A Post For The New Year

Our purpose is not to elaborate an ideology to justify postures already taken, nor to undertake a feverish search for security in the face of the radical challenges which confront the faith, nor to fashion a theology from which political action is "deduced."  It is rather to let ourselves be judged by the Word of the Lord, to think through our faith, to strengthen our love, and to give reason for our hope from within a commitment which seeks to become more radical, total, and efficacious.  It is to reconsider the great themes of the Christian life within this radically changed perspective and with regard to the new question posed by this commitment.  This is the goal of the so-called theology of liberation.

Many significant efforts along these lines are being made in Latin America.  Insofar as we know about them, they have been kept in mind and have contributed to this study.  We wish to avoid, however, the kind of reflection which - legitimately concerned with the prevention of the mechanical transfer of an approach foreign to our historical and social coordinates- neglects the contribution of the universal Christian community.  It seems better, moreover, to acknowledge explicitly this contribution than to introduce surreptitiously and uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context which can only be fruitful among us if they undergo a healthy and frank scrutiny.  

From the introduction of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez  

I can't but think that most people on reading that would think "Marxism" though I think in the context of Latin American in 1971 capitalism was as much on the mind of Gustavo Gutierrez.  It was a period marked by the double-speaking, two-edged sword of the Kennedy-Johnson administration Alliance for Progress and the even more soured handling of American policy towards Latin America by the Nixon administration.  I think too many Americans who read the Latin American literature would have done well to read, re-read and really think about these two paragraphs.  It would also have been best if they really considered the warning against introducing "uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context," whatever good to be had from those available only through "a healthy and frank scrutiny."

Since the publication of this book, probably the most influential work in theology of the past half century, numerous other schools of "so-called theologies of liberation" have risen up and, in many cases, flourished, if nowhere else than among those living in the contexts which those theologies address.  By this time James Cone, the pioneer of Black Liberation Theology was already writing out of the context of Black People living under white supremacy.  Women were writing a related but different and distinct kind of theology based on their living with male supremacy.  At times they addressed and criticized even liberation theologies being written my male writers and, in many cases, the male theologians heard them and took them seriously, consequently taking those voices into account.  Certainly LGBTQ+ People have been writing a different theology that addressed their own lives and experiences of oppression in light of the experience of God as addressed in Scripture.  That's no surprise, the past month's short peek into Walter Brueggemann's take on the Hebrew Scriptures prove that that began in the expression of those experiences in the particular context of The Children of Israel, their experiences of life and their experience of a need of liberation.  If any Christian wants to slam "liberation theology" they'd better think twice because if that were to be eliminated from Christianity, pretty much all of Scripture would have to go because the very heart of it is a repeated sounding of theologies of liberation, starting with Exodus, certainly, and very arguably even before that in the book.  

I think among the most needed theologies of liberation are those who address the American and other "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" in the bondage the sin of white supremacy and the cargo cultism of Republican-fascism.   Today, in the United States, the large majority of time you hear the word "Christian" that's the heresy that is meant by it.   

Anywhere there has been a rise of racist, bigoted excluding nationalism, there is a need of a countering theology of liberation.  I think there is a need of liberation from TV and other hegemonic, life eating media.  In a Latin American context, from the likes of Univision which regurgitates the seduction catering to our weakness and is in the process of harnessing People to their own oppression.  The same can be said of English language TV and media, up to and including such supposedly respectable venues as PBS, NPR and the deeply corrupt BBC.  Wherever there is inequality, wherever there is bigotry or gender based oppression there is a need of a theology of liberation, wherever there is privilege and the an elite, wherever there are those seduced by materialism and acquisitive mental illness there is a need of a theology of liberation to overcome those.  That was what was needed on the American left for the past century and a quarter or more, not Marxism or anarchism or some pseudo-scientific, bound to be rejected, bound to fail secular program.  In the past month I have become convinced that that nonsense, indeed, started with the generations of Descartes and Spinoza and the early period of scientism and its increasing adoption as the house ideology of Western and now world academia.  Brueggemann repeatedly notes that the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures were uncredentialed poets who spoke out of their artistic inspiration and out of the Sinai tradition of Hebrew prophecy.  Jesus was certainly uncredentialed, in a commonly held modern fable of him, he, as Paul and others are presumed to be illiterate.  In the anachronistic slogan of the recent and fading new-atheism, they were "illiterate bronze-age goat-herders."  

Even as I have rejected the prescriptive aspects of Marxism, which has had among the most disastrous and evil series of trials in real life of any ideology ever developed by human beings except monarchy, I have acknowledged that his critique of capitalism has a lot in it to learn from.  Capitalism is another system which has had a disastrous and evil trial in human history, the example of the large majority of People living under it, especially in such places as Latin America, Asia, Africa, etc. proves that it is sheer evil.  The worst thing that Marxism produced was the stupid and facile mounting of a dualism in which we were required to choose "which side are you on."  That there were other alternatives which rejected both is one of the most stupidly unconsidered aspects of modern culture.  That one of the aspects of that alternative existed in the Hebrew scriptural tradition in the rejection of lending money at ruinous rates without having state ownership of everything only goes to show how corrupted religion has been in the modern period, as corrupted as it was under feudalism in the middle-ages.  I don't think there is such a thing as a durable Marxist regime, they seem to always go into a post-Marxism that is not only indistinguishable from capitalism, they are among the most brutal expressions of capitalism.  

I think in the theologies of liberation may be producing practical and concrete, instead of merely theoretical ways around all of that through their addressing the lives of those who are afflicted by capitalism and in their experience of Marxism.  Nicaragua under the Ortega gang is just another example of how Marxism eventually gives way to gangster capitalist rule, as are Russia and the post-Soviet states as well as Communist China which is the preeminent state-capitalism under Communist rule.  That the present junta in Nicaragua is in the process of suppressing the Catholic church if, for now, somewhat less violently than the junta that they overthrew about four decades ago only shows that Christianity which addresses liberation, justice, equality, environmental justice, etc. will be as opposed by Marxism and post-Marxism as it is, in fact, by capitalism.  The American experience of billionaire and millionaire financed opposition to Pope Francis and the practice of Christianity is pretty much the same thing.  I have ever confidence that the coming years will see a billionaire-millionaire financed American schism, probably led by Raymond Burke or another of the reactionary bishops or cardinals.   If the next Pope is even close in their intentions to Francis and his attempt to make the Catholic church Christian, that's going to come.  In the mean time such movements as the Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement will probably slowly grow, identifying as Catholic even as they are officially rejected by the hierarchy.   I wouldn't be surprised if it started while Francis is still alive or soon after the next Pope is elected.   And, as always with American media, they will be presented as the face of "real Catholicism" just as the cargo-cultist, white supremacists are presented as "Christianity."   The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part.  Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds.