ opposition is in the famous story of his temptations in the desert. The story is familiar. With variations, it is contained in all four of the canonical gospels. Jesus has just been baptized by John. In Luke’s version, a voice has told him that he is somehow the “Son of God.” He goes out to the desert to discover what that might mean; he’s on a vision quest. He prays and fasts for 40 days. Afterwards come the visions of devils, angels, and of his own life’s possibilities. Satan tests him. In Matthew’s account, the culminating temptation is unmistakably imperial. It occurs on a high mountain. Satan shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth – an empire much vaster than Rome’s. The tempter says, “All of this can be yours, if only you bow down and worship me.” Jesus refuses. He says, “Be gone, Satan! It is written, the Lord God only shall you adore; him only shall you serve.” In other words, Jesus rejects empire in no uncertain terms. The story at the beginning of the accounts of Jesus words and deeds establishes him as anti-imperial.

That opposition to empire is extremely important to understanding what became of Christianity over 1500 years ago, when its leading faction decided to climb into bed with empire. In terms of Matthew’s temptation narrative, orthodox Christianity began worshipping Satan at that point, since in his account Satan worship was the prerequisite to reception of his “gift” of empire.

More specifically, in the 4th century, circumstances made it necessary for the emperor Constantine and his successors to repeat Satan’s temptation – this time to a cooperative faction within the leadership of the Christian church. That faction was asked to allow Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In return church authorities would exercise a kind of co-dominion with Rome. All they had to do was accept empire, give it religious legitimacy – become the state religion. Jesus had said “no” to a similar temptation. Fourth century church leadership said “yes.” In doing so, they effectively said “yes” to Satan worship – the necessary precondition of accepting empire. They also abandoned the Jesus of history and his this-worldly message. In the process, they reduced Jesus to a mythological figure and Christianity to a Roman mystery cult. Here’s how. . . .  

Like all oppressors, Constantine realized that religion represented an incomparable tool for controlling people. If an emperor can convince people that in obeying him they are obeying God, the emperor has won the day. In fact it is the job of any state religion to make people believe that God’s interests and the state’s interests are the same.

What Constantine saw in the 4th century was that Rome’s state religion was losing power. Christianity was spreading rapidly. And it was politically dangerous.  The message of Jesus was particularly attractive to the lower classes. It affirmed their dignity in the clearest of terms. Often the message incited slaves and others to rebel rather than obey. Rome’s knee-jerk response had been repression and persecution. But byConstantine’s day,Rome’s repression had proved ineffective. Despite Rome’s throwing Christians to the lions for decade upon decade, the Jesus Movement was more popular than ever.

Constantine decided that if he couldn’t beat the Christians, he had to join them – or more accurately, co-opt them. And he evidently decided to do so by robbing Christianity of its revolutionary potential. He would do so, he determined, by converting the faith of Jesus into a typical Roman “mystery cult,” a form of religion that was extremely popular in 4th century Rome. Mystery cults were “salvation religions” that worshipped gods with names like Isis, Osiris, and Mithras. Mithras was particularly popular. He was the Sun God, whose feast day and birth happened to be celebrated on December 25th.  Typically the “story” celebrated in mystery cults was of a god who descended from heaven, lived on earth for a while, died, rose from the dead, ascended back to heaven, and from there offered worshippers “eternal life,” in return for joining the cults. There the god’s body was eaten under the form of bread, and the god’s blood was drunk under the form of wine. The unity thus achieved assured “salvation” after death. 

To convert Christianity into a mystery cult, Constantine (who wasn’t even a Christian at the time) convoked a church council – the Council of Nicaea in 325. There the question of the day became who was Jesus of Nazareth. Was he just a human being? Was he just a God and not a human being at all? Was he some combination of God and man? Did he have to eat? Did he have to defecate or urinate? Those were the questions. For Constantine’s purposes, the more divine and otherworldly Jesus was the better. That would make him less a threat to the emperor’s very this-worldly dominion.

The result of all the deliberations was codified in the Nicene Creed: 

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things   visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

In terms of understanding the imperialization of Christianity, it is important to notice here how the Creed jumps from the conception and birth of Jesus to his death and resurrection. It leaves out entirely any reference to what Jesus said and did. For all practical purposes it ignores the historical Jesus described earlier in this series. It pays attention only to a God who comes down from heaven, dies, rises, ascends back to heaven and offers eternal life to those who believe. It’s a nearly perfect reflection of “mystery cult” belief. The revolutionary potential of Jesus’ words and actions relative to justice, wealth and poverty is lost. Not only that, but subsequent to Nicaea, anyone connecting Jesus to a struggle for justice, sharing, and communal life is classified as heretical. That is, mystery cult becomes “orthodoxy.” Meanwhile, Jesus’ own proclamation of a this-worldly “reign of God” in opposition to the “reign of Caesar” becomes heresy. The same is true of Paul’s understanding of “the wisdom of God” in making the poor and despised his chosen people. In that sense, the post-Constantine, post-Nicaea church was founded not only against Paul, but against Jesus himself. Christians in league with empire have been worshipping Satan ever since.

Next week: Liberation Theology and the Left in Latin America

Liberation Theology and Critical Thinking (Third in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

With Jesus and Paul having been identified as liberationists, it is now possible to connect them (and their liberation theology) with critical thinking. This entails clarifying the methodology of liberation theology.

For protagonists of LT, theology itself – even direct recollection of Jesus’ words and deeds and the writings of Paul as summarized here over the last two weeks –  is not primary. To be sure, one’s commitment to God might be fundamental for many. However LT begins by recognizing that living a dignified human life represents the truly primary task of human beings. It’s what the human project is about. That is, life is about living not theologizing. And at the end of a day of trying to make ends meet, there remains precious little time for theological reflection. 

Put otherwise, living a dignified human life in today’s world is by no means easy especially for the third world poor who are LT’s main protagonists. Recall the statistics cited earlier about the shockingly uneven resource distribution that characterizes the world of corporate globalization. Those numbers suggest that many forces including economic, social, political and specifically religious structures and ideologies make dignified human life (with the freedom from cold, hunger, disease, and  ignorance implied) nearly impossible for the world’s majority. So theological reflection is not even a second step towards making sense of one’s life. For activists (and protagonists of liberation theology, remember, are committed activists) the second step is social analysis – i.e. attempting to understand the forces (including religion) that make life so hard and unfair.

But even here the term “social analysis” might be misleading. It conjures the unlikely image of peasants exchanging insights about Marx’s labor theory of value or critiques of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Instead among the third world poor, social analysis takes the form of neighbors discussing their daily lives and, e.g. the obstacles preventing municipal authorities from supplying water or electricity to their slum community. Here the practice resembles Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire’s model of popular education. That model assumes that local communities however poor normally have within them the intellectual and moral resources necessary to understand and effectively address their own problems. When this is not the case, such communities can seek help from outside “experts.”

However, following Freire’s model, it doesn’t take long even for those completely lacking formal education to link their immediate problems with “structures” including abstractions such as “capitalism,” “free trade,” “neo-colonialism” and ideological manipulations of patriotism and religion. Nonetheless emphasis is usually on practical immediate responses to problems at hand. 

Theological reflection is a third step (after daily experience and social analysis) in the “hermeneutical circle” of liberation theology. It is what some people of faith do “at the end of the day,” to help them make sense of their experience of life. For communities with a liberationist understanding of the Christian tradition, this reflection often takes place in “biblical circles,” where neighbors meet to reflect on their attempts to follow Jesus of Nazareth. One can get a flavor of such gatherings from Ernesto Cardenal’s Gospel in Solentiname, which records verbatims of such gatherings in Cardenal’s lay monastic community in Solentiname, Nicaragua prior to the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution. Participants discuss readings from the Gospels and connect them directly to their lives. It is at this point that the earlier referenced similarities between the situations of Jesus and his followers in first century colonial Palestine and those of the poor of the 21st century third world are identified, discussed, and scrutinized for the practical and moral guidance they might offer.

A fourth step in LT’s process of critical thinking is planning a course of transformative action or praxis. Participants in the “biblical circle” identify small (and sometimes large) tasks they promise to perform before the circle’s next meeting. Each understands that s/he will have to report to the group on his or her success or failure to complete the assumed task. Without this step (however small) the circle remains a discussion group and not a Christ-like agent for change.

Finally, comes the step of “reinsertion” or return to daily life with its work, burdens, responsibilities, sorrows and joys. But in a sense, everything and everyone has changed following completion of the first four steps in LT’s critical cycle. This is true, since the critical process has served to explain or at least shed light on the factors fundamentally responsible for day-to-day issues such as low wages, high prices, family strife, alcoholism, police brutality, etc.  It is especially true since each participant in the circle has pledged to actually do something specific to make a difference.  

It is LT’s emphasis on understanding systems as well as on transformative action that makes its understanding of critical thinking continuous with the roots of critical thought found in Paul of Tarsus as the founder of critical thinking in the C.E. West.

In fact, systemic critique and insistence on transformative action is what has distinguished the great critical thinkers who might be considered Paul’s offspring – Marx, Freud, and even Nietzsche (though the latter considered himself Paul’s arch-enemy, precisely because of Paul’s paradigm shift favoring those the world considers “weak” and “despised”). The distinguishing characteristic of great critical thinkers is their refusal to accept the parameters of thought defined by “the given” as the categorical limits of perception imposed thereby. Instead, they’ve insisted on subjecting “what is” to judgments inspired by “what is not.”  In Paul’s case (and in Jesus’ too) the kingdom of God represents “what is not.” It stands in judgment over everything that is. In other words, the utopian “Kingdom of God” proclaimed by Jesus, and the “Wisdom of God” invoked by Paul become instruments for exercising “the critique of mythical reason” that has been so absent from the discourse  of the U.S. left

                Mythical reasoning compares a vision of the future like that encapsulated in the Kingdom of God image (“what is not”) with analysis of critical reasoning’s starting point, the actual situation defining the context under analysis (“what is”). A metaphor like the kingdom of God (or for that matter like the “communism” of Marx and Engels) represents a “myth” describing an ideal state impossible to attain. Such utopian image does not represent an actual goal, any more than the North Star represents the destination of navigators. Instead, precisely as an image of the impossible, it represents and indispensable point of reference for uncovering the possible. Without such image, without such utopian or mythic critique, one remains mired in the status quo without hope of escaping the given order’s categorical limits of perception.             

 Next Week: The Imperialization of Christianity

Paul of Tarsus: Christianity’s First Liberation Theologian

 (This is the 2nd in a series on liberation theology)

                It is very difficult for 21st century Christians to understand Paul of Tarsus. This is because (as Evangelical theologian, Brian McLaren puts it) we read Paul backwards – just as we understand Jesus backwards. By that McLaren means we usually begin our understanding with someone like Billy Graham (or with Benedict XVI for Catholics). From there we progress to John Calvin (or Vatican II), to Martin Luther (or the Council of Trent), to Thomas Aquinas, to Augustine, to Paul and then to Jesus. That progression yields a perception of Paul who was misogynist and homophobic, who supported slavery, who taught obedience to all governmental authority, and who was concerned the priority of faith over works the way Luther was. In other words, understanding Paul backwards projects back onto him controversies and consciousness that emerged decades, centuries and even millennia after his death.

                There is another way to understand Paul (and Jesus) however. And that is the way employed by liberation theology. This “other” way begins understanding with Adam, progresses on to Abraham, Moses, David, the Prophets, John the Baptist, Jesus, and finally Paul. This Paul is interpreted in the light of Jesus and not vice-versa. He knows nothing of the controversies that will distort his message over the centuries to come. Instead, we find in the man from Tarsus a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul is above all Jewish, and a working man besides. Paul is an intellectual, world-traveler, Jewish mystic, radical thinker, and martyr at the hands of empire. His overriding concern is spreading Good News about Jesus and his message which centralized the welfare of the poor and oppressed.

As everyone knows, Paul’s letters represent the earliest entries we find in the Christian Testament. Written beginning around the year 50, they pre-date the gospels by 20 years or more. They are the documents closest in time to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This makes it very significant that Paul’s letters (especially Romans and I Corinthians) reflect a clear liberation theology perspective whose defining character is a preferential option for the poor.

To perceive this reflection, it is helpful to consider Paul’s life’s circumstances in relation to Jesus. Such consideration reveals both continuities and discontinuities. To begin with, like Jesus, Paul belonged to the working class. He was a tent-maker. He was also, like Jesus, a Jewish mystic. This means he was aware that divine revelation did not belong to a single people, but was available to everyone by virtue of a common human experience.  Even more, Paul recognized a Divine Spark, i.e. a divine presence within every human being. He called it the Spirit of God. Both recognitions (of the commonality of revelation and of the Divine Spark) made Paul a universalist who saw that in God’s order national and class distinctions were meaningless. Finally, Paul, like Jesus, finished as a victim of capital punishment at the hands of the Roman Empire, though he was not executed by crucifixion, which suggests that unlike Jesus, he was not considered an insurgent or terrorist.

In addition to the similarities, Paul’s life circumstances also made him unlike Jesus in several important ways. For one, Paul was formally schooled as a Jewish rabbi, so he had more formal education than Jesus; Paul was an intellectual. Unlike Jesus too, Paul was a world traveler, and may even have been a Roman citizen. This not only helps account for Paul’s daring universalism, but for his opportunities and willingness to engage Roman philosophers on their own turf – geographically and intellectually.

Such considerations shed a bright light on Paul’s theology. There in key arguments he did not typically begin from a place of divine revelation, but from experience from which he drew rational conclusions. This made him like the Greco-Roman philosophers he was so interested in engaging.  Like the Stoics among them, he recognized the earlier referenced Divine Spark within each person. Paul, however, differed from the Stoics (and the Christian Gnostics who came later) in that he did not interpret the Divine Spark or logos as the presence of a changeless Spirit continuous with an eternal natural order. Nor did recognition of a divine indwelling spirit confirm the Stoic view that saw Rome’s political order as divinely established with the Emperor embodying the fullest expression of the divine “Word.”  

Rather, for Paul, the divine spark was identical with the Spirit of God, which Paul saw the same as what he termed the wisdom of God. That wisdom selected the poor and despised as God’s chosen people. This selection made Paul’s critical truth criterion vastly different from his Greco-Roman debate adversaries. For whereas the Greek’s criterion of truth was “what is” – the given natural and political orders – Paul’s fundamental criterion of “the judgment of God,” and “the Wisdom of God” prioritized the needs of the poor, humiliated, rejected, and despised. As liberation theologian, Franz Hinkelammert puts it, Paul’s argumentation was structured not by what is, but by what is not, i.e. by those “the wisdom of the world” excludes from consideration, viz. the poor just referenced. Seeing them as God’s chosen calls entirely into question discourse that the given world takes as normal.

To reiterate, all of this is difficult to perceive, since the liberation theology thrust of Paul’s thinking has been obscured by post-fourth century imperialized interpretations to be described in a later posting. (This also happened with the gospel accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus.) Thus on the one hand, Paul is commonly understood as pro-imperial, anti-feminist, and pro-slavery – as though the heart of Paul’s teaching were cultural rather than focusing on the counter-cultural “Wisdom of God.” Emphasis on Paul’s apparent sexism and his pragmatic approach to slavery ignores the apostle’s specific and substantive teachings about the invalidity of distinctions regarding nationality, gender, and social status. Interpretations of Romans 13 as endorsement of empire similarly ignore the center of his teaching about law and his contrast of the wisdom of the world vs. the Wisdom of God. If all authority comes from God as Romans 13 claims, then only those authorities whose legislation expresses the Wisdom of God (and its preferential option for the poor) must be obeyed.  

What Paul’s radicality means is that far from being the real founder of the Christian church (as is often alleged) Paul professed a theology that was quite foreign to his successors. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that the church was not founded by Paul, but against him. His teachings were far too radical for the digestive tracts of church leaders in the Constantinian institution that emerged in the 4th century. At that point, it became necessary to domesticate and tame Paul’s radicality and to make him like the rest of the church, a faithful servant of the status quo with its imperial oppression, misogyny, homophobia, racism, and eventual internecine squabbles about faith and works.

Until the emergence of modern scripture scholarship and interpretations like liberation theology’s we hadn’t heard from the real Paul of Tarsus since the first century.

Next Friday:  Jesus, Paul, Liberation Theology and Critical Thinking

What Is Liberation Theology? (First in a series published on Fridays)

Jesus as pictured by Nicaraguan peasant artists. Undeniably human. His most faithful disciples, women. His executioners, the U.S-supported Nicaraguan National Guard.

What is liberation theology? In a single sentence: liberation theology is reflection on the following of Jesus of Nazareth from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed like the women in the painting above. More accurately, it is reflection on the following of Jesus of Nazareth from the viewpoint of those among the poor who are committed to their own liberation. Liberation theology comes from a place of commitment to social change.

Change, liberation from what? In a word, from colonialism and from the neo-colonialism represented today by contemporary forces of corporate globalization whose leading champion is the United States of America. As we all know, those forces have half the world living on $2 a day or less. They’ve concentrated the world’s wealth in the hands of a sliver of 1% of the world’s population. Three men own as much wealth as the 48 poorest nations. Two hundred and twenty-five people own as much as today’s 3 billion living on $2 a day. According to the U.N., an annual 4% tax on those 225 would provide enough resources to feed, clothe, cure and educate the entire Third World. To the wealthy (often supported by Christians who present themselves a pro-life), such taxation is unthinkable. As a result, 30,000 children die of absolutely preventable starvation each day. In the eyes of liberation theology’s protagonists, that’s sinful and runs entirely contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

And what were those teachings? (This is the heart of liberation theology.) They were first of all those of a man recognized by the impoverished as someone like themselves. He looked like them — not like me or other white people. If we are to believe forensic history experts (see posting of April 26th below), he resembled the poor majority we see everywhere in our globalized world. He probably stood about 5’1’’ and weighed about 110 pounds. His skin was brown. He was a laborer, not a scholar. His hands were calloused.

Jesus also exhibited the characteristics that good Christians among us often find repulsive and ungodly. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother. According to Matthew’s account, he was an immigrant in Egypt for a while. The good people of his day called him a drunkard and the companion of prostitutes. They expelled him from his synagogue because he didn’t seem to care about the most important of the 10 commandments – the Sabbath law. The religious authorities said he was a heretic and possessed by the devil. The occupying Roman authorities identified him as a terrorist. They arrested him. And he ended up a victim of torture and of capital punishment carried out by crucifixion which was a means of execution the Romans reserved for insurgents. He was not the kind of person Christians usually admire. He was far too liberal to merit their approval.

In fact, the gospels give the impression that Jesus spent his public life roaming from one party, one banquet to another. At one point, he is said to have enlivened a wedding feast by producing more than 175 gallons of wine for partiers who had been drinking plentifully for days. And he was always finding excuses to break the law. In fact, he made a point of violating Sabbath restrictions whenever doing so might help someone who in most cases might have equally been helped any other day of the week. He was clearly a feminist. Many of his disciples were women. He spoke with them in isolated places. He actually forgave a woman caught in adultery, while implicitly criticizing the hypocrisy of patriarchal law which punished women for adultery and not men. And Jesus refused to recognize his contemporaries’ taboos around segregations. He crossed boundaries not only dividing men from women, but Jew from gentile, lepers from non-lepers, and rich from poor. . . .    Jesus actually touched and ate with lepers and others considered contaminated and unclean. He couldn’t have been more liberal. In a sense he was an anarchist. He honored no law that failed to represent the loving thing to do. His attitude towards the law is best summarized in his pronouncement about the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was instituted for human beings,” he said, “human beings weren’t made for the Sabbath.” This was pure humanism placing human beings above even God’s holiest law. Again, it was anarchistic.

Jesus’ teachings were politically liberal too. They centered on social justice. As such they infuriated his opponents but were wildly inspiring to the poor and oppressed. His proclamation was not about himself, but about what he called “The Kingdom of God.” That was the highly charged political image he used to refer to what the world would be like if God were king instead of Caesar. In that kingdom everything would be turned upside-down. The first would be last; the last would be first. The rich would be poor; the poor would be rich. Subsequent reflection by followers of Jesus in the Book of Revelation teased all of that out and drew the conclusion that with the dawning of God’s kingdom, the Roman Empire would be destroyed and replaced by a new heaven and a new earth entirely unlike empire. There (as indicated in the Acts of the Apostles) wealth would be distributed from each according to his ability to each according to his need. There would be room for everyone. If that sounds like communism, it’s because, as the Mexican exegete Jose Miranda points out, the idea of communism originated with Christians, not with Marx and Engels.

Once again, most of this is not the kind of thing  Christians are usually thought of as endorsing. But that’s the vision of God, Jesus, and his message that liberation theology presents. And it’s all supported by the research of 90% of contemporary biblical scholars, even those who know little or nothing of liberation theology.

Questions for Reflection:

1. What questions do you have about liberation theology as defined in this post?

2. Why do you suppose the U.S. government was so alarmed by the rise of liberation theology in the 1960s?

3. Would the U.S. government have been similarly alarmed by Jesus himself? Why? Why not?

4. Are you upset by the idea of liberation theology as described above? Why?

Next Friday: “St. Paul: Christianity’s First Liberation Theologian”

Chomsky on U.S. War vs. Liberation Theology

My first public post on this blog site (the video immediately below) begins my series on Liberation Theology (LT) — certainly a “thing that matters” in our post-modern world. In fact, I consider LT the most important theological development  of the last 1500 years. More than that, I see it as the most significant intellectual and activist movement in the last 150 years (or roughly since the publication of The Communist Manifesto). After all, it was a type of liberation theology that fueled the Civil Rights Movement. And today, an Islamic form of LT energizes the Arab Spring. Moreover, we have in the White House the first President to have been formed spiritually in a liberation theology congregation (that  of Jeremiah Wright). The video below presents the comments of Noam Chomsky on the U.S. campaign against LT during the 1980s, when U.S. leadership panicked at the form it took in Central America.  Years ago The New Yorker Magazine called Chomsky perhaps the leading intellectual of our era. Here he speaks specifically of the U.S. interventions in Central America during the 1980s as a war against LT. Elsewhere Chomsky termed those conflicts “the first religious war of the 21st century.” Please click on the YouTube film clip below. Then post your comments and questions in the space provided. Also include any suggestions for making this blog site better. My series on Liberation Theology will start next Friday (May 4th). In the meantime, there will be posts on other topics.

“Forensic Jesus”

This is what forensic archeologists say the Jesus of history probably looked like. He was a working man who stood about 5’1″ and weighed about 110 pounds. His skin was dark; his hands were calloused. His message was not about himself, but about the Kingdom of God — what the world would be like if God rather than Caesar were king. This web site is dedicated to exploring the relevance of that Jesus to our post-modern times.