Bill Walker | Blog

 

From Taylor’s paper:

In time, flesh will wear out chains.

Victor Serge, “Stenka Razin”

                                                Now get yourself a song to sing

                                                and sing it ‘til you’re done

                                                Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well

                                                Send the robber barons straight to hell

                                                The greedy thieves that came around

                                                And ate the flesh of everything they’ve found

                                               Whose crimes have gone unpunished now

                                               Walk the streets as free men now.

                                                Bruce Springsteen, “Death to My Hometown”

  The song now rises as high as the flames of hatred

  now whispers softly, kind and tender,

  Now glows like the sun and glitters like the lodestar

  Now thunders down the prisons

  Trang, “The Rising Song”

 

Thank  you, Dr. Taylor for your forceful, rich and inspiring presentation.

In his paper, Sing it Hard, Mark L. Taylor begins by briefly describing the problem of mass incarceration both in terms of the sheer number of people it affects in this country (per capita) and with regard to the significantly disproportionate population of minoritized groups and people of color that are imprisoned in the U.S. or controlled by the penal state in various ways.  Using James Samuel Logan’s study on the subject, Taylor lists four primary causes of the rise of mass-incarceration in the U.S., each of which interact together in the greater national and global context:

1. Mandatory long-term sentencing
2. The war on crime and specifically the war on drugs inaugurated by the Nixon administration and revived by Reagan, etc.
3. An “ever-increasing social policy commitment to incarceration and draconian criminal justice policies as a control solution geared toward exploiting fear about insecurity and containing and regulating the frustrations of the nation’s most exploited residents…”
4. growing privatization of prisons and the profit that can be captured as a result

Secondly, in order to explain how mass-incarceration can be understood specifically as a decolonial struggle, Taylor frames his analysis of this problem both historically and internationally: historically from the standpoint of U.S. politics in the latter half of the 20^th Century, contending that mass-incarceration is part of the repeated necessary sacrifice (Dussel) of surplus populations (Mike Davis and Christian Parenti) inherent in the rise of modernity itself dating back to as early as the 15^th century and following with the so-called discovery, or as Dussel likes to say, the “invasion of the Americas.”  Internationally the issue is situated with respect to globalization on the one hand and the on-going dominant role of individual nation-states like the U.S. in the West on the other.

I find this to be an especially significant point – acknowledging the growing power of trans and supranational capital and financial mobility that characterizes globalization, but not overlooking the persistence of geopolitical, nationally based centers of power that govern these financial and capital movements – Taylor recognizes, in other words, that to speak of Empire or neoliberalism as if it exists solely in the aftermath of the declining rule of nation-states is premature (otherwise we might not see such disparate imprisonment numbers in the first place) Furthermore, by examining the problem from a global perspective, Taylor does not, in my view, abstract from the concrete situation but rather adds clarity and depth of engagement to it.

(Citing Wacquant and Gilmore) Additionally, Taylor means to show that mass-incarceration is the inevitable byproduct, and to some extent even the engine, of U.S. economic growth since WWII, as well as that it is a consequence of the continued neo-colonial project of American exceptionalism and imperialism in general.

While there have been some praiseworthy underground resistance in the Christian tradition over the centuries, Taylor notes as well the extent to which many of Christianity’s most vocal proponents have been complicit in this militarist-expansionist project of the U.S., often under the guise of speech about “liberty.”

Similarly, while getting popularized by rhetoric about “individual responsibility,” the subsequent withdrawal of social support services and the augmentation of deregulatory economics only compounded the problem and has further lead to the development of the penal state.

Then, following several post-colonial theorists (Wallerstein and Mignolo) and in particular the thought of the Peruvian Anibal Quijano, Taylor expands the issue of mass-incarceration by conceiving of it not only the traditional Marxist, materialist categories of labor and class, but also the ambits of subjectivity, sexuality and collective authority, each of which he expounds upon and are interacting and overlapping dimensions through which mass-incarceration exercises symbolic power (Bourdieu) over its victims,  is expressivist (Durkheim), and functions as a dominant policing and economic force controlling human bodies.

And herein lies the key connection to decoloniality: seeing the U.S. prison population “as an important segment of the “world precariate,” those peoples who belong to the long history of regions, subject to Western and, more recently, U.S., imperial formation and enforcement.”  This, for Taylor, is what warrants that the struggle be named- decolonial.

Attention to these additional dimensions of coloniality coincides with Taylor’s call for a response in theo-poetic fashion – which is not reducible to the level of political economy but is also concerned with affecting culture and stirring artistic expression of creative story-telling, artistic, dramatic and performative acts of resistance to both express and catalyze a social movement against the oppressive force of mass-incarceration.  So just as coloniality broadens and deepens the configuration of this particular form of exploitation – in mass-incarceration – so too will an appropriate resistance movement take broader and deeper forms than mere advocacy for change in policy at the political-economic level.  It will be more total than that, Consisting of at least three visible marks of critical resistance, a Christian decolonizing effort according to Taylor is constituted by dynamic social existence moving from    

1.     Owning of agonistic being (ontology of struggle)

2.     Cultivating of artful reflex

3.     Fomenting of counter-colonial practices

The fomenting, Taylor stresses, is dependent upon the owning and the cultivating.

Finally, tracing the distinctives of a Christian Theo-Poetic challenge to mass-incarceration, for inspiration Taylor deliberately makes no reference to a transcendent Other or to knowledge that is dependent on some kind of revelation from beyond or outside.  Instead, Taylor wishes to invoke a neither fully immanent nor transcendent mode of trans-existence or trans-immanence (Nancy) that is in-finite, opposing any attempt to lockdown the world as is or close it off, as it were, and envisaging the world as unfolding…

A theo-poetic challenge, however, is nevertheless firmly grounded in the way of the cross for Taylor, and there are three main features to this way.  It is:

1.     Politically adversarial – Taylor makes a strong case for why this can be taken straight from Jesus’ own life and ministry.

2.     Mimetic (theatrical: off-setting the unpredictable, theatrical performance of the state, creatively dramatic – this dimension is crucial, Taylor says, for unleashing a counter-vailing power much like Jesus crucifixion did by challenging violent mechanisms of power.

3.     Kinetic (moving and dynamic) Using Taylor words, this sets in motion an organized embodiment that sought to “sustain life-renewing activity and communal work” by extending Jesus’s own “radically inclusive love that transgressed the ways of the religio-political state”

Anticipating the likely pushback from those whom Taylor might dub guild theologians, Taylor does not deny that power for resistance can be derived from an idea of the God who is found and testified to in Scripture and the creeds, but this is not what Taylor is doing.  Taylor firmly believes that the power of a vulnerable, networking people who bear the weight of produced social suffering is sufficient (and more suited?) to ignite and organize a counter-carceral movement, and he finishes by giving two good examples of this.

Now while one might identify this paper as a work of political theology, it is certainly more political and social in its content than theological (– though Taylor prefers to redefine both of these terms as set forth in his most recent book, The Political and the Theological).  One can appreciate that Taylor distances himself so much from the theologies of Christendom.  When Taylor employs the ontology of transimmanence, he does not appear to be making a case for this ontology as such here, so I’m going to briefly respond to a few of his apparent assumptions that are made rather than take issue with the notion of transimmanence as it might defended.

Without taking anything away from his socio-cultural-political and post-colonial critique and proposal I hope  – and conceding full well that Christianity itself needs to be decolonized, and that ontological otherness has perhaps more often than not been appropriated to numb or to excuse inaction on behalf of the oppressed – to reinforce coloniality in all its ambits – I would prefer to join other more traditional theologians, even if it is predictable and unoriginal, in retorting that faith in God as transcendent and benevolent, and faith in the prospect of eschatological hope, can still be a great catalyst for social change – just as perhaps, I think, it could even be argued that a theology of trans-immanence is susceptible to becoming closed-in, totalizing or despairing in some sense.  In sum, I’m not sure why the neither/nor approach to transcendence and immanence is more desirable than a both/and understanding.  Can’t transcendence strongly criticize idolatry, say, in the form of fetishized domination and over-securitization? Can’t transcendence be the source of courage for Christian communities to enact resistance without fear of death?  And then conversely, doesn’t a concept of a transcendent God’s immanence promise hope to the victimized in that God can be said to suffer with and relate to the victim in Christ?

– I want to pause now though to emphasize something: namely that these doctrinal questions are secondary concerns for me.  They come after, as Taylor puts it, as interpretations – not first (existentially rather than chronologically).  First, there is a choice to be made. Most importantly I want to reiterate and affirm what I interpret to be one of the most compelling points and contributions in Taylor’s presentation – namely, his assertion that “everything hinges on what kind of social existence what kind of communal embodiment, those who call themselves Christians, who identify their lives and groups with the way of Jesus, will present in the world.  In particular what kind of social existence will they present vis-à-vis the coloniality of power in which current mass incarceration is inscribed?“

This, it seems to me, is the battle cry, if you will, that can mobilize people in the Christian tradition regardless of their theological persuasions.  In my view, this is a profound and compelling theological statement about an urgent issue today, even in spite of what some might consider to be Taylor’s otherwise-than-orthodox ontology.  Moreover, this is an attempt to not only include but to join the other, to rally anyone in the struggle for liberation from the chains of imprisonment, irrespective of identity or affiliation – to summon all who are unwilling to stomach, as Taylor says, the injustice and the racism of the penal system. While the issue of Christian identity in the respect that it was raised yesterday by Anselm Min is left somewhat untreated here, one does find both Christian agency and agenda operative in this proposal.  It is an invitation to people of the way of Jesus to deploy their resources, language and practices “so as to find their place within the larger, and not just Christian, movement of critical resistance” to dramatically contest this neo-colonizing strategy of rule.  And I should add: I share Taylor’s concern that not nearly enough Christians are involved in this struggle, in the arts of protest and prayer that might “thunder down the prisons” and sing hard that “flesh can wear out chains.”

One last political comment to close:

Just to indicate one direction in which the discussion could be extended, in the same way that the nation-state cannot be properly understood apart from globalization, perhaps neither can mass-incarceration be thoroughly criticized without examining it alongside of violence in neighboring Central American countries that is being at least indirectly incentivized by these broken criminal justice policies.  At one point Taylor speaks of how de-socialized wage labor is managed by hyper-incarceration.  Hyper-incarceration is only a domesticate system, however, while de-socialized wage labor is being propagated around the globe by U.S. foreign policy and the behavior of certain U.S.-based corporations.  In unstable regions of Mexico, for example, the management system is not hyper-incarceration but murderous competition between drug cartels for control of smuggling routes and the labor of disposable traffickers.

But finally I just want to comment in closing that this paper was very moving for me and has incited my somewhat dormant creative imagination and thinking about this issue as I further explore the problem of the drug war.

Related articles

• Good Friday Reflections: The Executed God, Paul’s Anti-Imperial Grammar, and the Church’s Response (billwalker.wordpress.com)
• Mumia’s Letter to Princeton Seminary students (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• Conference: What are the Most Compelling Theological Issues Today? (billwalker.wordpress.com)

Any kind of Christian theology today, even in the rich and dominant countries, which does not have as its starting point the historic situation of dependence and domination of 2/3 of humankind, with its 30 million dead of hunger and malnutrition will not be able to position and concretize historically its fundamental themes.  Its questions will not be the real questions.[1]

INTRODUCTION

The problem posed by religious pluralism for particular and normative claims about reality and truth on the part of various faith traditions is nothing new.  From the Christian perspective, it has led to or reinforced fundamentalism and exclusivism on the one hand, while also causing others both within and outside of the faith to be suspicious of any claims of normativity on the other.  Ideas and epistemological movements like postmodernism and post-structuralism bring further but also what are by now familiar challenges to this problem.  Consequently, a number of original voices have arisen in attempts to reconcile this conflict of the one and the many in terms of a Christian theological outlook.

One such voice is that of S. Mark Heim who has proposed that a diversity of religious salvific ends might be imaginable within a Trinitarian framework.[2]  Heim’s chief interest in making such a proposal is to honor the integrity of the teachings and salvific hopes in other religions themselves, rather than fitting these aspects into the major tenants of a Christian meta-narrative. Thus the question for Heim of “what counts as salvation?” becomes more crucial than “which one saves?” because the world religions are not all pursuing the same soteriological end.[3]

Despite Heim’s sensitive and inventive contribution, some have found it less than satisfying.  Those like Paul Knitter or even Rosemary Radford Ruether for instance are unhappy with Heim’s proposal based on their commitment to and preference for justice as a unifying imperative, however variably construed.[4]  The difficulty from the Christian view with what Ruether and Knitter propose, however, is that their acquiescence to the conflict of competing creeds obliges a descent from the tradition in a willingness to forfeit or relativize any final or normative soteriological assignment to the person and work of Jesus Christ.  In doing so, in Heim’s view they have consequently undermined any universal assertions from all other religious locations as well.  And in order to do this, they must presuppose a common horizon of meaning and discourse themselves.  This is exactly what Heim is trying to avoid; for he and others like him judge what Ruether and Knitter (and Hick before them)[5] purport to be at least equally speculative in comparison to upholding a particular religious commitment.

Another unique voice that has perhaps received less attention than these others is that of Anselm Min.  Min’s approach is distinctive for his attempt to work out a synthesis between these two opposing views just highlighted.  Thus what follows in the bulk of this essay is an overview of and brief response to Min’s approach, followed by an attempt to apply and concretize Min’s thought in the ecclesial context with some assistance from the thought of Gustavo Gutierrez.    There are many issues surrounding this discussion that simply cannot be addressed here – many of them very acute.  It is nonetheless my hope that a better understanding of what Min proposes combined with a degree of Gutierrez’s ecclesiology might enable Christians to better navigate the rough waters of religious pluralism and globalization.[6]

ANSELM MIN’S CONFESSIONAL DIALECTICAL PLURALISM OF SOLIDARITY

Like Heim, Min accepts the mutual incommensurability of religions.  That is, he avers that the world religions are irreducibly different.  Moreover, religions as dialectical and concrete totalities cannot merely be conceptualized.  Rather, they must be “appreciated.”[7]  As such, in order to attain any approximate mutual understanding, it is appropriate and necessary for each religion to confess its distinctive beliefs and claims including the claim to finality.

Traditional inclusivists on the other hand, according to Min, refuse to accept the irreducible plurality of religions.  In his words, Min puts a pluralist “twist” on Rahner’s inclusivism by stating the following: “God’s love of all humanity and the essential social mediation of our ultimate fulfillment leads us to the a priori plausibility that each religion is the vehicle of that ultimate fulfillment for its own members.”[8]  Here Min is like Heim who dares to contend that that the “‘finality of Christ’ and the ‘independent validity of other ways’ are not mutually exclusive.”[9]  But whereas Heim is interested in constructing an overarching Christian model that includes the distinctives of other world religions, Min favors the liberationist vantage point specifically because of his shared conviction that its concerns – namely, the concerns brought about by the reality of world poverty experienced by roughly two-thirds of the population – are more pressing than the goal of reaching theoretical consensus.

Anthropologically, Min begins by describing human existence both individually and corporeally as constituted by the concept of a concrete totality wherein there are present many mutually distinct and irreducible dimensions, yet also mutually constitutive and internally related dimensions.  In Hegelian fashion, for Min history is a teleological process in which humanity struggles for the resolution of contradictions and strives toward a higher synthesis and reconciliation of opposed elements.  This philosophy posits a certain unity underlying the historical process and human beings themselves as concrete totalities.[10]

Furthermore, human existence is concrete insofar as it is a concrete historical process in which it seeks, through praxis, to achieve liberating self-unification out of the dialectic of these constitutive elements (transcendence and history, personal and social existence, materiality and spirituality, etc.).  Human beings are born into an already-existing world, historically conditioned and formed by particular economic and political organizations, distributions of power, as well as certain ideologies and cultures.  In this regard, Min considers the struggle to meet basic material needs to be the presupposition of everything else.[11]  Hence Min introduces and privileges the idea of praxis and liberation, or what in my interpretation can be called solidarity before dialogue.  Within the context of specific conflicts and possibilities, this struggle “for the realization of human life as a concrete totality” is characterized by working toward liberation from the oppressiveness of the social status quo and by striving for reconciled communities.[12]

Privileging by extension the liberationist hermeneutic circle (Segundo), Min primarily sees human beings as subjects of socio-historical praxis.  As such he subordinates thought, self-consciousness, will, and feeling to this praxis.[13]  Thus, questions of meaning cannot precede those of the demands for life itself.  At the same time, theologically speaking, liberation or salvation in its full sense is both eschatological and historical, so theory still has its place.  But Min consistently points out that theory – despite humanity’s ability to transcend itself – always happens within history and not over it.  For this reason, the issue of religious pluralism cannot be abstracted from the “practical demand and theological significance of massive human alienation and suffering, unjust social structures, global economic and military rivalry, and the rush of history toward the destruction of nature.”[14]

Religions have been both enemies and collaborators in violent and peaceful causes.  Conflict reigns within as much as among the various faith traditions.  Thus, Min selects the criteria of basic justice and the dignity of humanity as the ground for solidarity between religions.  For Min, a theory of justice will come from the Christian tradition, but for others, from the depths of their own religious resources.  From here, Min is forced to conclude that, “a serious dialogue must do away with the assumption of the ultimate harmony of all religions and the plea for indiscriminate tolerance of all diversity.”[15] In other words, some religious forms and expressions are problematic on the grounds that they are destructive and antithetical to the goal of historical liberation and as a result must be challenged and confronted.

Min is careful to say, however, that privileging economic and political factors is not the solution or approach to the issue of religious pluralism for all time necessarily.  Rather, it is because these factors have presented unprecedented challenges for this time.  Hence, the “validity of the competing claims of different religions to ultimacy, universality, and absoluteness” are not unimportant, but they do become secondary for Min.[16] Adherents to various faiths should dialogue, but not before seeking solidarity.  At minimum there is required for Min a dialectical relationship between dialogue and solidarity – the main reasoning here being that the intellectual matters are not divorced from the material ones, as if we could obtain peace simply through understanding or even mutual transformation (which are two of the most common Western ideals for interfaith discourse).

Min intentionally calls for a solidarity of others instead of with others so as to protect against a movement of inclusion by incorporation from a Christian center.  Furthermore, Min wants the Christian faith itself to be decentralized, as one more “other” among many others.  Min’s theology of religions is a theology “from below” in that it disallows for stepping beyond or outside of history and claiming intuitions into ahistorical, universal truths.  This is what Min argues is the key distinction between what he proposes and what many traditional Christian inclusivists maintain (Rahner, Tillich, Pannenberg, and more recently Moltmann, Jacques Dupuis, Gavin D’Costa, and Joseph Dinoia).  At the same time, it would of course be incorrect to say that Min is only working from a material and collective starting point.  His method is first one of faith guiding reason in a classical-Christian manor, and in this respect is also unavoidably a revealed theology “from above” in which Christ is largely the object.  This does not however preclude the liberationist perspective from being a thoroughly historical one.[17]

Despite these epistemological limits and the ontic contingency of human beings, Min asserts that there must also be dialectical flexibility in this thesis.  Just because we cannot stand above history doesn’t mean that a certain degree of objectivity is unattainable.  This is what distinguishes Min on the other hand from those in the post-liberal tradition as well as from post-structuralists.

As has already been noted, Min does not see any compelling reason to reject christological inclusivism as such.  For him it is “premature to abandon our traditional commitment to the finality of Jesus Christ so central to the identity of Christian faith.”[18]  Of course Min acknowledges that upholding this commitment to christocentrism is done in faith and by confession – not by intuition into ahistorical truth.[19]  So Min “cannot a priori dismiss the possibility that we may have to modify or abandon our christological belief at some point in the future.”[20]  And it is this risk that constitutes faith as faith.  Christians cannot deny the sincerity of the followers of other religions, nor the validity of all their respective truth claims, but neither can they live without faith in the transcendent and without a commitment to truth as humanity can best discover it in the obscurities of history and as mediated by human concepts.[21] This is true especially today, Min affirms, when humanity is compelled to rise to a more universal perspective by sheer historical dynamics, without yet having achieved theoretical clarity and consensus about many of the ultimate theological questions.  Cooperative praxis of liberation then becomes all the more urgent precisely in light of the historical conditions of our knowledge in an increasingly interdependent world.

Min believes a theoretical resolution of the issues of comparative evaluation of different religions – insofar as such a resolution is feasible – will simply have to be left to the judgment of future history.  Historical praxis, it is hoped, would expand humanity’s perspectives and create a consensus of intellectual presuppositions that are more universal, thus enabling a resolution of the remaining issues more adequately, dissolving certain present issues as issues altogether.

In addition to the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, pluralism itself, Min argues, must be taken dialectically.  The historicity of pluralism as a reality and the situation of global encounter cannot be taken for granted as simply given.  Min sees this as the mistake of many theologians addressing the problem.  Min first asks, what is the impact that the practical has had or should have on the theoretical?  But “dialectical pluralism is dialectical in the Hegelian/Marxian sense that it takes history . . . to be a process of differentiation, contradiction among difference, and sublation or reconciliation of such a contradiction.”[22]  Because of this, the preservation of particularities as such is not the goal.  Religions inherit their identities and are dynamic in nature, not immutable.  Accordingly, the pluralistic situation is not simply a conglomerate of unrelated juxtaposition of self-contained, unrelated religions; each has its own history of development with many internal tensions.

Thus, Min is striving to be dialectically and historically committed to both his Christian particularity and the irreducible pluralism of religions at the same time.  And like many traditional inclusivists, Min requests a readiness by Christians to make themselves vulnerable to the possibility of being transformed by the other.  More than just being open to mutual influence though, dialogue permits every religion to share its “good news” and invite others to be affected by this good news.[23]  Unlike Knitter then, Min does not think a renunciation of one’s own commitment to particular truths and confessions is necessary for genuine interfaith dialogue. This being said, Min also considers any evaluation of the salvific role of other religions from the Christian perspective premature.  So the primary question for every religion from Min’s view remains: “whether and how it is able and willing, from within its own [tradition], to promote the solidarity of others by contributing to the cooperation of different cultures and religions in common space, and to reinterpret itself and others in light of that solidarity.”[24]

A Critique Considered

Min “understands religion to be a matter of existential commitment, discipleship, and transformation that includes but also transcends objective rationality; thus it is more a (salvific) way of existing to be confessed in faith and praxis than a theory to be understood in detached reflection.”[25]  But is Min not implicitly conceding to Hans Kung, for example, who believes there can be a kind of “best” or “true” universal essence of religion in the first place?[26] And while Min does not subordinate the integrity of other religions to a particular Christian criterion per se, does not Min nonetheless subordinate the value and even utility of other religions to his own viewpoint?  If so, is this acceptable on the grounds that he claims to have no a priori universal perspective?  Indeed, Min is quick to reassure that his point of view is one among many, but is he aware of or fully transparent about the degree to which his religion functions as a mere contingent, concrete totality in the world himself?

Min has a response to this question.  He says, “I gladly admit that my very description of religion as a concrete totality that as such is irreducible to a particular perspective, contains an implicit definition and is caught in the contradiction of claiming both irreducibility and reducibility for religion.”[27]  For Min “it is a question of a practical solidarity of others, of together creating the concrete social conditions of mutual justice and solidarity.”  So Min asks, how will the people of faiths behave toward each other in the face of common historical problems?  Will agreements, governments, systems and laws be set to ensure a minimum degree of respect for life and security and other basic human need?[28]

Those like Heim and John Milbank would likely accuse Min of imposing a Western humanist or eurocentric ethical/categorical imperative on everyone else.  Min contends, however, that there is in fact “a common longing for the reality of justice in the sense of basic fairness in treatment and basic freedom from genocide and externally imposed material suffering and political oppression.  What is at stake is an absolutely elementary reality accessible to all religions.”[29]  In other words, nobody wants to starve or be murdered and dominated.  Ethical common ground between religions therefore “is determined from within the context of needs that human life demands for its survival and development.”[30]  Any focus on cultural or identity preservation and reproduction is based first on the supplication of material needs necessary for physical existence.  Thus the latter must be regarded as primary and fundamental – even universal.

Such an argument would have to allow for various and even, to an extent, competing theories of justice among the religions.  And here, Knitter and Min are in agreement, [31] as Knitter appeals to suffering as a universal with similar and immediate causes such as “poverty, abuse, victimization, and violence”[32] – the latent ambiguity of these terms notwithstanding.  Contra Milbank and Heim then, for Min and Knitter justice is not just one value option for social existence across religious and cultural boundaries.  Min and Knitter would accuse Heim’s model of reducing the problem of religious pluralism to the theoretical which can too easily lead to complacency about urgent matters of life and death.

So is Min judging other religions by his or a Christian standard of justice?  Yes and no, he might reply.  It is only a relative judgment that does not dismiss any religion as a whole. And he admits that Christianity deserves the same scrutiny, since the Church has been guilty of and responsibility for atrocities throughout the centuries.  A dialectical understanding of religions prevents this judgment from becoming too total, as religions are never inherently separate from all of the other historical conditions and factors influencing them.

Thus it may not be Min’s christocentrism that poses the biggest obstacle to a wider acceptance of his proposal.  As for the fervent defense of a universal imperative for justice, certainly many could see the idea as desirable if not compelling.  The more pressing problematic appears to be the looming unresolved tension.   between In response, one could make the case that Min is calling for a commitment to solidarity for specifically Christian reasons – not because of a general, abstract philosophical conviction.  In doing so, he avoids the temptation of trying to solve the pluralism problem in strictly abstract terms.  Presumably it is the witness and practical response to a particular christological revelation handed down by the community of believers that is informing Min’s decision more so than universal theology as such (however implicit in this a universal theory might be).  Perhaps what William Cavanaugh has suggested for the Church’s application of a universal principle can serve to “bring down” Min’s analysis: “The Christian is called not to replace one universal system with another, but to attempt to ‘realize’ the universal body of Christ in every particular exchange.”[33]  With this modest corrective in mind, it should be possible to transfer this reflection on solidarity into the ecclesial realm for the discovery of some implications.

 PROTEST BY KENOSIS: ECCLESIAL ECONOMIC INCLUSIVITY

            If solidarity before dialogue is the approach to interfaith relations, what are the stipulations on the ground for the Church?  Following Min, a shift in emphasis and attention is compulsory, from religious inclusivity to economic inclusivity – which already assumes religious inclusivity.  This is not to discount dialogue, but rather to take seriously the most pertinent issue facing a particular global situation.  In the words of Enrique Dussel: “We speak of ‘economics’ . . . as the moment in which praxis and poiesis, in a concrete synthesis, are articulated in order to constitute the practical-productive level par excellance.[34]”  Simply put, economics is the language for meeting basic needs and analyzing material poverty.  Material poverty in this instance is assumed to be, as liberation theology has said, a “subhuman situation [. . .] Concretely, to be poor means to die of hunger, to be illiterate, to be exploited by others, not to know that you are being exploited, not to know that you are a person.”[35]  Furthermore, in the age of globalization, by and large poverty is not caused by chance; it is usually a result of actions by those whom the prophets condemn.[36]

This reframed struggle, however – from dialogue to solidarity, or religion to economics – does not prioritize the political and economic issues to the exclusion or negation of other factors (be they cultural, racial, gender, etc.).  Rather, it takes precedence because of its exigency in this particular time and place, in which the difficulties posed by globalization seem overwhelming.  Following Dussel’s argument, the standpoint of the marginalized, the exploited, the poor is henceforth privileged, as “[t]he one who has the ability to discover where the other, the poor, is to be found will be able, from the poor, to diagnose the pathology of the state.”[37] This applies especially to the Church in the dominant stratum of the globalized context.  The Church must be able to scrutinize the state from the perspective of the poor, not because the Church subsists on the same plane as the state or abides by the same rules – of course it does not – but because it must be able to appropriately stand with the poor in solidarity and protest, and this cannot be done without the right tools of analysis.

For Gustavo Gutierrez, “Just as Christ carried out the work of redemption in poverty and under oppression, so the Church (or body of Christ) is called to follow the same path in communicating to others the fruits of salvation . . . But [Christ] does not take on the human sinful condition and its consequences to idealize it.  It is rather because of love for and solidarity with others who suffer in it.  It is to redeem them from their sin and to enrich them with his poverty.  It is to struggle against human selfishness and everything that divides persons and allows that there be rich and poor, possessors and dispossessed, oppressors and oppressed.”[38]

Secondly, the body of Christ strives to institute a communal life in accordance with the values of the kingdom of God.  And since the kingdom of God implies the establishment of justice in this world, it is not enough simply to denounce poverty.[39]  Nor is the church fulfilling its duty in the age of pluralism and globalization if it merely works to eradicate poverty (through charity, political activism, social programs, etc.).  Churches can actually strive to create concrete, alternative economic practices, spaces and transactions that are truly free – as opposed to the so-called “free market.”  This requires envisioning and realizing spaces marked by the body of Christ, where the key question in every transaction is whether it contributes to the flourishing of each person involved; that is, to the ability for each human life to participate in the life of God.[40]

Gutierrez speaks of the Church of Latin America in solidarity and protest.  With Min’s discussion of solidarity in play, I propose the faithful Church in the North American setting can find in Gutierrez the means and path for reaching economic inclusivity: namely, protest via kenosis.  The former is not achievable without the latter, which is why denouncement by itself is not sufficient.  Gutierrez calls for a church of the poor more than just for the poor.  In other words, the church as such is challenged to practice self-emptying.  Not only by rejecting poverty but by, as Gutierrez avows, “making itself poor in order to protest against it can the Church preach something that is uniquely its own: ‘spiritual poverty,’ that is, the openness of humankind and history to the future promised by God.  Only in this way will the Church be able to fulfill authentically – and with any possibility of being listened to – its prophetic function of denouncing every human injustice.”[41]  This level of solidarity means that the Church makes the problems and struggles of the poor its own problems and struggles.[42]  To use Roger Haight’s language, the Church must be willing to “shake off the ambiguous protection provided by the beneficiaries of the unjust order.”[43]

One has to acknowledge of course that in the 21^st century – despite definitive aggregate differences between the global North and South – a church’s location does not always determine its economic status.  There are poor churches and there are rich churches, together, sometimes in the same neighborhood.  Furthermore, a poor church does not always consist of poor people, and visa versa.  With this in mind, what Gutierrez says about spiritual poverty is instructive: “Spiritual poverty,” according to Gutierrez, does not merely incarnate itself by way of detachment from material goods.  It is more profound than that.  Above all, it is a “total availability to the Lord.”[44]  This can be the attitude of the so-called poor churches in America.  As for the affluent congregations, a different rule applies.  Protest in this case for Gutierrez manifests itself in specific action, a style of life, and break with one’s own social class – by committing to radical economic inclusivity.  All of the practical implications cannot and should not be worked out in abstract theory here, as every locale will have its own material demands.  Suffice it to say, in the words of Ricoeur, you cannot really be with the poor unless you are struggling against poverty yourself.  If the Church is the temple of the Holy Spirit, like the bodies of believers, the practical significance of clergy lifestyle for instance cannot be stressed enough.  A proper martyrdom as it were to the contemporary world may very well demand a restructuring of the financial dependency of clergy on the people they serve.  Gutierrez advises those who do not wish live on stipends or from teaching religion should be willing to experiment with healthy, secular jobs.[45]  This is just one tangible example of how the leaders of the Church themselves could practice kenosis.

In sum, there may be little that is fundamentally novel about either what Min or Gutierrez have recommended in matters of solidarity and protest, or about pluralism and economic inclusivity from the Christian perspective, as both of them rely heavily on their tradition and the signs of the times.  Nevertheless, a certain combination of their respective views might very well contribute something genuinely unique and fitting for dealing with new issues and questions facing the Church in terms of inclusivity and exclusivity in the age of globalization.

Bibliography

Assman, Hugo. Teologia desde la Praxis de la Liberacion. Salamanca: Sigueme, 1973, 40.

Haight, Roger D. Christian community in history. Vol. 3, Ecclesial existence. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Cavanaugh, William T. “Balthasar, globalization, and the problem of the one and the many.” Communio 28, no. 2 (June 1, 2001): 324-347.

———. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008.

Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation. Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2003.

———. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the Philosophy of Liberation. Indexed. Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1996.

Goizueta, Roberto S. “The Christology of Jon Sobrino.” In Hope & solidarity, 90-104. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Revised. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.

Haight, Roger D. Christian Community in History, Volume 3: Ecclesial Existence. Continuum, 2008.

Heim, Mr. Mark S. The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000.

Heim, S. Mark. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995.

Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Second Edition. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Knitter, Paul F. Introducing Theologies of Religions. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002.

———. “The solidarity of others in a divided world: a postmodern theology after postmodernism.” Theological Studies 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2005): 469-470.

Kung, Hans. Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. New York: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004.

Min, Anselm Kyongsuk. Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism. Grand Rapids: T & T Clark International, 2004.

Petrella, Ivan. Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic. Cambridge: SCM Press, 2008.

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INTRODUCTION

Christian ethicist and realist Reinhold Niebuhr unfortunately did not live long enough to have the chance to engage the various liberationist voices from the Southern Hemisphere.  Niebuhr espoused a social view of the world known as Christian realism, which according to Ronald Stone’s definition is “descriptive of socially engaged, reformist Christians who are economically left of the center of the Democratic Party.”[i]  To the extent that Niebuhr appears to be reacting in his writing to a particular political program sponsored by the church, the preceding Social Gospel movement at the turn of the twentieth century must be taken into consideration.  In spite of the harsh words he sometimes reserves for the trends of that period, Niebuhr himself supported a certain kind of socialism.  He was also critical of the Vietnam War, though poor health prevented him from being especially active and outspoken about this

Liberation theology, on the other hand, arose as movement during a period of disappointment after premature optimism in Latin America regarding development and progress – just at the end of Niebuhr’s life.  The historical context surrounding the rise of liberation thought was arguably one characterized predominately by politico-economic despair and destitution.  The chief distinctive of liberation theology is its material social analysis that led to the formulation of a doctrine known as “God’s preferential option for the poor.”[ii]  That is, theology itself was said to begin at the level of praxis rather than theory, and must first take into account the horizon and interests of the disinherited.  For the purposes of this paper, I have selected the early work of Leonardo Boff to be representative of liberation theology.[iii]

At a superficial level, liberation theology has been dismissed as merely a “soft utopianism” (Alves), while Christian realism has been seen been written off as simply an ideology of the establishment (Sanders).[iv]  Sometimes the two systems of thought clash, while in other instances they reinforce each other.[v]  Both function in some respects as Christian public theologies or Christian social philosophies.[vi]  What I hope to show is that Christian realism and liberation theology are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though antagonism between them has persisted.  Secondly, I will provide a brief reflection on both and attempt to point toward a third option.

Raimundo Barreto has contended that there is sufficient evidence to suspect that Niebuhr would have been more sympathetic to liberation theology than many of his followers have been.[vii]  Barreto argues that liberation theology can be seen as a kind of Christian realism despite the clear differences.  Both schools are concerned about social justice and maintain a structural understanding of the nature of sin.  And rather than beginning with abstract speculation or timeless philosophical principles, they also have in common a strong pragmatism and serious reading of reality as their starting point.[viii]

The primarily differences between liberation theology and Christian realism according to Barreto are the following: 1) the socio-historical situations in which they speak, 2) their views toward power, and 3) their expectations about the possibilities for human beings in history (i.e., their anthropological and eschatological perspectives).[ix] A synthesis might not be possible, but dialogue and alliance is desirable.  Such is the purpose of the comparison to follow.

A GLIMPSE OF NIEBUHR’S CHRISTIAN REALISM

Niebuhr criticizes “orthodox” churches for “compounding dogmatisms from another day” and liberal churches for hiding “their light under the bushel of the culture and modernity.”[x]  For Niebuhr, Christian morality can be neither mere clothing of natural philosophy nor “outmoded authoritarian moral codes.”[xi] Niebuhr’s Christian realism is captured by the notion that the “ideal of love is real in the will and nature of God”, even though there is no time or place in history where the ideal has been realized in its pure form.[xii]  Niebuhr opposes the tendency of churches toward institutional preservation, which often happens by means of literally interpreted myths and bad science.  By the same token, he is suspicious of uncritical cultural assimilation and accommodation.  Niebuhr is confident that the Kingdom of God cannot come about by political means.  As Niebuhr sees it, “both liberalism and Marxism are secularized and naturalized versions of the Hebrew prophetic movement and the Christian religion.”[xiii]  He is convinced that utopianism inevitably leads to disillusionment.[xiv]  Niebuhr calls for a moral life between the dialectical tension of the ideal and the real, of optimism and pessimism.  The church must not deviate from prophetic religion by falling into sacramental complacency on the one hand or mystic otherworldliness on the other.[xv]

Niebuhr understands the ethic of Jesus to be the ideal of love.  Essentially he says that it consists in loving our enemies, abandoning self-love, embracing self-sacrificing service, and unconditional forgiving.  Such an ethic opposes natural morality and the general flow of societal behavior.  As such, Niebuhr concludes that “[i]t is, therefore, impossible to construct a socio-moral policy from the religio-moral insight of Jesus.”[xvi] A Christian social ethic must take seriously the nature of sin and the destructiveness of egoism.  In sum, Niebuhr submits that the peace of the ‘city of God’ can use and transmute the lesser and insecure peace of the ‘city of the world’, but this can only be done if the two are not confused.

According to Niebuhr, one of the critical points overlooked by Christian liberalism is the extent to which coercion exists in every economic and political system.  For Niebuhr, there is no such thing as un-coerced cooperation.  Similarly, moralistic utopianism ignores the sin and corruption of the individual.  For the modern Church and its romantic presuppositions, it seemed that the mere statement of the ideal of love was a guarantee of its ultimate realization.[xvii]  In short, Niebuhr judges that “liberal solutions of the social problem never take the permanent difference between [humanity’s] collective behavior and the moral ideals of an individual life into consideration.”[xviii]  This difference necessitates that collective behavior be monitored and enforced politically – that is, by force, whilst individuals ought to be disciplined by ethical standards because they are more likely to abide by them.[xix]  Hope in mechanisms of social control to create pure justice is always futile, but when it comes to structuring the state, Niebuhr argues that “basic justice in any society depends upon the right organization of [humanity’s] common labor, the equalization of their social power, regulation of their common interests, and adequate restraint upon the inevitable conflict of competing interests.”[xx]  Niebuhr knows that there is no objective or disinterested viewpoint, so he asserts that a system with the most checks and balances on power is the best one.[xxi]

ASPECTS OF BOFF’S LIBERATION THEOLOGY

Like Niebuhr, liberation theologians such as Boff do not believe that the church should necessarily be the prominent conduit for justice in society, though it of course has the highest obligation to contribute and set an example.  There exists a certain ecclesiological skepticism in both systems of thought.  Though the church has preached Christ as liberator, but in Boff’s estimation, the church has not generally been supportive of liberating movements for those on the periphery.  Additionally, Niebuhr and Boff together stress that every theology is socially situated.[xxii]

Whereas European and colonial theologies often look to the past to retrieve their instruction, this history, constituted by the subjugation of the poor, is rejected from the liberationist point of view.  It is instead the future that becomes the energizing force for liberation theology – a future that breaks with the sinful structures of oppression.  And if a utopia is being envisioned, it is not to be understood as a synonym for illusion or flight from the present.[xxiii]  Instead it is born from hope and serves as a model for perfecting reality and protects against stagnation.  Somewhat counter-intuitively, speaking of utopia is thought to keep the social process open and prevent ideologically absolutization. For Boff, it inspires ever-increasing transformation.[xxiv]

In Latin America, immense portions of the population have been marginalized.  Systemic evils transcend individual ones and have far greater consequences.  It is not just that collective groups must be analyzed and regulated differently from individuals, as Niebuhr suggests, but that they must be analyzed regulated first and more urgently.  This is the precise situation that Boff believes the gospel is addressing – namely, that of unjust forms of government and economy.  Hence one finds in liberation theology the central motif of Jesus’s teachings about the kingdom of God – not as some unrealizable, distant end, but as a growing, immanent condition that manifests itself in accordance with our cooperation with God to loose the chains of injustice here and now.  Boff understands this kingdom as a global, institutional and political revolution, though he is careful not to reduce it to any one dimension, be it economic, cultural, or political.[xxv]

Thus, all christology is united with ethics.  Boff cites several passages of Scripture: “He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way which he walked” (1 John 2:6);  “It is not those who say to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21-23).[xxvi]  For Boff, the historical Jesus takes precedence over the creedal Christ (though the latter is by no means excluded or eradicated): “According to the parable concerning anonymous Christians in Matt. 25:31-46, the eternal Judge will not ask people about the canons of dogma, nor whether they made any explicit reference to the mystery of Christ while they lived.  He will ask if we have done anything to help those in need.  Here all is decided.”[xxvii] The appeal for change in the prophetic tradition and the language of exodus from bondage are other key sources of biblical authority for liberation theology.  Not to participate in this process of emancipation is to directly reject Christ and disobey God.

Poverty is concretely characterized by malnutrition; a high infant mortality rate; endemic diseases; low income; unemployment; lack of social security; lack of health care, hospitals, schools, and housing facilities.  As such, it is regarded by Boff as fundamentally inhumane, offensive, and inimical to the will of God.  The roots of these problems are not first and foremost identified in individuals but in the ruling class of society, its method and establishment of governance, and a “First World” culture of consumption.  The issue is not one of aid but of justice.  Consequently, the faith of the Western world in progress, science and technology is called into question.  This elitist vision assumes that benefits will trickle down fro the top layers to those at the bottom.[xxviii]  The chasm between this group and this dominated peoples is the major obstacle to development from Boff’s point of view.  The material problem is such that some nations are dependent on others.[xxix]  As a result, a shift in power is in order – one in which more is desired than just revision or reform.  This outlook is further supported by the observation that Jesus himself challenged the existing powers and authorities of repression in his day, which in part led to his death: “The cross demonstrates the conflict-ridden nature of every process of liberation undertaken when the structure of injustice has gained the upper hand.”[xxx]  At the same time, Boff also acknowledges Jesus’s resistance to the temptation of political messianism.[xxxi]  In sum, the way of Jesus is a journey of eschatological hope that goes by way of, but is not limited to political hopes.

A WAY FORWARD WITH BOTH?

One can appreciate the cautioning insight of Niebuhr’s realism to avoid expecting too much success in social reform, drifting into moralism, the potential dangers of utopianism, and the overly direct theologizing of politics without adequate attention to concrete reality.  At the same time, the contributions by liberation theologians of “passion for social reform, the arguments for the acceptability of revolution as a strategy for social change, and the necessity of moral critique as part of the social struggle” can easily be missed.[xxxii]  Furthermore, those like Boff and others like him (Bonino and Gutierriez for instance) treat utopia not as a fully realizable ideal but as a “hopeful social projection distinguishable from both the Kingdom of God and from the realizable program of existing political parties.”[xxxiii]  A primary liberationist critique of Christian realism would thus object to its pragmatic acceptance of the status quo and its full rejection of utopianism.[xxxiv]

No doubt Christian realism was originally Euroamerican-centric in its view of the world.[xxxv]  But Niebuhr recognized that, regardless of its intentions, the presence of the U.S. in Latin America was often regarded as exploitative.  For Niebuhr, U.S. intervention was generally a block against democratic development – though he affirms that it had made some contribution to achieving liberal democracy in Latin America.[xxxvi]  From the viewpoint of liberation theology, “Niebuhr may have overdone his critique of utopianism in the social gospel and in communism, but certainly both programs had in them grand illusions.”[xxxvii]  What is more, “Niebuhr also critiques the pretensions of laissez-faire capitalism and the utopian fantasies of contemporary American presidents.”[xxxviii]

It could be contested that liberation theology is too totalizing in its denouncement of the market system and all possibilities of reforming capitalism.[xxxix]  Similarly, some have voiced that it has been incapable of transforming base communities into active political forces.  But alternative paths have nevertheless been sought between ‘restrictive exploitative and foreign dominate capitalism’ and ‘inefficient socialism.’[xl] Stone argues that liberation theology has always been more than a theology of revolution and that is more like a form of practical theology for society.[xli]  For this reason, he deems the accusation that liberation theology is completely dependent upon Marxist analysis as wide of the mark.

In his description liberation theology, Robert McAfee Brown uses the maxim, “to know God is to do justice.” In the first place, however, liberation theology presents a theory of injustice.[xlii]  Liberation theologians defines justice as the acts of God in history which free the oppressed from institutionalized violence.[xliii]  Thus, there is really no separation between love and justice in liberation theology.  For Niebuhr on the other hand, “[t]here can be no justice without love, because true justice in the establishment of right relationships, and that cannot happen apart from love.”[xliv]  In addition, Niebuhr warns that love must strive for something purer than justice if it is to attain justice.[xlv]  While it is important to remember that Niebuhr attributed the irrelevancy of orthodox churches to their divorcing of justice and love, Niebuhr nonetheless sees love’s function as one that regulates justice; in other words, he does not apply the terms interchangeably.[xlvi]

Moreover, whereas Niebuhr is skeptical of all accumulation of power, liberation theologians want to harness power and give it back to the powerless victims.  Boff is more hopeful about the level of justice that humanity can achieve than Niebuhr.  This is largely because of desperate nature of circumstances in which so many live in Latin America.  More hope is needed to empower the masses living in misery.  So again, the biggest difference between liberation theology and Christian realism seems to be social location.[xlvii]  Their respective approaches are not necessarily incompatible but rather reflect the different circumstances in which they were written.  Christian realism does not begin from a place of the majority of humanity and their cries for justice.  Its setting, however sensitive to social grievances, is typically from the vantage point of privilege.  In view of this, perhaps one could conclude that each system is “right” for its own context and that the difference between the two is determined more by a matter of degree than kind.

Insofar as recent changes in liberation theology are requiring that its proponents enter into discussion about democracy, there might exist a collaborative future between these two groups.  The impact of world-economic structures on weak economies, however, continues to be missing from the rhetoric of Christian realism today.  The gap in terms of language about economic policies and power politics remains. [xlviii] The fact that both perspectives are “in the church” is not enough to unite the two.  So while it may have been demonstrated that Niebuhr and Boff’s are not in competition, they are not in harmony either. Therefore, another assessment is in order.

William Cavanaugh has avowed that “[t]he Christian is called not to replace one universal system with another, but to attempt to ‘realize’ the universal body of Christ in every particular exchange.”[xlix]  This observation illustrates not the competitive or harmonious relationship between liberation theology and Christian realism, but the cooperative nature of the their relationship.  They are cooperative and complimentary exactly insofar as each does indeed do this – realize the body of Christ in its own context.  As Barreto suggests, liberation theology can benefit from Niebuhr’s reflection on original sin.  Niebuhr’s interpretation of Christian ethics enables one to operate at a level of indifference to political outcomes – not indifference to political action itself.  On the other hand, Christian realism could stand to gain from some of liberation theology’s optimism.[l]  Along with this optimism, liberation theology demands what Brown has identified as the move by citizens in the dominant stratum of society to recognize one’s complicity in oppression, become “traitors” to one’s own privileged class, and broaden one’s base or worldview to include the concerns of the disenfranchised.[li] These three criterion prevent anyone with Niebuhr’s politic from ceasing to protest corruption and injustice or to strive for solidarity with the poor marginalized. With the two systems held in tension, apathy is never tolerated, yet hope for and ultimate dependence on God’s intervention is retained.

Finally, Argentine theologian Gerardo Viviers has noticed that liberation theology is in a process of change and judges that both liberation theology and Christian realism have been too captured by the rational categories of the Enlightenment: “The future theologies of Latin America will be more open to myth, symbol, story, and the experiences of indigenous religious expressions.”[lii]  In this light – beyond what has already been concluded – the way forward might also involve a slightly higher degree of distancing by the church from direct trust in or reliance on political avenues for the achievement of a more just society, both for Christian realism and liberation theology. Such an attitude toward government is likely to foster a more realistic perception of the limits of our capacity to make “accurate prospective judgments about the results of enacting one political proposal rather than another, [more so] than that of those whose thinking hews to the ordinary consequentialist line.”[liii]  Further, this guards the church from getting caught up in debates about just war for instance as Niebuhr was with the Cold War.[liv]  On the other hand, it would protect Christians from becoming somewhat reductionist in the Marxist sense by seeing justice strictly in terms of economics – often to the exclusion of culture, ethic heritags.  In both cases, however, involvement in politics remains mandated.  Ultimately, this subtle critique should probably be seen as no more than a mild 21^st Century modification at best of two enduring contributions to Christian social thought in our time.

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INTRODUCTION

A new wave of theological exploration has emerged in the last thirty years coming from the Latino/a religious culture of the United States.  The religious identity of this people group, however, has its birth in traditions as old as any other belonging to the vast majority Anglo-American citizens.  The tidy, fixed labels that are used to characterize and categorize U.S. religions are sometimes necessary and in certain instances helpful, but when in surveying the Hispanic religious experience and culture in North America, traditional boundaries are instantly broken down.  Protestantism, Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and indigenous religiosity have collided to form an altogether new hybrid between Mexican-American or Latino/a migrant and Euro-american religious identities – one that is also sometimes considered a “borderland,” chicano/a (Mexican born in the U.S.), or Mestizo/a identity.  What is  more, there are no rigid borders in terms of geography that define or limit the landscape of this diverse ethnic-religious group.  In order to begin describing how such a mestizo/a religion was formed, the high points of an old and complex “Latin” history must be at least briefly traced.

SOME HISTORY

“Until recently, a Euroamercan male hand has written their history, defined their theology, and shaped their identity.  Yet as Hispanics grow in number, they have begun to write their own stories, a process that consequently makes their perspectives subversive to the dominant theological discourse” – Miguel A. De La Torre

Three broad streams have generally shaped U.S. Latino/a religion: the European, the Native American, and the African.  The European heritage has primarily been Spanish, though not exclusively, and to speak of Spain is also to recognize the shared history with Jews (and conversos, or Jewish-Christian converts) and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula dating back to before the Spanish Inquisition and American Conquest. 

Spain was invaded and conquered by the Moors in 711.  Thereafter is called the period of convivencia (living together) in which some wars were still fought, but rarely for religious reasons.[i] Overall, this was a time of relative peace between the three Abrahamic faith traditions.  It consisted of great cultural exchange along with racial and ethnic blending.  Not surprisingly, this Late Medieval Era continues to fascinate scholars today.

After nearly a millennium of Islamic rule in Andalusia, Granada fell to the armies of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile’s “Reconquest” in 1492.  Nearly 200,000 Jews were required to leave the country, and tens years later all Moors were also expulsed.  The Spanish were convinced that God had given them this task of re-conquering the country on behalf of the Christian faith.[ii]  Regarding the reconquista, Rusto Gonzales notes the interesting datum that many of the families of Moors and Jews who were forced to convert or evacuate had lived in Spain much longer than any English-speaking people have lived in the United States.[iii] 

Upon confronting the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Spanish “explorers” would give a document called a Requerimiento to the leaders of native tribes, which would explain that Jesus Christ was the ruler of the world, and that God had given the power of this rule to the Pope and the crown of Spain.  This authority was said to be passed down to these crusaders themselves, legitimizing their invasion and lordship over the land.  If there was any resistance – even though there was obviously no way for the two groups to understand each other – the locals would then be regarded as rebels and could be treated as such.  Encomiendas, on the other hand, were selected numbers of indigenous representatives who were trained and taught in the way of Spanish Christendom to then preside over other local inhabitants on behalf of Spanish “nobles.”  Though this latter practice had greater potential for civility, both methods were frequently abused.

The details of such abuse and the atrocities committed by the Spanish against the indigenous during these years after Columbus’s voyages are well known and documented, so a short overview can suffice here:

The quest for gold in Hispaniola was a disaster for the island’s indigenous people and subsequently, for the inhabitants of the whole continent.  When the goldfields failed to materialize, the Spanish turned on the local inhabitants and forced them to supply a quota of gold every three months.  Every man, woman, and child was liable for this quota; the Spanish cut a hand off those who failed and hanged or burned any who resisted.  After only two years, an estimated half of the population had died or been killed – an estimated 125,000 to 5000,000 people.  Those who survived Spanish cruelty were vulnerable to European diseases for which they had no immunity.  When it was clear that little gold available was exhausted, the conquistadores forced the inhabitants to work the land for them instead.[iv]

The legacy of violence tied up in the quest for a New Catholic Spain, “coupled with avarice and religious intolerance, were the necessary ingredients that would lead to the bloody conquest, subjugation, and rape of the native people . . . Some saw the conquest as a means of evangelization.  Many conquistadors, like Cortes, saw themselves as instruments of God and bearers of the gospel, foreshadowing what the U.S. would later use to justify their occupation of Spanish and Mexican territories.”[v]  Using Aristotilean categories, theologians like Jose de Acosta saw the natives as barbarians devoid of reason in order to justify their enslavement and abuse.  Unfortunately, despite the bright like shown by them in a very dark hour, the few challenges toward and condemnations of the heinous Conquistador crimes voiced by those like Bartolome de Las Casas and Antonio de Montesinos achieved very little in terms of improving the treatment of the natives.

Despite the break in the coexistence of the three monotheistic traditions in Spain, the plurality of religious practices from this period was passed on in part through the commercial exploitation and “discovery” of America by the conquistadorian arm of Ferdinand and Isabella.  In the same way that Spain was not monolithic, neither were the so-called “Indians” that Columbus and the conquistadors came across following his landing in the Americas.[vi]  The various people groups and societies ranged widely in terms of their social-political systems and worldviews, depending on whether it was the Taino, Aztecs, Mayans, Zapotecs or others.  Some of these civilizations were extraordinarily sophisticated.  Ultimately, however, their weaponry and lack of immunity to disease rendered their defenses incapable of deterring the Spanish invasion.  The Aztecs surrendered to Hernan Cortez in 1521. The Inca Empire and Quechua religion, located in Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, was crushed between 1532 and 1572.

African traditional religions, especially from the Western region of the continent, were brought by force during the slave trade, and have permeated certain areas of Latin America in varying degrees – perhaps most notably in Cuba.  This has led to some continuity with and infiltration in U.S. Hispanic religiosity.  Africa dance, music, and view of the spirit-world in particular have left a significant impression.[vii]  The common history of subjugation and racism served to further amalgamate certain aspects within each of these strands of symbols and rituals in all of their multiplicity.  

In the midst of tragedy, despair and indefensible evildoings, something remarkable happened.  As the story goes, On Mount Tepeyac outside of Mexico City on December 9^th, 1531, the Virgin of Guadalupe (also known as “Our Lady Guadalupe”, assumed to be the Virgin Mary, appeared to a poor mestizo named Juan Diego.  Although the truth of the account is disputed, as some suggest it was actually a tool of the Spanish Catholic church to evangelize the natives, the Virgin of Guadalupe has nevertheless remained a powerful and transformative symbol for the Mexican people.  This power is no doubt partly due to the degree to which it runs counter to the violent history of the Spanish conquest and the patriarchal hierarchy of the Catholic ecclesial structures.  Most obviously, the Virgin appeared to a peasant worker of humble beginnings and with a bicultural heritage, rather than to the Spaniards or to any church officials.  Secondly, the Virgin herself is thought to have appeared as a mestiza.  And perhaps most interestingly, she came to a place that was sacred to the indigenous and that had been dedicated to an Aztec goddess.  Small wonder then why “the Virgin of Guadalupe represents a cultural and religious union, a mestizaje, that has not only evoked religious fervor in the people, but also has come to symbolize the mestizo/a identity of the people.”[viii]

Skipping forward several hundred years, most Latin American countries gained independence from Europe in the early Nineteenth Century.  For 15 million dollars the United States would “purchase” from Mexico a territory in 1848 that included New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada and part of Colorado.  In the same treaty, Mexico agreed to accept the annexation of Texas.[ix]  John Quincy Adams and Ulysses S. Grant themselves saw the war against Mexico and the treaty itself as unjust.[x]  Orlando E. Costas contends that “[t]he Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo may have created a political border but could not impose a cultural one.  Mexican families live today on both sides of the Rio Bravo.  They have a historical and cultural claim to the Southwest.  This religion belongs as much to them as it does to Ango-Americans.”[xi]

The reasons for migration across the Rio Grande ever since have largely been determined by economic factors.  It times of depression, less work is available in the U.S., and people tend to blame Mexicans for taking U.S. jobs.  When business is booming, however, a demand for cheap labor increases, and somehow political steps always seem to be taken in order to open immigration doors (such as the Bracero Program) and call upon the Mexican “reserve army.”

Additionally, many Central Americans from the various nations have come to this country because of the civil wars supported by the United States in their homelands, as was the case with the U.S. Contra war in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration.  Likewise, “[t]erritorial invasions and the exploitation of natural resources by U.S. corporations like the United Fruit Company contributed to Latin America’s underdevelopment and internal unrest.”[xii] Now the U.S. is the fourth largest Spanish-speaking country in the Western hemisphere, and making up 25 percent of the U.S. population, Hispanics are the largest minority group in the country.[xiii]

 

U.S. LATINO/A RELIGION, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Hispanic Americans belong to two worlds and yet they are not bona fide members of either . . . the future of Hispanics in the Americas lies neither in assimilation nor isolation, but rather in the recovery and affirmation of their double identity.[xiv] – Orland E. Costas

In U.S. Latino/a religion, one finds deep sense of the interrelatedness of all things in an “ever-expanding, extensive continuum that goes beyond our immediate present and place in history.”[xv]  Living as a minority in this context is to live in a space between a variety of cultures, races, languages and beliefs that often clash together quite violently.  The myth of a “melting pot” society becomes most evident in these clashes.  In places where people experience their existence as underprivileged in comparison to the dominant Anglo culture, highlighting ethnic and cultural identity is a means of survival, and God becomes a sources of strength for resistance against oppressive forces.

U.S. Latinos/as are sometimes assumed to merely be Latin Americans or Latin American immigrants in the United States.  While this is true, the majority of U.S. Latinos/as have regional roots that go far back before the independence of the United States or the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848.  In light of the divergence in culture between North America and Latin America, however, Latino/a life in the United States is constituted by a daily struggle to achieve wholeness. Latinos/as are a people separated from the land that previously defined them. The fragmentary nature of this identity lends itself to being understood precisely as Mestizo/a.

By adopting the label mestizaje (Elizondo) with its origins in the word mestizo, which was used described those whose parents were from both Spanish and indigenous descent, the U.S. government’s attempt to hide or erase cultural heritage (whether intentionally or unintentionally) is resisted.[xvi]  Nevertheless, any attempt to encapsulate such a heterogeneous group of people by using one descriptor is necessarily to risk reinscribing notions of exclusion and to potentially occlude important internal tensions and differences.[xvii]  Mestizaje is not a neutral term, and one must counter any effort by scholars or politicians to veil the violent past that this socio-ethic nomination is meant to evoke.

The stigmas associated with being Hispanic in the U.S. are many ranging from being seen as lazy to just plane impure or “dirty”. The legacy of Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and Spanish “Providentialism” (as guardians of Catholicism) has contributed to these denigrating stereotypes.  Mestizaje has more to do with how one looks or sounds than where he or she lives.  Judgments made about Latinos/as based on their funny accents and darker have been accumulated to create their deep sense of Otherness.  Conversely, honorary “whiteness” awaits those with clear English and lighter skin color. [xviii]

This alienation is part of the reason why the formation and preservation of communidad is so central to Hispanic-American religious life.[xix]  With between two hundred and three hundred thousand undocumented Mexicans arriving each year in the U.S., Latinos/as are rightly thought by some to be the resident alien populace par excellence: “Children and infants who hold no memories of their (former) homeland are condemned to live within the memories constructed for them by their parents.  [As] exiles, aliens, and outsiders [they] feel unable to escape an inner struggle that defines their ethnicity, an ethnicity that frustrates their ability to reconcile their identity with their presence in the United States.”[xx]

Furthermore, The urban settings or “barrios” where many Latinos/as are concentrated has produced an environment in which much of the Hispanic community suffers under residential segregation, discrimination in employment, and political isolation.[xxi]  An increasing number are beginning to discover the power of their vote, however.  Nonetheless, while Hispanics spend around $300 billion a year into the U.S. economy, 40 percent of their children still live in poverty, which is the highest rate for any ethnic group ever recorded in the U.S.[xxii] They are also the most disproportionately uneducated racial group in the U.S. population.

The prominence of machismo or sexism in Latino/a culture relegates the woman’s role to the private sphere, the home, while men take on the public work.  It is considered macho to provide for one’s family.  Moreover, women are less likely to “get into trouble” if they stay in the house.  Men are very protective, but in a paternalistic fashion.  Their job is to keep women away from other men.  The aggressive and liberal sexual behavior of men on the other hand is rarely questioned.  In fact, infidelity itself is thought to increase their machismo.  Men provide the avenue through which honor comes to the family, while women are considered more susceptible to bringing shame.[xxiii]  The irony with Euroamericans talking condescendingly about “machismo” culture, however, is that it can be used to mask the chauvinistic structures of their own society as well.[xxiv]

Though it would be wrong to think of all Latinos/as as Catholics, most do have shared cultural roots in the communidad of Catholicism.  At the same time, it is estimated that somewhere between 25-40 percent of Hispanics are affiliated with Protestantism somehow – and that number is growing.[xxv]  But the Hispanics who have left Roman Catholicism for Protestantism are not necessarily evangelicals or fundamentalists.  And as was alluded above, popular religiosity in the wake of maintained Native American and African traditional practices and spiritualities undergird the heart of daily Hispanic spiritual life.  In this environment emphasis is placed on the importance of home devotional practices, like home altars, prayers to saints, promesas (vows), quinceaneras (fifteenth-birthday celebrations), vigilias (vigils), estribillos or coritos (choruses).[xxvi]  The spirituality or devotional piety of popular Hispanic religion is dynamic and grassroots-based in nature.  Worship is like a “sacred fiesta,” consisting of enthusiastic singing, freely expressed praise, Santa Cena (the Lord’s Supper), confession of sin, and the confession of faith in the One who forgives sin.[xxvii]

Descending from a context where government and economy are often less than dependable (sometimes due in significant measure to negligence on the part of its Northern neighbor), it is no accident that familia is so importance and central to Latino/a life.  It is the perhaps the most basic and social institution of Hispanic culture, spanning far wider than just to immediate relatives.  The social and familial character of Latino/a culture correlates closely with the stress placed on justice as the fundamental value in society.  In Spanish, for example, the English word ‘righteousness’ does not have an equivalent, and is instead translated as “justicia” or justice in the Bible.  To illustrate, whereas the English version of Luke 23:47 might read, “Certainly this man was righteous,” the Spanish follows thusly: “Realmente, este hombre era justo,” justo meaning just.[xxviii]  And with the emphasis on family, justice in turn is first and foremost seen as a communal matter rather than an individual one.  There is very little room or thought given to the idea of a “private” life.  Justice is chiefly a collective concern.

The complex intermingling of native and Christian religious symbols and rituals have caused problems for Latinos/as, as Protestants claim to have a truer, purer form of Christianity.  In other words, anything not found in the Bible is rejected, or so goes the theory.  Candles, robes, incense, and crucifixes have been seen as unacceptable.  So has at times the practice of wearing black for mourning or of novenas for the dead – the custom of meeting for nine days after someone’s death to remember them and to pray for them.  Pianos, pews, and Christmas trees have always been accepted though – these elements are the valid exceptions.

Pentecostalism has become the second largest religious group in the U.S. of Hispanics after Roman Catholicism.  Countless small independent churches have been formed across the Southwest since the Azusa Street Revival.  Rituals in these immigrant communities often include times for testimonials, healings, prayer to the Holy Spirit and fasting.  In Hispanic worship in general – not just in Pentecostalism specifically – the body is just as important as the soul and the mind.  But because so many ethnic and racial veins run through the blood of Mestizaje identity (indigenous, European, Arabian and even some Asian), the most important elements common to and uniting all Hispanic religion continue to be the Spanish language and cultural tradition itself.

U.S. LATINO/A THEOLOGY

Miguel A. De La Torre and Edwin David Aponte provide a summary of the chief aims for the Hispanic theologian:

Latino/a theology becomes a distinct type of God-talk whose function is (1) to understand the Divine from within the Hispanic cultural location; (2) to seek God’s liberative will in the face of both cultural and economic oppression; (3) to search for a common voice that proclaims salvation, liberation, and reconciliation to the most diverse segments of Latino/a culture; (4) to create theological harmony between the U.S. Hispanic condition and the scriptural narratives; (5) to struggle against the way Latinos/as are perceived and conceived by the dominant culture; and (6) to provide a prophetic voice that unmasks the racism, classism, and sexism implicit in the theology of the dominant white culture.[xxix]

While it may be generally accepted in theory that all theology is done from a particular setting in time and point of view, Latino/a theology, largely in agreement and confluence with liberation theology, fosters a heightened acknowledgement of this reality.  As such, abstract philosophical reflection, though not absent, is definitely reduced or at minimum given a secondary role in the theological methodology.  Embedded within the Hispanic theological outlook is Juan Luis Segundo’s principle of the hermeneutic circle – however implicitly or explicitly – which is partly borrowed from Marxist thought and emphasizes a praxis-based approach to interpreting doctrine and religious ideology.  In this logic known as dialectical materialism, doing theology always starts from a concrete place within a given social stratum fundamentally determined by class.  Moreover, interpretation is considered an on-going process.  Claims to centeredness and objectivity are usually suspect – even if theology in general tends toward this.  One’s subjective position is never wholly transcended.

Whereas mainline Protestantism or European Catholicism might tend to see the role of tradition as one that is implicitly conservative – “harking us back to the church fathers, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and so on” – Hispanics will typically have an increased awareness of “socio-historical realities of the originators of the revered tradition.”[xxx]  Accordingly, tradition from the U.S. Latino/a perspective is one in which the need for constant reformulation and reconstruction is emphasized.  This is taken seriously enough for Luis Pedraja to make the following claim:  “To deny that theology is a product of its cultural context is tantamount to denying the Incarnation and the historicity of Scripture.”[xxxi]

Concerning Scripture itself, Justo Gonzalez has spoken of “Reading the Bible in Spanish” as an especially political and subversive act for Latinos/as.[xxxii]  Using the vernacular automatically hands a certain amount of power over to those on the periphery by giving them the ability to participate.  In particular, however, this extends access to those who typically excluded from biblical scholarship, which is a crucial step.  The exercise of listening to what the voiceless learn from the text henceforth becomes a principle avenue for acquiring new theological insight.

Deeply indebted to Latin American liberation theology, U.S. Latina/o theologians understood theology as “the critical reflection on the praxis” of the people – a praxis that would need to reflect the different sociopolitical, cultural, and historical contexts both explicitly and systematically in U.S. Latino/a communities.[xxxiii]  Consistent with the liberationist heritage then, U.S. Latino/a theology seeks to be a theological task of people – the reality for whom is often one of oppression and marginalization.  If there is a privileged center, it must therefore be one through which the reality of disinheritance can be resisted.[xxxiv]

According to liberation theologians themselves, one finds in the Bible God’s preferential option for poor.  What is more, salvation itself is not something to be seen as solely realized in the future or in the afterlife.  Nor is it restricted to the spiritual realm. Rather salvation is a living and historical reality to be achieved in a community’s present material circumstances.  Relying on Hegelian and Marxist dialectical reading of history, sin is primarily viewed as structural and as having infected the systems and institutions that govern humanity.  Sin conceived of as an impediment for liberation here and now just as much as a hindrance to salvation after death.  Hence, poverty itself must be understood as a scandalous condition and as offensive to God.[xxxv]  Communion with God is breached as long as injustice prevails.  In response, the responsibility of the Church and Christians everywhere must be to work for solidarity with those who are suffering from oppressive systems.  Jesus’s proclamation of the impending Kingdom of God as a reign of justice that brings freedom and good news to the poor, the captives, the blind and lame becomes the hope that energizes a theology of liberation; it is the promise empowers the disenfranchised to be victorious against the slave-driving Pharaoh’s of this world.[xxxvi]

In liberation theology, the starting point is the historical Jesus more so than the christological creeds – though this is not to suggest that the latter is necessarily absent.[xxxvii]  Much of liberation theology has been critical of the established ecclesial orders.[xxxviii]  Juan Luis Segundo voiced his criticism of the church on the grounds that it sought theological unity and the salvation of individual souls over and against any significant effort for socio-economic-political justice.[xxxix]  Archbishop Romero himself echoes this concern: “The church exists to act in solidarity with the hopes and joys, the anxieties and sorrows, of men and women.”[xl]  And as Leonardo Boff argues, “[a]ccording to the parable concerning anonymous Christians in Matt. 25:31-46, the eternal Judge will not ask people about the canons of dogma, nor whether they made any explicit reference to the mystery of Christ while they lived.  He will ask if we have done anything to help those in need.  Here all is decided.”[xli]

Thus there has indeed been an extensive influence exerted upon U.S. Latino/a theology and religion by Latin American Liberation Theology.  Nonetheless, the two cannot be confused.  Hispanics generally have more conservative cultural roots than many of the influential thinkers in the liberation movement.  Social and cultural marginalization for Latinos/as in the U.S. is as significant as poverty and oppression. Hispanic/Latino/a theology has actually forced Latin American Liberation Theology to re-examine itself and confront some of its own lacunas.  For instance, the limited focus on politics and economics excludes cultural, aesthetic, and racial dimensions of society.  It also fails to explore popular religion.  Sexism is also not really addressed.  Pedraja claims for example that using culture and ethnic identity “brings about changes beyond the scope of Latin American Liberation theology with its emphasis on politics and economics.”[xlii]  At the same time, the preference for Latino/a culture in Hispanic theology does not imply an idealization of that identity.[xliii]  Rather, since all cultures and identities are human constructions and as such are imperfect, the selection of one particular community’s perspective makes explicit what is already true of theological projects from any point of view.

Despite the critical distinction made between Latin American liberation theology per se and U.S. Latino/a theologies, Maria Pilar Aquino has tried her hand at combining the two:

The very existence of mestiza theology and economics – liberation, even with its unresolved challenges, comes to demonstrate a collective discomfort with respect to modern white, male, Euro-American culture.  When the current American system declares any alternative dead, thereby destroying any possibility of reaching those alternatives, the Latina communities in the midst of their oppression continue to envision a world in which we all can live.  As long as Latino theology continues to demonstrate its ability to coherently articulate that which we can be, convinced of its possibility, then our task finds its worth and meaning.[xliv]

Aquino envisions the God of the barrio, the God of Jesus the mestizo, and the God of manana

precisely as the God of liberation for Hispanic peoples.  To remember that Jesus too had difficulty finding a place, and that he was born away from home, and that thereafter he was an exile in Egypt is to do theology in the Latino/a way.  For Aquino, Hispanics theologize on behalf of life and liberation and on the side of the poor and oppressed. The on-going reformulation of their very identity depends on this. Social location determines the hermeneutics for interpreting Scripture, and only in view of a qualified reading of history can this be done for Latinos/as. Theirs is a spirituality of hope in the struggle for liberation, and the relationship between theology and pastoral action is direct.  And finally, if there is to be any ecumenism, it starts from the ground up.[xlv]

THE WAY FORWARD IS MESTIZAJE: BEYOND THE FRONTIER MYTH

“All my life I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: To overthrow a labor system that treats farm workers as I they are not important human beings”[xlvi] – Caesar Chavez

In the minds of many U.S. citizens, active memory of both the North and Central American conquests by European ancestors is conspicuously absent.  A disconnect is present between the historical reality of “what land belongs to whom” and “why.”  The manor in which the American historical identity has been transmitted and constructed is forgetful and fanciful – so much so that, as far as many U.S. citizens are concerned, there is only one “America.”[xlvii]  Closely connected with the frontier myth therefore is the myth of an innocent history.  The reason why the United States has refused to hear the truth of its own history is articulated well by Justo Gonzales:

[A]s long as it is innocent of such truth, it does not have to deal with the injustices that lie at the heart of its power and its social order . . . In our country, such guilty innocence is the handmaiden of injustice.  Injustice thrives on the myth that the present order is somehow the result of pure intentions and guiltless history . . . Perhaps once we are agreed that we are all ladrones [thieves], it will be easier for all of us to see much more clearly into issues of justice.[xlviii]

Tying this in with the border issue, Goizueta builds on Gonzalez’s thought as follows:

[L]ate modernity is a world of borders; but, given our history, the profound fear of immigrants reflected in recent legislation suggests that U.S. society continues to view these borders through the lenses of a frontier myth, open to economic expansion but closed to human immigration.  The consequent distortion has devastating consequences, among them the inability to acknowledge historical ambiguity.  Conversely, the Latina/o experience is one that . . . allows for ambiguity and reflects an understanding of the border as a true meeting place, where different cultures interact.[xlix]

Indeed, for many Latinos and Latinas, the border is much more than a place where they live.  The border becomes who they are, as a people whose identity and reality is in between.[l]  To be a border is to live between the rapist and the violated woman and to experience the pain of that tension.[li]

Goizueta is careful to argue, however, that the reason for exposing the lie of an innocent history is not to “ascribe blame to some while exonerating others;” rather it is because by doing so, we will “be able to more effectively bring our future reality into harmony with our national deals.”[lii]  The goal is mutual enrichment.  The borderland cultivates an acknowledgement of all our impurities (against the grain of supposed racial purity).  This is welcomed by Latinos/as, because they know that none of us is pure.[liii]

Virgilio Elizondo shares his own testimony and speaks of the period of time when the person of Jesus the Lord was eclipsed by theory, doctrine, philosophical formulation and theological abstraction.  For Mestizos/as, Jesus is instead a “living person – a friend, an older brother, the “master” who – unlike the masters of this world who abused, exploited, and insulted us – was always solicitous for our welfare and would always be around to help us and comfort us on our way.”[liv]

In the history of Latino/a ecclesial life in the United States, Elizondo observes that the “Euro-American ways of the established church were not he ways of [his] people.  The clergy, religious, and theologians were still foreigners and strangers to our way of life and to our expressions of faith.”[lv]  Elizondo gives account of the deep loneliness that often came with not understanding and not being understood as non-English speaker growing up.  What gives hope to the Mestizo/a situation in particular for Elizondo is a close examination of the socio-cultural person of Jesus himself – one whose earthly identity was as a poor man who showed favor to the lowly and disinherited.  God became a historically, culturally, and racially conditioned human being.[lvi]  As a Jew and a Galilean, Jesus resided in a borderland himself, not unlike the Southwestern United States – almost like being a Mexican-American in Texas.[lvii]  His language and accent probably sounded different from the dominant Latin and Roman Imperial context.    Jesus saw a world where native women were conquered and violated by soldiers.  The scandal of the virgin birth takes on new meaning in light of this.  Elizondo resonates with the migration and social distance that would be the core of Jesus’s daily life.[lviii]  Jesus was an outcast in his own homeland which parallels the experiences of Latinos/as who have been “considered too Mexican by mainline U.S. society, and too ‘gringo’ by families and friends in Mexico.”[lix]  In short, appreciating the fullness of the incarnation enables one to recognize the extent to which Jesus suffered the injustices of our world in much the same respect that many Latinos/as do.

Paul writes of how God was pleased to choose the nothings and foolish things of the world to shame the wise and the strong.  In the same way, Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God and “dares to live what others fear: the joy of common table fellowship with everyone.  By freely eating with everyone, he breaks and challenges all the social taboos that keep people apart.”[lx]  Did this not a major reason for why he was sent him to the cross?

Elizondo understands the liberation that Jesus brings as existential rather than as a strictly universal concept.  It is a tangible liberation that gives inspiration to the hope for what can be: “that the human family might be one, rich in the great diversity of the various nationalities of the world, but no longer divided into enemies, free enough of racial and cultural prejudices of the past to be able to love one another as each is, free enough to learn from one another, free enough to value and respect one another.”[lxi]

Mainstream U.S. culture and political identity seeks to pollute the beauty of Mestizaje, however, with the blinding glamour of abundance.[lxii] Furthermore, a Latino/a theology of liberation would argue that international markets are a far greater destructive force to local identities than immigration could ever be.  In truth, “Americanization” has gained sway in a much more devastating fashion among the youth of Mexico who find the popular cultural and consumerist way of life very appealing.  Regional groups can confront this totalizing, homogenizing energy. The mestizo/a of today provides exactly this oppositional strength when it shows how racial and cultural mixture does not have to work against national identity but can actually enrich it.[lxiii]

U.S. citizens often do not recognize that if it weren’t for the dire material circumstances in which many immigrants find themselves at home – the conditions of which are often a direct result of U.S. corporate and consumer behavior in the first place – the overwhelming percentage of these same immigrants would prefer to stay where they are.  Survival is at stake.  Moreover, the Western version of the path to development, which is regularly imposed upon Latin America through free trade agreements like NAFTA in accordance with the interests of the North, has had all kinds of unintended negative consequences.  The advice of Harold J. Recinos is instructive on this point:

As Latino/a theologians become more focused on the theological analysis of popular piety, it is my hope that they will turn their attention to systematic analysis of the multiple ways in which popular religion for people in structurally and culturally disadvantaged positions use belief systems to construct everyday forms of resistance to political, economic, and theological elites.  This line of research will demonstrate that U.S. Latinos/as are not passive political and religious actors but self-conscious subjects who imagine an alternative social reality, organized with more justice, dignity, freedom, and happiness.[lxiv]

And so it does seem that this would be a worthy job for the Latino/a theologian of the 21^st Century.  In return, it also seems only fair and necessary – in order to make a better future – to call upon others to lend an attentive ear.  The popular religion of the Anglo-U.S. population has practically always been both silent and death when it comes to matters of urgent concern for justice.  Whether it’s with regard to the crises of overpopulation of Hispanics in state and federal prisons for non-violent crimes or the exponentially growing death toll in Mexico as a result of the drug trade driven by U.S. demand and consumption – or the many other acute issues facing U.S. Latinos/as in this age – evangelicals, Protestants and Catholics alike are far behind in their organization and activism on behalf of God’s care for the immigrant and minority communities in this country.

The depth, beauty and richness of Latino/a religious and theological identity has only been minimally highlighted here.  To say with Hispanics that the future is truly Mestizaje, a greater appreciation for and solidarity with this people of eclectic culture and a religious mosaic but be cultivated in the minds and hearts of Americans everywhere.  Latino/a scholars of religion continue to do their part, as can be seen here, but the divide between the dominant Euroamerican culture and Mestizo/a American people is still great.  Giving encouragement to other Hispanics in hopes of a brighter tomorrow, Loida I. Martell-Otero offers this word: “There is a particularity of our spirituality which enlivens our life of faith, and therefore our theology.  We have many names for this: our passion, our joy, our deep love for the Lord.  Non-Hispanics are often nonplussed by it . . . Our challenge is to keep the fire of our passion from dying out.  We must continue to think with our hearts and feel with our brains.”[lxv]  May it be as she says.

INTRODUCTION

As arguably the greatest theologian of the 20^th century, the Swiss-Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar among many other works has written a sixteen volume systematic theology, consisting of three parts: theo-phany, or aesthetics (the beautiful), theo-praxy, or dramatic theory (the good), and theo-logy, or logic (the true).[i]  Most voluminous in his systematic corpus triforme is the first set, The Glory of the Lord, which is largely an attempt to reincorporate aesthetics into Christian thought by way of reviving beauty and form (gestalt): “Balthasar holds that in the face of death it is impossible to encourage belief unless [humanity] is sustained by the vision of the splendor of the form of Christ.”[ii]

In supposed contradistinction to his predecessors in Bultmann and Barth, von Balthasar seeks to preserve as much the objective (Barth) as the subjective (Bultmann) in his theology.  In doing so von Balthasar labors to integrate both existential subjectivity and revelatory objectivity into faith.  Not surprisingly, von Balthasar is critical of Protestantism in general to an extent, but in particular of Barth’s radical separation of the analogy of faith from the analogy of being, in which at least a faint echo of Kierkegaard’s fideism can be heard[1] (though ultimately von Balthasar will adopt what he calls the “analogy of charity” in his Theo-logic, since being and love for him are coextensive).[iii]

Broadly speaking, much of the rationale for the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism can be illumined by highlighting the fundamental disagreement concerning natural theology and the doctrine of sin.  In orthodox Catholic fashion, von Balthasar holds the conviction that the natural and supernatural are correlated and that creation is (still) good.  Thus nature is a reliable but not sufficient mediator of truth.  It is sacramental and wondrous in fact, as patristic theology understood, and can be thought of as a vehicle for the divine.[iv]  Reason and revelation are complementarily though not extrinsically related.[v]  Therefore while sin stains and works against the relationship between God and human beings, deafening the ears of humanity to God’s pursuit and latent call, it does not destroy this relationship.  Von Balthasar in this sense maintains that despite its limitations, natural theology is not inherently sinful insofar as it isn’t abused by attempts to grasp or control God.[vi]

Located between the aesthetics and the logic is the theodramatiks, which, though not the most extensive part of von Balthasar’s trilogy, could defensibly be described as the crux of it.  For as Gerard O’Hanlon has astutely put it, “we are asked not only to contemplate Jesus but . . . to follow him.”[vii]  God’s revelation is not just something to be looked at but lived in. “The good has its center of gravity neither in perceiving nor in the uttering: the perception may be beautiful and the utterance true, but only the act can be good.”[viii]  Or as Louis Roberts encapsulates it: “The splendor of the form of Christ can be perceived only by one who is willing to suffer, to take up the cross and lose himself, to forget his selfish needs.  This is the role of the protagonist in a tragedy.”[ix]  As such the aesthetics is a prelude to the main event: the dramatic encounter between infinite and finite freedom via the self-emptying love of God in Christ.[x]  The analogy between finite and infinite freedom makes possible humanity’s sharing and participation in a common history and drama within the Trinity.

The dramatics consists of five volumes, the first of which mostly functions to frame the project in dramatic terms, followed by anthropology (vol. 2), christology (vol. 3), soteriology (vol. 4), eschatology (vol. 5).  Obviously no volume in the triptych is exclusive of or unrelated to the others.  Nicholas J. Healy has argued that the there are three main tensions within which von Balthasar is writing: 1) the eschatological: between over and under-realized, 2) unity and difference in theosis: namely, between the God-world relationship and the divinity-human Christ, and 3) salvation: between the universal and the particular.  This essay focuses mainly on the second and third tensions.

Between Exegesis and Dogmatics

By examining the historical witness of Scripture, it could be said that von Balthasar begins his dramatic soteriology with a christology “from below.”  At a certain point he departs from this perspective, however, and explores whether the subsequent Pauline and Johannine reflections “from above” can corroborate the person and work, or identity and mission, of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Synoptic Gospels.[xi]  After a relatively rigorous engagement with a number of challenges raised by those in the field of historical-critical biblical scholarship (see “The Problem of Method,” Tbeo-drama Vol. 3), von Balthasar observes that the temporal proximity of the Pauline epistles to Jesus’ life – in light of their high regard for the saving significance of the crucified and resurrected Christ of faith – could only make sense if the Jesus of history had possessed and communicated a clear messianic consciousness at an objective level, and one that was at least implicitly eschatological and universal.[xii]  The Triune and incarnational theological developments of the tradition that followed would provide the “deep coherence” necessary for the formulation of systematic thought in the early Christian churches.

The doctrinal formulas of the Councils then were neither abstract philosophical speculations nor faithless empirical records.  Rather, von Balthasar argues that “there exists an analogous transposition of what Jesus said in his parables originally addressing the Jews, because Jesus anticipates and embraces the time of the Church within his own time.”[xiii]  This is what is meant by “continuity in discontinuity”, which is found between the Conciliar Creeds and the Gospel narratives.[xiv]  Furthermore, the traditional dogma itself shines light on certain passages and words of Jesus that would otherwise be extremely difficult to interpret, and does so in a manor that can hardly be dismissed as merely coincidental or convenient.  The seemingly miscalculated apocalyptic prophecy of Mark 13:30 for instance can perhaps be explained by the successive trans-temporal nature of atonement theory, as well as by an immanent, “already but not yet” understanding of the presence of God’s kingdom.  According to von Balthasar, John sees a “mutual interpenetration of realized and futurist eschatology.”[xv]  As such, Jesus appropriately saw “world-time within the entirety and unity of his own destiny” rather than in terms of chronology.[xvi]

Von Balthasar rhetorically raises the question: “Might not Jesus’s consciousness of his mission have been that he had to abolish the world’s estrangement from God in its entirely – that is, to the very end, or in Pauline and Johannine terms, deal with the sin of the whole world?  In that case, after his earthly mission, the decisive and (humanly speaking) immeasurable part was still to come.”[xvii] By this von Balthasar is confident that “[t]here can be no doubt that Jesus was someone indwelt, guided and even ‘driven’ by the Spirit, far surpassing the Old Testament prophets and apocalyptic figures.”[xviii]  The forgiving of sins and Jesus’s “authority” through teaching and healing activity further affirm this divine identity for von Balthasar.  It is important to recognize, however, that von Balthasar does not regard this datum as rational proof for anything about Jesus.  His is by and large not a scientific or even modern venture in the conventional sense.  This is why von Balthasar has been labeled a “transmodernist”[xix] practicing post-critical biblical interpretation.[xx]

There is indeed a plurality of New Testament theologies, as von Balthasar is aware.  In the case of human biographies, no exhaustive presentation can be given of a person’s “total utterance,” however “painstaking and conscientious.”[xxi]  Instead, one can only approach a multifaceted human life by considering a multiplicity of complementary perspectives.[xxii]  What is more, Von Balthasar regards the Hebrew Bible as a testament en route toward incarnation, expressed for the most part within the confines of God’s deeds in Israelite history and in the story of their nation.[xxiii] In sum, there must be a variety of testaments and accentuations, as only a polyvalent structure could give due witness to the fully transcendent idea of the one being proclaimed:

“Diverse theological variants are produced within the sphere of the plenitude of apostolic authority that comes from the exalted Lord.  It is to this apostolic authority that the kerygma (the eyewitness testimony, martyrion) is entrusted, literally ‘surrendered’, in an ‘interplay of obligation and freedom’ . . . Hence we can say that the plurality of perspectives in the New Testament Scriptures mirrors and echoes the Christological fact, which sums up the disparate Old Testament models, subsuming and transcending them in a new synthesis . . . On the other hand, this opening-up of perspectives does not run to infinity; rather, as the period of the canonical Scriptures, it is extensive with the Apostles’ preaching and supervision . . . Prior to and presupposed by all dogmatic theology, a hidden inner unity is present.”[xxiv]

While von Balthasar does not presuppose the veracity of Jesus’ divinity on a metaphysical scale without responding to the critics like Schweitzer, Bultmann, Harnack and others, his reason is informed by the “eyes” or “light” of faith – by an aesthetic receptivity to the beauty of Christ-form at outlined in Seeing the Form.[xxv]

Balthasar intends to give a “portrayal of Christ that neither preempts the action undertaken by him nor falls back into the kind of purely extrahistorical, static, ‘essence’ Christology that sees itself as a complete and round ‘part one’, smoothly unfolding into a soteriological ‘part two.’”[xxvi]  With respect to the two parts – which comprise the topic of this essay – the predominant or primary question nonetheless is not “who is Christ?” for von Balthasar, but “what does Christ accomplish?”.  The answer to the latter will necessitate meaning for the former.  At the same time, there is a mutually reinforcing relationship, and the act of Christ can be equated with person of Christ in many cases, but the economy and history, or, the action of salvation takes primacy in the theo-drama.

DRAMATIC SOTERIOLOGY

Trinity and Incarnation

This basic formula of the analogia entis is also the ultimate foundation of our Christian theological dramatic theory, just as it has its concrete center in the Chalcedonian “unconfused and indivisible” . . . two natures in Christ.  This means that we can speak concretely of theosis only in the context of Christology: it presupposes the no less mysterious possibility of the Incarnation of God.[xxvii]

In order to substantiate such a drama wherein both the triune God in Christ and humanity maintain agency – each in accordance with the adequate degree of finite and infinite freedom – two doctrines are of supreme importance, and each one underpins the other.  In the first place, the hypostatic union or the divine consubstantiation with humanity through the incarnation is necessary for Jesus to have born and carried the sin of the world.  No mere human being could ever do this or serve as the universal representative for all others.  Von Balthasar is even so bold as to allege that after the incarnation, “the Father has nothing further to communicate to the world, in the present aeon nor in the aeon to come.”[xxviii]  “As Irenaeus often repeats,” von Balthasar declares, “the Son is the visibleness of the Invisible One, and this paradox remains the non plus ultra of revelation.”[xxix]  At the same time, this revelation remains incalculably mysterious.  In his book The Divine Image, Ian McFarland echoes von Balthasar and his reliance of Maximus the Confessor, stating that the more visible and comprehensible Christ becomes through the incarnation, the more he is known to be incomprehensible.[xxx]

More concretely, however, the incarnation is what allows God the Father to have solidarity with and save every sinful conscious subject that answers ‘Yes’ to the divine beckoning. Without a share in the human nature of Christ, God remains an observer and is otherwise unaffected by the drama, leaving the forgiveness of sin unauthorized.  Because of the fusion of two natures (though they do not become indistinguishable) in one person, Christ is representative at once of humanity and the Source to which humanity’s owes its being.

In the second place, the coming of God in the form of a human being reveals something about the internal relationship within the Godhead.[xxxi]  Combined with the extension into world time through the covenant theology of both Covenants (with Israel and the Church), Jesus’s resurrection and the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost form the entire backdrop of the Trinity.[xxxii]  And von Balthasar sees the cross as the ever-present presupposition of the Trinity, so again there is a mutually constitutive relationship held between these doctrines:

This divine act that brings forth the Son, that is, the second way of participating in (and of being) the identical Godhead, involves the positing of an absolute, infinite “distance” that can contain and embrace all the other distances that are possible within the world of finitude, including the distance of sin.  Inherent in the Father’s love is an absolute renunciation: he will not be God for himself alone.  He lets go of his divinity and, in this sense, manifests a (divine) God-lessness (of love, of course) . . . The Son’s answer to the gift of Godhead (of equal substance with the Father) can only be eternal thanksgiving (eucharistia) to the Father, the Source –a thanksgiving as selfless and unreserved as the Father’s original self-surrender.  Proceeding from both, as their subsistent “We”, there breathes the “Spirit” who is common to both: as the essence of love, he maintains the infinite difference between them, seals it and, sine he is the one Spirit of them both, bridges it.[xxxiii]

The soteriology of von Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology is profoundly significant, for only the triune God can genuinely be a dramatic participant on the world stage.  The sin of the world is transposed into the “unholy distance” created by the Son, then overcome and transcended by God through the Spirit.[xxxiv]  The conjoining and interdependency of the two doctrines (Trinity and incarnation) is what actualizes the absorption of sin and the succeeding redemption of humanity.

Christology: Mission and Person

Von Balthasar’s point of departure must be Jesus’s will to live as a servant, as the slave of all (Mark 10:45, Luke 22:27), following his own commandment by humbling himself (Matt 23:12), losing his life (Matt 10:39), and giving it up (Mark 10:45, John 10:17).  Christ takes on a “descending” attitude and gives human beings an existential example (Phil 2:8).[xxxv]  Further, Christ parallels Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, but in his latent universalism moves from Israel to ta ethne (the nations):[xxxvi] “Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28).  Von Balthasar underscores Jesus’s explicit awareness of being sent and his knowledge of the one who sent him (Luke 4:43; 10:16; 20:13; Matt 15:24; 21:37; Mark 12:16), as well as of the kingdom “coming” and as “having come” (Mark 1:38).  The Johannine metaphors are instructive here:  Christ as “divine light and life” (John 1:9; 3:19; 10:10), and the commissioning by the Father is abundantly overt – the profession to have come from and in the name of the Father (John 5:43; 8:42; 16:28):

“In these Johannine ‘sending’ formulas, the uniqueness of the person of Jesus is expressed through a twofold uniqueness: that is, his Trinitarian relationship to the Father and the soteriological goal of his mission.  Nor are these factors merely juxtaposed: the intimate relationship between the One sent and the One who sends him takes the form of obedience within the Father’s act of surrender.  The Father is the One who sends, and in this act of sending he establishes, guides, and takes responsibility for Jesus’ whole existence on earth; he lays down the latter’s purpose right from the start, namely, the salvation of the world (John 3:17; 6:39).”[xxxvii]

Christ’s putting on of flesh encompasses perfect freedom and absolute obedience so that the Son can be the perfect image of the Father: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).[xxxviii]

Christ’s “missio” is the guiding principle of von Balthasar’s christology – a christology of consciousness and of being.  Christ’s consciousness implies both the work and the person, and the identification of the person is what satisfies the “theodramatic requirement.”[xxxix] Christ’s role therefore is active and his person ontological.  His conscious subject is equivalent to the divine mission.[xl]  God has actually appeared in the play, on stage, in Christ the incarnate Son, and without evacuating his place as the sovereign One and as Judge; that is, God becomes immanent without foregoing transcendence.  External or neutral contemplation cannot grasp this truth.  In order to see, “we must have been admitted to the sphere of the Holy Spirit, that holy intimacy between Father and Son.”[xli]

Atonement

“And so it was that two marvels came to pass at once, that the death of all was accomplished in the Lord’s body, and that death and corruption were wholly done away by reason of the Word that was united with it.  For there was need of death, and death must needs be suffered on behalf of all, that the debt owing from all might be paid.  Whence . . . the Word, since it was not possible for Him to die, as He was immortal, took to Himself a body such as could die, that He might offer it as His own in the stead of all, and as suffering, through His union with it, on behalf of all . . . and might deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage . . . [b]y his death has salvation come to all, and all creation been ransomed.  He is the Life of all, and He it is that as a sheep yielded His body to death as a substitute, for the salvation of all . . .” (para. 20, 5-6; 37, 7) – Athanasius of Alexandria

Indispensable to dramatic soteriology for von Balthasar are five major aspects.  First, Christ gives himself through God the Father for the salvation of the world.  This act occurs both as free self-surrender and absolute obedience to the Father’s will.  Secondly,  the “Sinless One” takes the place of sinners in an exchange.  Third, humanity is freed, ransomed, redeemed, and released as a consequence of this substitution.  More than this, however, humanity is elevated and enabled to participate in the divine life as a result of this newfound freedom.  And finally, the entire sequence must be understood as instigated by divine love.[xlii]

In von Balthasar’s view, the Church Fathers were able to contemplate with profundity the notion of theosis, or divinization, which corresponds closely to the fourth point above, making possible the attachment to or participation in God’s being as a result of having been ransomed, redeemed, and freed from “the powers.”  What is not taken far enough according to Balthasar, however, is the second step – namely, exchange.  While there is definitely an appreciation for Christ’s function as the one who takes away the sins of the world and suffers the consequences of this sin, the early Church was unable to conceive of Christ’s direct identification with the sinfulness of humanity as such.  In fact it wasn’t until Luther, von Balthasar argues, that Christ’s atonement for sin was properly thought of as having thoroughly become sin itself on humanity’s behalf.  Anselm in particular for Balthasar, though he put more weight on the idea of Christ’s surrender and self-sacrifice, likewise devalues the function of Christ’s substitution by reducing it to a merited payment due to the “guiltless credit” earned before God.  Hence in Christ “satisfaction” is offered for humanity’s sin in Anselm’s model, but identification with sin itself is not sufficiently developed:

What is lacking is the link with the Son’s Trinitarian missio, his “sending” by the Father on the basis of his processio.  Thus Anselm cannot explain why Jesus’ obedience is addressed emphatically to the Father rather than to the whole Trinity.  What is also missing is the organic connection between Christ and all other human beings, which is established by the Incarnation and on which the Fathers lay such stress.  The fact that Christ is the New Adam, possessing the gratia capitis, is more assumed than declared.[xliii]

As this “new Adam,” Christ’s accomplishment is less than dramatic if only an external “work” with the right ontic or judicial dignity.[xliv]  For von Balthasar, the crucial question is this: “How internal is this role-playing in the suffering Christ, and how far does he identify himself with the role?”[xlv]  Even Saint Thomas falls short of a thoroughly dramatic soteriology in von Balthasar’s view.  Despite having contemplated Christ’s suffering in more depth than Anselm, the “satisfaction” theory dominates, and representation or substitution is fairly peripheral in Thomas.  And while Luther rightly accentuates substitution, does he not simultaneously deemphasize exactly what the Fathers stressed so well – namely, humanity’s becoming and actualization in the divine life, or theosis?  Moreover, Luther intensifies the necessity for the punishment of sin by underlining the redemptive quality of Christ’s death as an innocent victim.  Here Balthasar is hesitant and wonders whether Luther, with a concentration on the penal nature of substitution and sacrifice,  has compromised God’s love, which is supposed to undergird the entire process.

Although von Balthasar wishes to retain Anslem’s two postulates – “that is, death must be unmerited and undergone by a person of the highest dignity; and it must contain an element of infinite pain, which alone can purge and destroy the monstrous quality of the world’s guilt” – this isn’t enough.  Christ must bear the weight of this guilt.  At the same time, purging and destroying sin takes precedence over punishing it, just as in Anselm.

Then there are those like Pannenberg and Rene Girard (though their respective positions are quite disparate concerning atonement in general) who suggest that it was not God but humanity who cast sin onto the Lamb of God.[xlvi] The problem in this case from von Balthasar’s view is that humanity becomes the initiator of its own redemption, rather than it being God’s own enactment. Other Protestant liberal christologies also like to put emphasis on Jesus’s solidarity as expressed in his life of fellowship with the poor, sinners, and the marginalized, but these perspectives see the cross as “nothing more than the ultimate consequence of this ‘social’ solidarity.”[xlvii] So while the Son dies “because of sin”, at a deeper level he dies “because of God”, because “God has definitively rejected what cannot be reconciled with the divine nature.”[xlviii]

Conversely von Balthasar is unsatisfied with Rahner’s portrayal for the opposite reason.  In Rahner’s formal depiction, God’s activity in the drama is consigned too closely to that of a spectator instead of a self-giver.  On the other hand, von Balthasar strives to avoid relegating humanity’s role to one of strictly inactive passivity.  Some measure of finite freedom must be preserved and not eradicated or completely perverted by sin so that a genuinely dramatic creaturely interplay can be performed.  That is, subjectivity still matters in spite of humanity’s utter dependency on God for mercy and forgiveness.  In summation, for atonement both the substitutionary (or representative) side, which is objective and beyond sheer moral influence, and the participatory side, which invokes the human and subjective activity, are required.[xlix]  Whether this is compatible with the Reformation doctrine of sola fide and sola gratia as Luther intended it would be another focal inquiry.

The “Momentum of the Cross” and “Christ’s ‘Descent’ into Hell

“There was a cross in the heart of God before there was a cross on the hill of Calvary.” – Horace Bushnell

“The bifurcation in God must contain within it the whole turmoil of history.”[l] – Jurgen Moltman

Sheol is understood by von Balthasar simply as the state of separation from (the glory of) God.[li]  The difference between sheol and hell after the New Covenant is not unlike the distinction now made between hell and purgatory.  Hell is the fate of those who recognize the vicarious deed of God both consciously reject it, but purgatory “must be a possibility for humanity, inasmuch as, through the vicarious suffering of lostness, an impulse of mercy has been commingled with the eschatological ‘fire’ of God that tests people” (1 Cor 3:12, and Origen).[lii]  Heaven on the other hand is a possibility because of Christ’s pending return.  Through the lens of the New Testament, since both “paradise” and “Gehenna” remain polyvalent, von Balthasar says they only receive their “theological unequivocalness” through the event of Holy Saturday.[liii]

The momentum of the cross, powered by Jesus’s authority, obedience, self-abandonment and poverty carries over to the descent into hell and the annihilation of the last enemy, which is death (1 Cor 15:26).  This is what von Balthasar calls the place of the lowest rung on the “ladder of obedience.”[liv]  All have sinned, are guilty, and have lost the glory of God (Rom 3:23).  Christ’s poverty and self-abandonment (kenosis) constitute the bearing of the sin of the world, but this is only the first of two essential acts.  The second is accomplished through “solidarity with the death that is the lot of all.”[lv]  Because of the incarnation, the “journey to the dead” (Thomas) is an implicit consequence of the cross event.[lvi]  Von Balthasar contests that Jesus carries the Father’s saving will to this point as the “crushed sufferer” (Isaiah 53:10) quite passively.  This claim runs somewhat contrary the traditional one, which instead concentrates on the active conquering by Jesus of the gates of hell, and without much struggle.  Alyssa Pitstick draws attention to this and points out that in the classical account, Jesus did not “suffer” in hell.[lvii]  For von Balthasar, however, Jesus must have assumed the absolute nature of this extreme condition, which entails not triumph but almost lifeless “sinking down.”[lviii]  Furthermore, those like Edward Oates defend that von Balthasar’s Holy Saturday reflection, grounded in the Apostle’s Creed, meets the criteria for acceptable theological development and innovation.  Paul Griffiths also criticizes Pitstick for classifying von Balthasar’s inventive study outside of the orthodox vein.[lix]

In the wake of Nicholas of Cusa, von Balthasar speaks of the “interior view of death” and reiterates that the suffering of Christ is “the greatest that can be thought of.”[lx] At the same time, von Balthasar also says that Jesus becomes the “judge who has measured out all the dimensions of [humanity] in its own experience, and can assign to each [human being her] lot eschatologically.”[lxi]  So the descent into hell and solidarity with the dead is of course not ultimately devoid of victory – “death is swallowed up” (1 Cor 15:54; 2 Cor 5:4).[lxii]

Calvin stresses humanity’s justification by obedience as well, but fails to unite Jesus’ suffering with the Father’s love: “In Calvin, moreover, the ‘brackets’ of the trinitarian love are lost to sight, so that the idea of the ‘severe vengeance of God’ (divinae ultionis severitas) takes on one-sided prominence.”[lxiii] Again in a Cusanian reading, von Balthasar prefers to proclaim Christ’s absolute obedience as the key christological concept within the broader trinitarian context.  This does not ignore, however, that Christ absorbs the wrath of God into the realm of grace as a consequence of sin, but the latter process must be reconciled with the “proclamation made to the world of God’s disposition of love.”[lxiv]

Subjectively, Jesus earnestly cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And yet objectively, this feeling and experience of unreserved anguish is redemptive, because in Christ the culprits have a representative before the Judge.  As Christ takes sin up into the ‘trinitarian fellowship’, the sinners’ ‘No’ to God is transfigured. [lxv]  The contradiction in God created by sin is resolved on account of Christ’s self-abandonment.  God’s anger is countered by the Son’s love that willingly exposes itself to such torment, disarming it and “literally depriving it of its object.”[lxvi]  God’s wrath toward humanity for its rejection of God is dissolved by a divine love that is more abundant than God’s wrath.

Christ’s mediation and representation occurs within the Trinity itself, not externally to it – despite the apparent irreconcilable conflict caused by the sin it subsumes.  In this way it is reasonable to assert that in the incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the triune God is engaged on humanity’s behalf.[lxvii]  What’s more, in view of this multi-layered and triune atonement, the concept of substitution need not “stand or fall” with the ancient sacrificial system.[lxviii]

The God-world Relationship

In short, Balthasar is traversing the razor’s edge between demoting God’s involvement in the economy of salvation to the plane of world entanglement and tragic mythology on the one hand (of which he believes Hegel and Whitehead to be guilty, and even Moltmann to an extent – God doesn’t “need” the cross or the process of self-surrender in other words) and over-negating or mystifying any awareness of this involvement to the realm of static, obstinate dualism and detachment on the other.  Whether von Balthasar succeeds in walking this fine line will be a pertinent question.  Can God the Father in “uttering and surrendering himself without reserve,” not lose himself?[lxix]  Does God not extinguish herself in kenosis, or does this demonstrate an even more unfathomable love and omnipotence, as von Balthasar would have it?  He contends that God’s sovereignty paradoxically situates God above the need to dominate or use coercion and violence, such that even when confronted by God, humanity is not overwhelmed to the point of forfeiting volition.[lxx]  In this way von Balthasar draws on the Augustinian idea, insisting that finite freedom can only find its fulfillment in infinite freedom.[lxxi]  This is what leads Thomas to later say that “the nearer (vicinior) a free nature stands to God, the more it is able to move itself.”[lxxii]

As a result of what von Bathasar imagines in the above Trinitarian description, the substitution or “exchange of place” can ultimately be grounded in the immanent Trinity; hence God is not unmoved by the event of the cross.[lxxiii] Most interestingly perhaps, and to which was alluded above, the concept of punishment or sacrifice is not prevalent in von Balthasar’s language.  Accordingly, deeming the exchange as a “payment for sin” is somewhat precluded and does not adequately capture the character of the atonement for von Balthasar.  Though Christ atones for the guilt of humanity’s sin, like the Thomistic and classical position has always said, one must be open to the possibility that God could have redeemed humanity in other way, and this is no minor stipulation.

Yet von Balthasar goes a step further.  He submits that the sufferings of Christ are far greater than all possible sufferings caused by sin, so that it is the freely chosen, immeasurable quality of torment that generates the highest possible display of God’s love for and solidarity with humanity.  This gives another plausible reason for Christ’s death without subtracting its ontological and soteriological significance.  Still, one way or another, sin has to be overcome, vanquished – and its severity and divisiveness ought not be downplayed – but the essence of atonement is illuminated for von Balthasar more by God’s desire for reconciled relationship with creation than by the requisite to penalize people for sin.

Dramatic Anthropology

“Only a fool can hope for ultimate fulfillment in this world – and, as for penultimate hopes, we are not concerned with them here.  In other words, even the Old Testament Messianic hope in the future is self-contradictory unless it opens out to a victory over death (both the death of the individual and the death of the world as a whole), to a ‘resurrection from the dead’ . . . Only on the basis of his Resurrection does he show that he has “‘overcome the world’” (John 16:33).[lxxiv]

Humanity is characterized as “the meeting point of many conflicting forces”: human beings are aware of their shortcomings and limited achievement while also being driven by unlimited longings.[lxxv]  More than this, human beings can know their sinfulness and the obstruction to full finite freedom that this sinfulness causes. This is what Paul describes as “finding himself doing things he wishes he did not do.”[lxxvi] Accordingly, human existence is described as a battlefield: “Man therefore is divided in himself.  As a result, the whole life of men, both individual and social, shows itself to be a struggle, and a dramatic one, between good and evil, between light and darkness.”  The tragedy is that human beings find themselves “unable to overcome the assaults of evil” and so feel “bound by chains – despite the universal aspiration for freedom and justice that is stronger now than ever before.”[lxxvii]

This bondage and preceding talk of the Son’s all-embracing obedience to the point of death on the cross begs the question of how human beings can be liberated to live presently as dynamic characters in the drama.  To address this, von Balthasar reminds that the definitive event of Christ’s death and resurrection is being “continually rendered concrete from below, as it were, by continued sin: it is continually being implanted from above into all times, in the sacrament instituted by Christ” (referring to Baptism and the Eucharist).[lxxviii] God’s grace is ministered through these sacraments in order to resolve the ontic problem of the God/creature relationship.[lxxix] Christians are hereby empowered to live in the sphere of en Christoi, which includes the risen Christ of faith as well as the historical Jesus, who “recapitulates in himself everything earthly.”[lxxx] This provocative claim summons the whole world.[lxxxi] In his outline of von Balthasar, Kevin Mongrain asserts that this “participation in the paschal mystery . . . liberates humanity from despair and/or fatalism, thereby enabling it definitely to reject all human-made utopias in the name of alternative “utopian hope” based in the memory of Christ’s death and resurrection.”[lxxxii]  Additionally, in contrast to some forms of Eastern religions or even certain negative, mystical, or apophatic Christian traditions, this participation does not erase or diminish the identity of individuals.[lxxxiii]

Thus, the personal mission of Christ can be imitated by those who are called in him to participate in his drama.[lxxxiv]  O’Hanlon summarizes it this way: “The dramatic notion of role becomes identified with the theological notion of mission – we as human beings have a role within the divine drama by becoming persons, which we do in answering our mission as beings called and sent by God” (emphasis added).[lxxxv] Von Balthasar elucidates this calling himself with allusion to the posture of prayer: “The great ‘Watch and pray!’ in which the Synoptic Gospels end, is a call to enter into the fundamental attitude of Christ.”[lxxxvi] This relationship with the person of Christ is that through which humanity is drawn into the Father.  Hence the human struggle with evil affects the very inner life of God.

The “Pain” of God

In von Balthasar’s estimation, God takes a risk with this act, and “something in God can develop into suffering.”[lxxxvii] These are no small claims, and despite his commitment to the classical tradition and aversion to certain contemporary anthropomorphic tendencies, such language goes against the grain of traditional theology.  Qualification is added in that “the divine is not so interwoven in the drama of history that the conclusion of the struggle is uncertain; but the divine is also not elevated beyond the world so that whoever will assume the standpoint of God must elevate himself beyond the dramatic into epic distance.”[lxxxviii]  Whether such imagery and necessarily human language warrants von Balthasar’s theo-logical conclusions, the theophanies of the Hebrew Bible certainly lend support:[lxxxix] “The Old Covenant spoke of God’s ‘bowels’ (rachamin) trembling with compassionate love: this is precisely what is revealed to the world when the Father surrenders all his love, embodied in the Son.”[xc]

Traditionally, God is both immutable and (in the Son) mutable.[xci] Von Balthasar makes reference to Ignatius who speaks of “the impassible one who suffers for us.”  And relying on Gregory of Nyssa, von Balthasar explicates that “If God wishes to save [humanity] by freely choosing suffering, [God] suffers impassibly; [and] since [God] suffers freely, [God] is not subject to suffering but superior to it.”[xcii]  Presumably then, what Christ takes upon himself, without sin or inclination to sin, is the healing of humanity’s fallenness from within.  This indicates the tension in God between apatheia and pathos, though von Balthasar cautions that these attributes should only be associated with God whilst keeping in mind the incomprehensibility of God and the break along the ontological continuum.

But von Balthasar also argues that the Fathers stressed apatheia mostly because of the way that the Greeks understood it – as mythological.[xciii]  Hence he seems to be saying that attributing apatheia to the classical conception of God is in danger of approaching a misinterpretation.  Of course von Balthasar is careful to ensure that “there can be no pathos in God if by this we mean some involuntary influence from outside.”[xciv]  So it is never that God’s essence changes, “but that the unchangeable God enters into a relationship with creaturely reality, and this relationship imparts a new look to his internal relations.”[xcv] So while God does not change in any univocal sense, this interaction does demonstrate the great extent to which the destiny of the world is a concern for God.

 A Theology of Liberation?

For the criticism and controversy surrounding liberation theology, coming from the Vatican and European Catholicism in particular, von Balthasar has a surprising amount of appreciation for the urgency evoked by liberation theology.  He concedes extensively with this rather astounding statement: “since this appeal to Christians, this summoning of their crucial, world-transforming cooperation, is at the heart of Christianity, [liberation theology] reveals the dramatic situation of the Christian in this world as perhaps nothing else does.”[xcvi]

Pointing to the example of Paul as one who “earned his keep” and said that anyone who does not work should not eat (2 Th. 3:10), von Balthasar sympathetically acknowledges that organizations of “human toil” can nonetheless operate to gain power at the expensive of workers for the benefit of owners, at which point working for sheer survival would no longer be a viable option:

Whether this domination aims at “boundless affluence or the boundless stockpiling of arms” does not particularly matter . . .in either case, the threshhold has been crossed to a purpose that is immoral because it is inhuman.  The inhuman aspect is immediately seen in the exploitation no the workers, who are regarded and treated as mere means to power.  Clearly, the Christian must throw himself into the to cogs of this pitiless machinery and, as the Pastoral Constitution tirelessly insists, urge the human proportions (which he has discerned in Jesus Christ) against the twofold disproportions of excessive power (in affluence and imperialism) and powerlessness (in poverty).[xcvii]

One could almost mistake this passage for words that came from Gustavo Guitierrez himself.

Nevertheless, von Balthasar remains concerned that liberation theology’s “greatest danger lies in its tendency to link together the relationships of the first and Second Adam, earthly action and the kingdom that comes down from God, within a single system or overview; in doing so, it succumbs in a new way to theological rationalism.”[xcviii] Von Balthasar elaborates by stating that while “we have a strict Christian duty to fight for social justice on behalf of the poor and oppressed,” the boundaries of the use of force for realizing political change are not easily identified.[xcix]  He argues that even Jesus’s “cleansing” of the Temple is no justification for Christians to behave coercively.  Can agape, which endures all things, be applied as a tactical instrument for the attainment of political goals?[c]  Von Balthasar asks, would this not be a manipulation of divine virtue?  Yahweh’s “holy” wars in the Hebrew Bible are equally unfitting as an illustration and are at best typoi or anticipations.

Though the ‘politics of the cross’ may be become a mere partial ingredient in overall political calculations as the practicality of earthy justice, the state can never be “theologized”, even if God has instituted it for the purpose of order and finite justice (Rom 13).[ci]  At most the “Christian can try to exercise influence in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount,” for at the point that the political sphere is breached, it becomes a question of how this approach can be imposed on multitudes of people.  In spite of his expressed sympathies then, in von Balthasar’s total response he comes close to basically consigning the Christian politic to either martyrdom or the monastery.  It is not difficult to imagine how those living in destitution might reply.  As Joerg Rieger has poignantly observed, the question of “who benefits?” materially from a given approach to theology should be given serious consideration.[cii]  But to fairly summarize, von Balthasar simply believes that “all intermediate zones, in spite of their urgency,” can only be relative insofar as they have “political and economic liberation in the foreground.”[ciii]  Ultimately, “liberation movements merit theological credentials only if they are carried on within the horizon of that ultimate liberation won by Christ and for him.”[civ]

A BRIEF CRITICAL RESPONSE

As one commentator wisely disclaimed, pretending to probe and challenge a theologian of this stature might be akin to a “fly trying to show an elephant to visitors to the zoo – the fly keeps getting whisked off the immense corpus.”[cv]  With that said, any theological treatise as vast and sophisticated on von Balthasar’s can hardly avoid creative and at least partially novel features, and no “new” claim about a two-thousand-year-old tradition is exempt from scrutiny.  Who should be the one to bring the scrutiny is the better question, and for this reason some dependence on the inspection by others is obligatory.  I will, however, include a modest dose of my own deflection.

First, despite his otherwise critical tone toward Hegel, von Balthasar appears to envisage a change in the Son and therefore in the Trinity that is brought about by the total abandonment and emptying that realizes salvation for humanity and the world.  This is also where expressions like God’s “risk” and talk of God “giving himself away” is used.  Ben Quash has interestingly contended that Hegel and von Balthasar both designed their aesthetic projects in such a way “that all lines converge on drama as a consummate form of artistic expression.”[cvi]  Both of them also choose the literary method of “drama” as opposed to “lyric” or “epic”; “‘epic’ is modern realism devoid of awe and reverence while ‘lyric’ is artful romanticism remote from reality.”[cvii] Is it not feasible then that attributing the unstable quality inherent in “drama” to God does more (or less) than merely enhance or enrich the portrayal of God as found in Scripture and the whole tradition?  Doubtless von Balthasar is enlisting such a description for the purpose of depicting a more vivified and suspenseful scene, and this may be where the notion of drama as the overarching framework falls short of faithfulness to the very ontological gap between humanity and God that he is determined to protect.  In this regard, it is hard to see how von Balthasar doesn’t recommit Moltmann’s “sin”, albeit is a more subtle way.

Concerning Christ’s descent, his absolute torment and debasement in hell renders conditional the state of all person’s condemned status.  Though he has been suspected of positing some kind of grounds here for universal salvation, von Balthasar refuses to make any pronouncements about the eschatological outcome for anyone.[cviii]  With the instigation and conversion of sheol into purgatory, however, it is difficult to imagine how he does not eventually envision that all could be saved, and he has certainly expressed hope for so much.[cix]  This is more of an observation than a criticism, however.  In my judgment there is no fault in hoping that God will redeem and reconcile all things.

But about Jesus’s experience in hell, does von Balthasar speculate too much or exaggerate the enormous quality of Christ’s suffering?  What is the basis for this preoccupation if not mild sadism?  Is it not enough that the Son of God would become human and die this humiliating death that many other “nonpersons” – rejects of the imperial rule – had to endure?  Surely the patristic emphasis on victory over death and “the powers” was no mere coincidence.  Solidarity is unquestionably essential for atonement, but defeat of this systemic and institutional sin of the world is no less imperative if Jesus is Lord and if the Kingdom of God is at hand, as Christ taught.

Even more pressing is a question raised by Steffen Losel and Frances Fiorenza, along with a host of others: where is the mentioning of suffering on behalf of victims rather than just perpetrators?[cx]  Love as self-surrender and obedience on behalf of guilty sinners – this is unevenly weighted.  Cannot God’s love be thought of just as much in terms of God’s compassion for the victimized?  No doubt von Balthasar’s account of the atonement has recourse to this – and solidarity with the suffering is by no means an absent theme[2] – but this exact dimension of reconciliation for victims as such, and historically speaking, is at most an addendum.  The point here is that self-sacrifice and obedience might be the most valuable expressions of the Christian life for some, but not necessarily for others – others like the masses of abused and defeated peoples.[cxi]

It is not just that substitution for sin is carried out in atonement, or even that human deification is prompted, but equally that the very structures and systems that devise the death machine of the Roman Imperial expansion are criticized. The cross inverts and reveals the dark underbelly of the “pax romana” perjury.  What better denouncement of violence and subjugation than the demonstration of power over death resounded by the resurrection?  The cross must appeal and plead to sufferers, calling on them to forgive.  On the other hand the cross convicts and summons tyrants to repentance.  Thirdly, the sins of all are taken up by the sacrifice to end all sacrifices (Heb 10).[cxii]  Korean theologian Andrew Sung Park has also presented a triune atonement model that opts largely for the restoration of victims’ dignity in a non-retributive manor.[cxiii]  Park includes in his reflection the atonement for the forgiveness of the oppressors, but the nonviolent emphasis would likely pose problems for scrupulous harmony and continuity with the tradition.  The problem of nonviolence notwithstanding, however, his is an apposite example of an atonement theory with historical consciousness.

This should be a concern not just for feminists and liberation theologians, but anyone wanting to apply theological reflection to the realm of history with all of its dialectical oppositions, which are all the more acute in the age of globalization.[3]  This criticism is by no means novel and by now is widespread, but just the same it should be mentioned.  It is not that von Balthasar overlooks the social and the communal so much as the historical.  His interpretation of trinitarian and christological love is danger of functioning “to reinforce passive acceptance rather than active resistance to oppression and abuse,” signaling that the Christian life consists exclusively in submission to God and “obedience to the church (as the institution through which the Holy Spirit speaks).”[cxiv]

With respect to John 14:6 and the claim that “no one comes to the Father except by me”, von Balthasar concedes with the rest of Christian inclusivists that “this is not to deny the ultimate salvation of all who do not know him and adhere to other religions.”  On the other hand, von Balthasar maintains that other religions do not mediate salvation – only Christ can do this.[cxv] (He also makes no distinction between the various salvations that are sought by the world religions.) This position is a slightly more restrictive and conservative take on theology of religious pluralism than one finds in Rahner or Kung, for instance, and certainly more so than what would satisfy many interreligious theologians today.  Nonetheless, von Balthasar does at least leave room for the salvation of any non-Christian, and since it is not the task of this essay to explore the merit of von Balthasar’s theology of religions, further questions here will be put aside.[4]  It may also be that von Balthasar’s aesthetics in itself is an apologetic for Christian truth:  “The whole mystery of Christianity,” he says – “that which distinguishes it radically from every other religious project, is that the form does not stand in opposition to infinite light, for the reason that God has himself instituted and confirmed such a form.”[cxvi]  Even still, this belief relies heavily on a revelation that is not equally available to everyone.  For a genuinely dramatic theology, that indeed is intended to include the stage of the whole world, it would surely seem like further reflection is needful with regard to how exactly Christ’s atonement might be mediated in other faith traditions, and to what extent these faith traditions themselves have intrinsic salvific value for their own hopes and soteriological aspirations.[5]  Any thought experiment along these lines must be carried out in the utmost humility, however, with care not to take for granted any special insight into “things too wonderful” (Psalm 131).

As Pannenberg prudently instructed, in systematic theology “we keep in view the plurality and debatability of all religious truth claims.”[cxvii] One must deal with the correctness of Christian truth claims as open ones.  Even more sobering is the reality that for many people “it is by no means self-evident today that the truth claims of Christian doctrine may even be regarded as open” in the first place.[cxviii] At the same time, what von Balthasar does provide is one of the most impressive and integrative presentations conceivable as regards the Christian revelation, its heritage of interpretation, and the view of God therein with respect to humanity and the world – all with the best reason and resources available.  The product as it concerns salvation is a hope-filled assurance and inspiration to all who wonder about God’s distance from creation, care for it, and involvement in redemption through the person and work of Jesus Christ.  In this account, God’s solidarity with sinners in the face of death – humanity’s greatest enemy – is firmly established.  Though the more historico-liberative aspect of this redemption story might be wanting, the trinitarian and representative potential is ripe for further development and reflection to be taken up.  The retrieval of the aesthetic and the dramatic, as well as the classical – going against the modern flow of thought – makes for a masterful outcome that theologians will need to wrestle with for decades and perhaps even centuries to come.

[The following is  a preliminary draft to a final essay I wrote in my systematic theology class this semester.  It's about 25 pages double-spaced, so if anyone actually reads it through, I'll be very flattered.  There are seven major doctrines treated: anthropology, eschatology, christology, soteriology, the doctrine of God or Trinitarian theology, pneumatology and ecclesiology, so it may be helpful to just read one at a time.]

THE STORY OF SALVATION

STEPS 1 & 2: THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGICAL HOPE

The Existential Crisis

On July 11, 1995, in Juarez, Mexico, Silvia Morales was reported to be missing.  At age sixteen she was a beautiful young woman and a good student.  She had left home the previous day as usual to work her shift at one of the many U.S. factories (maquiladores) recently built in the commercial aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement.  This time, however, she did not come home.  After months of her mother’s tireless searching and refusal to admit her likely death, local authorities eventually discovered her body.  It was clear from the autopsy that Silvia suffered brutal sexually violation, mutilation and torture before being strangled and left in the desert.  Estimates today suggest that since 1994 thousands of women have been victims of similar crimes in the border state of Chihuahua.  Very few of these cases have been or likely ever will be solved.

1.  Anthropology

It could be said from the perspective of the comfortable and the living that to speculate about the possibility or nature of afterlife is a futile endeavor.  One could posit that fulfillment and meaning in life are best sought by strictly attending to the present, for that is all that can be controlled.  This might be a viable argument if the horror like the one described above in the story about Silvia was fictional (it also might not be a viable argument even then).  Seeing as this is not so, however, one is inclined to suspect otherwise.

The human condition is such that we live with a kind of openness directed toward possibility in the world, always becoming.[i] Unlike animals, human beings have to some degree an undefined nature insofar as we are constantly adapting.  There is present a certain un-development over and against definite instinct.  One might also say, at least culturally speaking, that a process of “creative destruction” takes place, to borrow the term from economics, where old forms are replaced by new ones.

Kathryn Tanner fore example characterizes human nature as such not by sinfulness but as “prewired” for strong participation in the divine life, which renders weak participation doomed for contamination.  Classically speaking, and somewhat in contrast to Tanner, the Augustinian tradition understands humanity to be inherently depraved as a result of “original sin” or self-love.  Other modern theologians have described sin in essence as pride.[ii] David Kelsey defines sin as “distortion of trust in God,” and this is primarily what will be assumed from here onward.[iii] This distortion can result in trusting the identifies given to us by our vocations in the world as opposed to God on the one hand, or “trusting” God to the abandonment of responsibility to a historical situation on the other hand – both are forms of idolatry.  And finally, there is the sin of trusting only oneself.  Though not explicitly naming it sin, this threefold depiction of sin has consensus with Pannenberg who calls trust in finite things a perversion caused by humanity’s desire for control of life.[iv]

Along with this openness or possibility then necessarily follows, in part because of sin, a restlessness, or what different existentialists have termed “angst.”  Pannenberg interprets this to mean that humans are longing for, or even dependent upon something beyond what this world can offer: “What the environment is for animals, God is for humanity.”[v] Such a claim need not be individualistic, however, nor extra-worldly.  In the first place, human beings actually acquire interests and needs from their environment and social setting, and so it would be hasty to submit that one’s configured existence is solely a consequence of preference or choices.  Such is partly the significance of Heidegger’s constitution of Dasein or “being-in-the-world.”  Secondly, Pannenberg argues that “the community that humanity has with God directs humanity back into the world” (italics added).[vi]

Epicurus’ implores us not think about death while living, implying that it would diminish our enjoyment of life.  In a similar vein, Wittgenstein argues that no one experiences death.  Jurgen Moltmann is interested in challenging these claims.  In the first place, and in agreement with Pannenberg, one mustn’t allow thought of life after death to deprive vitality from the present.  Such preoccupation risks “fatalism and apathy,” rendering the here and now empty and merely transitional.[vii] On the other hand, however, Moltmann is confident that “the thought of death and a life after death doesn’t have to deflect us from this life; it can also give this life a new depth.”[viii] Such a depth can enable us to love more fully.  It might be inferred from Moltmann, and Pannenberg as well, that if one is not disturbed by the question of life after death, she is deceived and is rather only suppressing what is a natural yearning.

Furthermore, ignoring every deliberation about death, as Epicurus recommends, is to live under the illusion that life will not end, which is to potentially miss something quite invigorating that comes from the consideration of one’s finitude.  Perhaps no one understood this better than Heidegger:

“What is characteristic about authentic, existentially projected being-toward-death can be summarized as follows: Anticipation reveals to Da-sein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by concern taking care of things, but to be itself in passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself.”[ix]

At the same time, it seems Moltmann would want to depart from Heidegger’s understanding of the experience of death insofar as Heidegger might be construing death to be one’s “ownmost potentiality-of-being” and “nonrelational” in a hyper-individualized or isolated fashion, though there are those who would criticize this reading of Heidegger.[x]

To some degree it is a modern and perhaps Western phenomenon for individuals to conceive of death in these terms.  Moltmann readily reminds us that Eastern cultures like that of Korea or those of Native Americans for instance are aware of the communal experience that is death and the relationship that one maintains with family, ancestors and tribe even afterwards.  Thus, for Moltmann it is appropriate and even beneficial to contemplate how the possibility or hope for life after death might inform and energize the present.  It is important though in Moltmann’s account of Christian eschatology to be mindful of what one actually longs for with desiring life after death.  Moltmann insightfully notes how the popular and in some sense traditional notion of a bodiless, and therefore mindless soul is in reality something rather inconceivable.[xi]

2. Eschatology

Returning to Silvia’s existential crisis, the question inevitably arises once more:  “Are the murderers to triumph irrevocably over their victims?  Can their death be their end?”[xii] In response, Moltmann citing Max Horhemer answers that theology “is the hope . . . that injustice will not be the last word . . . [it is] the expression of a longing that the murderer may not triumph over the innocent victim.”[xiii] This quite natural hope is what prompts Moltmann to accuse those who would “push away the question about the life of the dead” as being “profoundly inhumane.”[xiv] In this same line of thought, and in order to disavow the cynical offering of previous generations as victims on “the altar of the future,” Walter Kasper concurs: “Consequently, unless we are willing to cut hope in half, as it were, and limit it to a future generation and to those who are in the vanguard of progress, our hope must imply the God of hope who gives life to the dead.”[xv] In other words, sincere eschatological hope maintains that every person in history will have the chance to become who God intended her to be.

This hope today is especially born out of a deep concern for those in the third world for instance who far too often die “unnatural, premature, violent, and by no means affirmed death.”[xvi] It calls to mind and invokes the promise that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too shall be resurrected and “bear the image of the heavenly man” with our spiritual bodies, which are not mindless bodies or separated from the soul (1 Cor 15:49, NIV).  It is exactly this assurance in things hoped for but not seen that permits Paul to learn “the secret of being content in any and every situation” (Phil 4:12) and to ask, quoting the prophet Hosea, “Where, O grave is your destruction?”

This belief in further compensation in the life hereafter is not only about redemption for Silvia.  There is a twofold function.  During the postexilic period in the Jewish community and to a degree the concurrent Platonism developing in Greek thought about the immortality of the soul, the idea arose for one to also trust that every individual will “receive what is due according to his or her deeds” (2 Cor 5:10).[xvii] Thus, God’s people also hold out for a final judgment, which is not necessarily to speak of an eternal fate.

The profundity of this anticipation is fortified when compared to the liberal tradition of expecting a realized, humanly constructed and worldly utopia.  But at least two obvious objections can be raised precisely at this point: First, in the postmodern era, how is one to envisage any grounds for sensible faith in such a speculative and arguably triumphal narrative?  Furthermore, doesn’t this kind of conjecture lead down the same devastatingly foundational and world-fleeing path that liberals, skeptics and post-structuralists alike are determined to avoid?  A thoroughgoing apology cannot be carried out here, but I will henceforth attempt to very briefly sketch a theological and expositional vision for a plausible Christian framework that both instantiates what has thus far been proposed and seriously considers these two aforementioned difficulties.

The Hebrew Scriptures testify to both the prophetic and the apocalyptic, which respectively reveal meaning and fulfillment.  In Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom of God, these two culminations (meaning and fulfillment) are historically separated such that one has come (meaning), and the other will come (fulfillment).[xviii] Each end corresponds to two different biblical motifs – meaning with “the suffering servant,” which constitutes the present, and fulfillment with “the Son of man,” which substantiates the future coming.[xix] With this assertion, Reinhold Niebuhr and Moltmann are in agreement that Schweitzer’s conception of Jesus’ ethic being based on the illusion of his proximate return is mistaken. Without the forecast of a new and transformed future, despair is immanent.  Nevertheless, “sin is overcome in principle but not in fact,” so the love of Christ “must continue to be suffering love rather than triumphant love” for now.[xx] We still wait for the day when “He will wipe every tear from their eyes” and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev 21:4).

A complete juxtaposition between “already” and “not yet” however is not appropriate.  There is a sense of a synthesis in which the God’s reigning is dawning.[xxi] But a full realization is not something humanity can bring about politically; rather, it will be a cosmic irruption of God’s initiation.  The injunction to humanity is therefore one for preparedness and a call to decision:[xxii] “The time has come, he said. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15).  Hence, there is a unity between the eschatological and ethical in Jesus’ message, and this is the key to renouncing the liberal contention against proclaiming anything final.  We remember that Paul warns abrasively against idleness (2 Thess 3:11).  In this way, one can depart from a full demythologizing and still say with Bultmann himself that, “fulfillment of God’s will is the condition for participation in the salvation of His Reign.”[xxiii] Christians, conscious of their spiritual poverty (Matt 5:3), are to be liberated by grace from the grip of “superficiality and love of self and the world,” or sin, and empowered to embark on the impossible task of living like Christ as “merciful, pure of heart, and peace-making.”[xxiv]

Ultimately, never straying too far from Silvia’s predicament and the guilt of her perpetrators – the charge for sanctification and spiritual rebirth notwithstanding – the belief remains for God’s principle aim to be that of justice: “to put right what has gone awry, finish what was begun, pick up what was neglected, forgive the trespasses, heal the hurts, and be permitted to gather up the moment of happiness and to transform mourning into joy.”[xxv] If Silvia represents “the poor” defined broadly (Matt 5:1), then the pronouncement of the kingdom of God is not opposed merely to “the rich”, but those who make themselves rich at the expense of the poor.  Moltmann uses the phrase “the man of violence.”[xxvi] These oppressors are called to “change and seek liberating community with the poor if they are to be included as citizens of the kingdom.”[xxvii]

This kingdom Jesus brings is already solidified in the future, which means the status of the oppressed changes eschatologically [some text missing here].

Pannenberg on the other hand, while having much in common with Moltmann, lands faintly more on the side of openness to the future kingdom, indicating greater significance in what has not yet been disclosed.[xxxii] The character of God and the legitimacy of the entire Christian faith hang on the coming consummation of an unrealized, ontological priority of the future that must entail a new creation of the entire cosmos, when God will be all in all.[xxxiii] Thus, despite the fully present potential reality of the kingdom of God since Jesus’ ministry, Moltmann and Pannenberg both present what is truly a theology of hope.

STEPS 3 & 4: CHRISTOLOGY AND SOTERIOLOGY: THE “HOW” OF ESCHATOLOGY

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. – Colossians 1:15-20

In light of the existential crisis of Silvia and the subsequent eschatological hope, from the Christian perspective one must now introduce a christology and soteriology almost simultaneously that coheres with the heretofore anthropological underpinnings. This is the third and fourth step together in the systematic progression that reaches the peak or center of the theological chiasm before descending back “down” toward the first doctrine.

3. Christology

The three offices of Christ as described by Thomas Torrance make for an excellent place of departure for a rough christological outline.  First, and most fittingly in view of Silvia, Christ assumes the role of prophet.  For Torrance the prophetic offices implies an incarnational assumption that has ontological consequences.  God became human through the hypostatic union, by what Athanasius called homoousion, and “was pleased to have his fullness dwell” in Christ.  Incarnation and atonement are inseparable, as Gregory of Nyssa claimed.  This phenomenon and breaking in or rupturing of God in history creates a new ontological horizon in an eternal present.  This is the logos made flesh as poetically illustrated in John’s prologue.  The divine act of love, humility, and self-emptying, from the hymn in the second chapter of Philippians, provides the initial performative act which establishes that solidarity between God and humanity that Silvia’s situation requires, such that she could reply:

“Away from me, all you who do evil, for the LORD has heard my weeping.
The LORD has heard my cry for mercy;
the LORD accepts my prayer.
All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish;
They will turn back and suddenly be put to shame.” (Psalm 6:8-9).

The second office is that of the priest which “corresponds to the passive obedience of Christ, his submission to the Father’s judgment and his self-offering in sacrifice for our sins.”[xxxiv] The priestly function can be abused and misrepresented when the absorption of God’s wrath by the Son’s propitiation of sin is overemphasized.  This language is not absent from the New Testament, but a careful study of the Jewish sacrificial system can reveal possible alternative interpretations.  The violence against Silvia cannot be redeemed with more violence.  The passive obedience of Christ is a submission and non-violent protest to the violence of the world that would crucify the innocent victim or commit the atrocity against human dignity endured by Silvia.  In the work on the cross, Jesus condemns oppression, hatred, hypocrisy, and all kinds of evil.  In this respect the event is indeed a severe judgment on humanity’s failure to depend on and trust God, which can have terrible repercussions.

Thirdly Christ occupies the throne as king.  In some manner his reign has not yet come to the full fruition that the apocalypse foretells, but he nevertheless actively obeyed God, with subtle distinction from the passive priestly obedience, by conquering death in the resurrection and ascending to “the right hand of God,” which symbolizes the completion of incarnation by the return to glory. One has confidence in this event supplied by the testimony of the disciples and the early church, and most powerfully by the voice of the martyrs.  This third piece of the triplex munus (threefold office of Christ) is what most saves, but not without the other two parts enabling it. [xxxv] Thinking the three together gives a far richer comprehension of the atonement than by merely noting the various theories in themselves: exemplary, satisfaction/ransom, christus victor, penal substitution, and incarnation).[xxxvi] In sum, Christ shares in Silvia’s suffering, he judges her violator, and he raises her to new life.

4. Soteriology: The Climax

The soteriological outcome can be easily and similarly derived from this Christological portrait if thought in terms of three dimensions as well.  Firstly, “By grace through faith” in Christ’s action we are saved (past tense) – “not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph 2:8). In the second place, the “already accomplished” facilitates a saving or being saved that is worked out presently in “fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12) leaving no room for assurance to produce lethargy.  The first level of theory informs the second level of praxis, but both are reaching together for something more that has not arrived.  Further still one awaits the third level of the ever-elusive parousia, the coming of the basileia that will shatter every horizon, about and by which the children of God can confess “we will be delivered” (Dan 12:1).

I cannot help but suspect, without certainty, however, that the second two depend on the first – not for proof – but for deep coherence.  If Jesus isn’t the resurrected Christ, who in some definite sense overpowered death, then the naysayers might be right.  He would be another prophet, and maybe even the greatest, but not God incarnate.  Hope for Silvia fades in this view.  How could we ever expect our own resurrection?  This does not mean one should attempt to empirically verify the event, but to say that it doesn’t matter or that it’s a distraction, as some have, is devastating to this particular eschatology.

Along with Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Luke Timothy Johnson, and in contrast to Jesus Seminar leaders John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, Terrance Tilley asserts that, “it is unwarranted for historians to separate the historical-Jesus from the movement that remembered and imitated him in its distinctive practices.”[xxxvii] So “whatever one thinks of the historicity of the resurrection, followers of Jesus were convinced that their experiences of seeing him after his death grounded their devotion to him.”[xxxviii]

Another matter remains.  It is not sufficient to merely put forth what, how, and why Christ saves without exploring the “who” question – one that has plagued the Christian community since its inception.  It will be helpful to turn attention once more to Moltmann.  Regarding the notion that individual salvation is determined by every person’s decision in response to an invitation for faith, Moltmann answers:

Is this theologically conceivable?  Can some people damn themselves, and others redeem themselves by accepting Christ?  If this were so, God’s decisions would be dependent on the will of human beings.  God would become the auxiliary who executes the wishes of people who decide their fate for themselves.  If I can damn myself, I am my own God and judge.  Taken to a logical conclusion this is atheistic.[xxxix]

Here in response I wish to express both appreciation and dissatisfaction.  To be sure it might seem asinine at first to postulate that human beings are given so much freedom in their futility to solidify their own fate, which at this time might be best summarily condensed to one of either communion with God or separation from God.  Before expounding on the implications of Moltmann’s statement, a succinct elaboration on the concept of justification will facilitate the discussion.  Karl Barth understood that reconciliation happens first with God’s judgment upon the sinner, achieved by Christ’s death, and is followed by the verdict of this judgment, which is announced in the resurrection – this is the process by which humanity is justified.[xl] N.T. Wright, relying heavily on Alister McGrath, introduces it thusly: “the heart of the Christian faith in found in ‘the saving action of God toward mankind in Jesus Christ.’”[xli] He goes on to argue that there are a number of biblical metaphors to reference how God saves people through Christ, but none should be elevated about the others.  Some might say this was the overreaction of the Reformers.  McGrath himself as a reformed theologian concedes:

The “doctrine of justification” has come to bear a meaning within dogmatic theology which is quite independent of its Pauline origins, so that even if it could be shown that it plays a minimal role in Pauline soteriology, or that its origins lie in an anti-Judaism polemic quite inappropriate to the theological circumstances today, its significance would not be diminished as a result.

In an extremely terse treatment of the text, a key to the puzzle, or better said, mystery of salvation is found in a proper exegesis of Galatians where Paul addresses the problems caused by ethnic and cultural discrimination in a church of both Jews and Gentiles.  Works of the law are not what justify – this much is clear.  But what are the works of the law?  Abruptly understood, these works include “living like a Jew” and the separation from “Gentile sinners” in Galatians 2:14-15).[xlii] Reading Paul in this context,

We are forced to conclude, at least in a preliminary way, that “to be justified,” here does not mean “to be granted free forgiveness of your sins,” “to come into right relationship with God” or some other near synonym of “to be reckoned ‘in the right’ before God,” but rather, and very specifically, “to be reckoned by God to be a true member of his family, and hence with the right to share table fellowship.

This statement does not refute nor undermine Ephesians 2:8-9.  What it does do is liberate us from hegemonic hermeneutics, just as with the varying atonement theories or offices held by Christ; and what one does have is a plurality of word pictures and allegorical passages that bear witness to an incomprehensible truth.  Thus I’ve conveyed my appreciation for Moltmann’s suspicion about individual salvation above, but now I aim to articulate what I think is deficient in his remarks.

As long as Scripture in its whole is thoroughly reliable and authoritative – divergent interpretation notwithstanding, and even with other resources for hermeneutics like tradition, reason, and experience – one cannot in good conscience presume universal salvation. Universalism as dogma is reckless.  Rather, like Hans Urns von Balthasar, one can only dare to hope that all humanity be saved.  And just to clarify, “an absolutely firm conviction of the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ need not undermine the truth of other religions.”[xliii] The warnings to evildoers throughout Scripture, however, are too numerous to ignore.  In my view the canonization of universalism, though far from the most threatening of deviations, inescapably disseminates complacency toward the responsibility of sharing the good news of the gospel and inviting others to participate in God’s mission of “reconciling all things” to God’s self.[xliv]

Concerning the human being’s response to God, Kasper says revelation exists in human, historical mediation so that the message is not concerned with theoretical speculation but is a “practical message of judgment because it ultimately says that man has no power over the mystery of God either through knowledge or through action.”[xlv] God confers revelation in order to evoke a decision from people.  Faith, therefore, is not a sheer momentary act of emotion, volition or comprehension, but encompasses all of these powers through an on-going choice and a “comprehensive mode of existing.”[xlvi] As this pertains to individual salvation, there is faint disparity between Kasper and Motlmann.

About the earliest Christians, the post-liberal theologian George Linbeck insightfully notices an “extraordinary combination of relaxation and urgency in their attitude toward those outside the church.”[xlvii] Without yet delving into ecclesiology, the “world mission” of Christians should be likewise.  Again, if one trusts God, both peace and exigency will rule – peace to believe God is just, and exigency to carry out the Great Commission by making disciples “as you go” (Matt 28:19).  The aim of outreach is not conversion but mutual understanding and transformation, but this does not prohibit extending an invitation to others to come, to lay down their lives life, and follow Jesus.  When it comes to interacting with other faith traditions, Moltmann decries any attempt to adhere to general pluralism and is representative of the view that “dialogue with other religions is not helped if Christians relativize that which is distinctively Christian.”[xlviii] Any comprehensively constructed theology today must confront the problem posed by religious pluralism, which is beyond the allotted scope here.  Suffice to say very inconclusively, however, that, as Moltmann insinuates, the God of Jesus Christ is merciful.

The end goal of a christological soteriology then is not the punishment of the man who killed Silvia, however unspeakable his deed.  His act was caught up in a whole web of violence.  No clear lines can be drawn from our perspective, demarcating the sheep from the goats and the wheat from chaff: “Judge not, or you too will be judged” (Matt 7:1).  In the words of H. Richard Niebuhr about Christ,

“his work is concerned not with the specious, external aspects of human behavior in the first place, but that he tries the hearts and judges the subconscious life; that he deals with what is deepest and most fundamental in man.  He heals the most stubborn and virulent human disease, the phthisis of the spirit, the sickness unto death; he forgives the most hidden and proliferous sin, the distrust, lovelessness, and hopelessness of man in his relation to God.”[xlix]

STEP 5: THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AND APOPHATIC CHRISTOCENTRICISM

Once more drawing for the christological praise song in Paul’s letter to Colossians, one sees that “the Son is the eikona of the invisible God,” the image or icon by which we are able to say anything about the nature of the first person of the Trinity.  As Ian McFarland admits, “the iconodule argument that the incarnation creates a situation in which the whole material realm to be pressed into the service of imaging God would appear to suggest that genuine knowledge of God is now a universal human possibility.”[l] For this reason, McFarland advocates an apophatic christocentricism,[li] but this does not get divorced from the original existential crisis.  One knows already what the Pentateuch has professed: “The Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deut 31:6).  The Minor Prophets declare: “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2); and “The Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished” (Nah 1:3) as the God who liberates slaves.  Thus again even before the time of Christ the Jewish people acknowledged that Yahweh is faithful to the covenant and will both rescue Silvia and repay her attacker what is due him.

But God had not yet come.  The Spirit of God was there in the beginning (Gen 1:2), but she both came upon and forsook (2 Chron 24:20).  When Moses led the Israelites from Egypt out of bondage, she was powerfully present.  When Joshua commanded his armies to slaughter, she fled.  How can one say this? – Only by the ministry of Jesus which is the complete Revelation of this age, in whom God was pleased to fully dwell – our apophasis.  In this way he fulfilled Torah by surpassing it: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:43-45).  What is God like?  The answer, in a word, is Christ.  In a brilliant essay responding to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology, Kathryn Tanner disagrees with Marion’s apophatic depiction of Christ and, depending on a close reading of Cappadocian Fathers like Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, offers an alternative:

In Christ, humanity is exalted to its own full glory-Christ has a glorified humanity-by virtue of the fact that this human being is one with the second person of the Trinity. Finally, according to the account I am offering, the beauty and glory of the human form need not rival God’s, since God is the giver of it. Therefore God’s work is not done in the disfiguring of Christ-his beating, his scourging-that, for Marion, allows Christ’s humanity to become an icon referring attention entirely away from itself and only to the Father.[lii]

Embracing apophatic christocentrism permits a higher view of other religious icons (the Buddha, Mary, Krishna, Muhammad, and so on), but the Christian must concretely know God as the one who unbridles the chains of injustice and heals the broken, which was foretold in Isaiah and manifested in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.  Thus, Tanner’s critique is duly noted.  Moreover, a devotion to Jesus then doesn’t have to contradict central tenants of Judaism.[liii] The same Spirit present in Jesus was always living and active.  In Christ “the prophet of Sophia [is] recognized as incarnating Wisdom who teaches the members of the movement not what is wise but how to exercise wisdom in practice . . . empower[ing] them to become creative and graceful reconciling agents of the commonweal divine”:[liv]

“For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of [the Lord's] goodness. Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.” – Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-28

Without reducing her to Wisdom since this is also the divine Logos residing in Christ, the doctrine of the Triune God emerges with the action of God’s Spirit as the wooing and sanctifying agent of love in the present world.[lv] As Gustaf Aulen tells us through Irenaeus, “it is God Himself who enters into the world of sin and death for man’s deliverance, to take up the conflict with the powers of evil and effect atonement between Himself and the world.”[lvi] Balthsar speaks of God’s impassible suffering, a paradox that both conveys God’s immanence while guarding against anthropomorphic tendencies.  Perhaps it was best captured by Gregory of Nyssa when he spoke of “the lofty stoop[ing] to the lowly without losing its loftiness.”[lvii] Nonetheless, when it comes to God, because Jesus Christ is not exhaustive of God to us, we see now only dimly, returning to apophasis (1 Cor 13:12); but this same passage about love also signifies, as does the Johannine canon, that God is love, analogically.

Love evokes doxology.  It mystifies, and is not grasped or achieved in full.  So it is with God.  The language of praise and prayer and the proliferation of divine names in response to the revealed account of God in the tradition, in the Scriptures, in humanity’s finite reason and the experience of the Christian community through the centuries, becomes worship – worship because, to repeat, Silvia is set free, and what has gone awry will be restored to its original purpose, which is strong participation for the whole cosmos in the Divine life and communion with all of creation in God’s infinite freedom.[lviii]

What this love also does, however – intense as it is – necessitates the introduction of a third constituent of divine triadic unity as alluded to above with reference to Sophia.[lix]

This unicity of essence implies and includes the unicity of one single consciousness and one single freedom, although of course the unicity of one self-presence in consciousness and freedom in the divine Trinity remains determined by that mysterious threeness which we profess about God when we speak haltingly of the Trinity of persons in God.[lx]

An intricate elaboration on the doctrine of the immanent Holy Trinity, or “the inner life of God completely unrelated to us and to our Christian existence,” is unhelpful once the apophatic and mystical nature of God the Father is introduced.[lxi] This is what Karl Rahner calls the absolute holy mystery.  Consequently, one can deduce, as with Rahner and Tanner and in slight disagreement with Kasper, that for all intents and purposes, the economic Trinty is the immanent Trinity: “The psychological theory of the Trinity neglects the experience of the Trinity in the economy of salvation in favor of a seemingly almost gnostic speculation about what goes on in the inner life of God.”[lxii] Tanner too intends her own theology to function starting from what is most visible in Christ as the Word incarnate, which exhibits the general pattern of relationship with the other members of the Trinity.[lxiii]

STEP 6: PNEUMATOLOGY

“God presents himself to us little bit little.  The whole story of salvation is the story of God who comes.” – Carlo Carretto

Concerning the third agent, Ives Congar explains that “the action of the paraclete consists in urging the world to recognize its fault and to confess its guilt.”[lxiv] Never by encroaching on their freedom, the Holy Spirit guides and directs individuals in a subtle but sovereign fashion toward relationship with God by inviting repentance.[lxv] The Holy Spirit is the “immanent and anonymous presence of God.”[lxvi] God spoke through Ezekiel saying, “I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezek 11:19b).  The path of contrition is maneuvered by “walking according to the Spirit” (Gal 5:16), and the Spirit is “the principle of interior personal sanctification.”[lxvii] The fruit in the lives of all people and wherever there is holiness or purity of heart – the Spirit is the source.   The “already” and “not yet” age of the Spirit pulls and propels creation forward to the coming of the Kingdom of God.[lxviii]

Among the many telling biblical examples of this transforming process occurring are those of the Roman centurion Cornelius’ conversion (Acts 10) and Zacchaeus the tax collector (Luke 19).  In the context of the latter narrative, Zacchaeus’ occupation in society was deeply entrenched in an exploitative and massively suppressive system of cruelty.  In the instance when Congar mentions this account, injustice and sin are used interchangeably.  Needless to say, Zacchaeus was a sinner, maybe not unlike the modern-day, corrupt Wall Street banker, dishonest lobbyist, or illegal arms and narcotics cartel leader – all of which are roles played by those complicit with the brutalities like the one that Silvia faced.

Similar to “posture of the heart” evidenced by the second thief on the cross, when Zacchaeus climb the tree to see Jesus, he becomes like “the man who knows how poor he is and who rejects all pride and self-sufficiency, even the pride of rags, the man who stands before God in his nakedness and his need – [and] that man knows the miracles of love and mercy, from the consolation of the heart and the illumination of the spirit to the allaying of hunger and thirst.”[lxix] When we cry out for help, it the Spirit that responds by bearing witness to our spirits that we are the children of God.  Even the sinners and tax collectors received mercy from Jesus.  Indeed, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom 10:13), but this is not a formula; nor does it take place in the economy of exchange.  The thief on the cross could not have known that Jesus was going to be raised from the dead.  He had no awareness of the creeds.  What distinguished him from the first man was he “feared God” like Cornelius.  Jesus tells him they will be together in paradise.  Nothing is mentioned about the fate of the first man, however, so the message is not one of exclusion.

The Spirit is “at the deepest level the longing that impels us toward God and causes us to end in him.”[lxx] Moreoever, Gregory of Nazianzus refers to a “gradual progress of the revelation of the mystery of God through the Old Testament to the New and in Christian reflection itself,” which both unifies and diversifies its manifestations.[lxxi] Identification of the Spirit’s work is rendered an ambiguous task in a limited sense.  On this idea, Congar and Kasper agree that one cannot point and say where it is (Luke 17:21).[lxxii] The Holy Spirit as comforter “will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13-14).  Paul echoes Jesus by instructing his listeners to be taught by the Spirit (1 Cor 2:12-14), which depends and strengthens the faith of disciples.[lxxiii] Sometimes it is a “still, small voice” (1 Kgs 19:12), while in other cases the Spirit intercedes and prays for us in our weakness with groaning (Rom 8:26).[lxxiv]

The Spirit administers gifts to each person in the Church (1 Cor 12, Rom 12, Eph 4, 1 Pet 4), the purpose of which is the edification and building up of its members.  With respect to Church, which will receive more acute treatment below, the Holy Spirit animates the body of Christ, which is the Church. Where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church.[lxxv] In this way, the church can be identified, but one should be cautious before delimiting where it is not.[lxxvi] Those in whom Christ dwells by the power of the Holy Spirit can undergo theosis or deification, and the Spirit gathers together everything that is tending toward God.[lxxvii]

STEP 7: AN ECCLESIOLOGY TO PROCLAIM, SIGNIFY AND TRANFORM

In her book, Discipleship of Equals, Schussler Fiorenza draws on J. Paul Sampley’s translation of the word koinonia or communion as “shared partnership and commitment,” and such consensual partnership is operative as long as the partners are of the “same mind” as when it was founded in the first place.  The common purpose and commitment of all Christians is . . .the witness to ‘the mystery of God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.’”[lxxviii] This definition corresponds closely with how Roger Haight through Schleiermacher construes the Church: “the institutionalization of the community of people who, animated by the Spirit of God, live in the faith that Jesus is the Christ of God.  The mission of the church is to continue and expand Jesus’ message in history.”[lxxix] In this first respect respect, the church makes proclamation.

Moreover though, the Church is not merely obliged to proclaim. The Church is instilled with the prophetic task of both criticism and construction, internally and externally in the process of change.[lxxx] It must be willing to “shake off the ambiguous protection provided by the beneficiaries of the unjust order.”[lxxxi] Whether in protest by means of a powerful witness to an alternative community (Acts 2) or direct participation in the creation of a more just society – it will depend on the church and its particular circumscription – the church has a duty as the body of Christ to participate in the transformational of both individuals and culture.  In both cases, it is required that the Church maintains solidarity with those who suffer from misery and deprivation,[lxxxii] and this solidarity means that we make ours their problems and their struggles.”[lxxxiii] Roger Haight defends the need for the church’s inculturation for precisely an end such as this; and inculturation for Haight does not connote assimilation, which precludes reducing ecclesiology to the sociopolitical realm.[lxxxiv] The enterprise of inculturation involves and names the church’s second operation as a sacrament, or visible sign of an invisible reality (Augustine).

This call to be poor is extended most expressly to church leaders, which means at times they will be expected to demonstrate the same manner of subversive, peaceful action against systemic violence that Jesus epitomized.  More recently one need only look to compelling martyrdom account of God’s servant Bishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador.  Unfair wages and exploitation, for instance, make up a sinful situation that offends God.  If the Church is the temple of the Holy Spirit, like the bodies of believers (the Kingdom of God is within you!), the practical significance of clergy lifestyle cannot be emphasized enough.  A proper testimony to the contemporary world demands a restructuring of the financial dependency of clergy on the people they serve. Gustavo Gutierrez advises those who do not wish live on stipends or from teaching religion should be willing to experiment with healthy, secular jobs.[lxxxv] This is just one tangible route by which the Church can fulfill its third assignment, which is to be a medium for transformation.

For this reason, despite its consistency with New Testament apocalyptic literature, an ecclesiology that rests wholly on eschatology with an “ontological priority of the future” is not satisfactory for the third world.[lxxxvi] What this crucial qualifier discloses is that even a very balanced, dialectical theology of both/and or already/not yet tensions is contextual, and insufficient as a universal system.  As Haight affirms, there is no one New Testament model for church polity.[lxxxvii] This is not to say, however, that just any system can stand.  Even Gustavo Gutierrez himself does not reduce eschatology and salvation purely the socio-political sphere; nor does he renounce the necessity of separation between Church and state.  Different faith communities will inevitably and predictably be persuaded at times to stress one of the three roles of Christ (prophet, priest and king) over and against the others depending on context.  As such, a system protecting against the extremes may still be the best system, insofar as systems remain useful.

This is why Haight emphasizes in his ecclesiology the tension between unity and plurality, ideals and actualities; between community and institution, charism and office, progressive and conservative forces, continuity and change, and even history and eschatology as in Moltmann.[lxxxviii] Therefore, an Anabaptist Congregationalist church in North America can sustain partial communion with a socially liberal Catholic church in Argentina.  Different churches can administer the sacraments in different styles and still keep fellowship with one another.  “One baptism” can consist of various forms of Baptism.

However, considering what liberation theology has taught us, hierarchy poses a latent threat and impediment to liberation for Silvia – the importance of ecumenism notwithstanding, it is defensible that grassroots and democratic movements have historically been more effective than top-down, institutionalized enforcement of policy for social change.  Thus it may be that a criterion even for partial communion should be implemented entailing the expectation of more equitable governance in churches than has been traditional typified in many denominations.  Furthermore, such equitable standards today would not only need to transcend clergy and laity lines, but obviously break down divisions between gender, sexual, and racial barriers as well to establish a genuine priesthood of all believers.[lxxxix] Church leaders can have authority without hierarchical power, which parallels the Congar’s account of the Church as “no longer defined in terms of its priesthood, consisting of priests carrying out their task with lay people as their ‘clients’.  Instead it is seen as community that is being built up by the brotherly contributions made by all its members.”[xc]

There is a weakness with this recommendation though, for who would be in charge of enforcing church guidelines beyond local boundaries without some kind of hierarchical structure?  It is true: “the local church is not a freestanding, self-sufficient reality.”[xci] There are no easy solutions here, and like Moltmann’s eschatology, Haight’s approach may be the best that has come forward – the balance between community and institution in particular, and living out of the theological and ecclesiological tensions themselves in general.  In Haight’s ecclesial vision, cooperation replaces competition.  As Schleiermacher insists, diversity does not imply division.[xcii] Further, ecclesial existence for Haight is equated with communitarian existence.  In an important albeit restricted sense, community is the mission.[xciii] There are other foundational elements, or features and practices that comprise ecclesial existence, like gathering for worship and prayer and the hearing of the Word.[xciv] And in order to preserve its holiness, which is another key trait, the Church must constantly be renewed by the Spirit.  This happens through repentance and confession.

Again, a principle charge for today’s church will be that made by Congar: “A sound and critical rejection of any form of ecclesiolatry should find its place within an immense, deep and warm love of the Church, and experience has shown that such a love is very favourable to a life of prayer and praise.”[xcv] In one sense contextual, and in another sense, universal, by the power of the Holy Spirit and in the service of Christ the King, the Church assumes the role as both Silvia’s advocate for healing and justice and the administrator of forgiveness and grace for guilty sinners in the world.

(This is my second formal paper submission this fall and first one for a class called “Studies in Systematic Theology” with Philip Clayton – it’s 12 pages and not really “blog entry friendly” just to warn those who aren’t interested in reading a lengthy post!)

WALTER KASPER: A CLASH WITH SUSPICION

The challenge raised by modern atheism has no doubt been recognized by Christians everywhere at least to some extent.  One could argue that, by and large, theology seems to have been stripped of its power to speak to people today.[i] The church has attempted to respond in a variety of ways.  Oftentimes the effort is made by means of strictly positive, analytical apologetics (somewhat ironically in the current anti-foundational, post-structural setting),[ii] as if God were merely an idea or concept to be grasped and proven.  Cardinal Walter Kasper however is fully aware that such an approach to theology is futile at best and the most ignorant kind of idolatry at worst.  He asserts that “God’s freedom-in-love in the form of a gratuitous self-communication would in fact be annulled if it could be shown to be rationally necessary.”[iii]

Kasper’s rigorous work in The God of Jesus Christ illustrates his ability as an expert synthesizer to take the reader through the criticisms of the Christian faith offered by modern and post-Enlightenment thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche,[iv] followed by a comprehensive walk through the history of the development of the doctrines on the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It is a journey through the Ecumenical Councils and the writings of the Church Fathers along with attention to twentieth century thinking in biblical criticism, the feminist movement, and the theologies of Rahner and Barth.  Kasper concludes the book by spelling out a specifically Trinitarian theology as the only true proclamation of the Christian God.

Despite the problem posed by those declaring the death of God, and despite the insufficiency of reason and words as finite structures to exhaust or define God, Kasper hardly relinquishes – far from it in fact.  Rather than committing sacrificium intellectus by resorting to some form of blind or irrational fideism, he is convinced that God can nevertheless be confessed in praise, in grounded (revealed) mystery, as the reality that includes all else, as triune, and as the God of Jesus Christ.  Conveying a classical, dialectical character in his doctrine, Kasper successfully avoids the fatal flaws of overly mystifying God on the one hand and reducing God to a proposition on the other.[v] Indeed, while there is always a risk in striving to conceive of God solely on the basis of what is (Heidegger),[vi] there is an equally grave danger with post-metaphysical God-talk of blurring the lines between theism and agnosticism.  If one wishes to elicit a wise silence about God, then it will nonetheless be necessary to determine something about what this silence says.[vii] So while God is incomprehensible and not situated on the ontological continuum of Being, Kasper knows that now more than ever are Christians responsible for demonstrating a scrupulous reasonableness about the faith – not to give an answer, but instead to add profundity to both the God question and the Trinitarian confession.[viii]

Having extended a similar critique of Feuerbach, Kasper states that, “the defects of the Marxist interpretation of religion are due, among other things, to the fact that Marx nowhere expressly analyses the phenomenon of religion in itself but a priori reduces it to economic and political functions.”[ix] As a result, like Freud, Marx is guilty of overlooking the possibility that atheism too could be the result of wishful thinking.[x] Concerning Nietzsche, Kasper observes that his attempt to locate eternity in the present life as opposed to a life beyond this one only eternalizes meaninglessness – the reality that Nietzsche’s nihilism knew so well.[xi] In a persuasive endeavor to take advantage of what Kasper identifies as a major weakness in Nietzsche’s insightful analysis of human nature, Kasper understands the historical hope of humanity to essentially be one for justice – justice not only for those of us living now or in the future, as that would be only a very feeble hope, but for all of the fallen before us in addition.  Without this hope (and he is careful not to call it a certainty), Kasper believes the case for faith to be senseless.  And yet, the hiddenness of God demands that Kasper not settle with a merely historical-philosophical argument.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND ITS BOUNDARIES

A truly theological theology preserves the Godness of God not by abstraction but precisely by locating the image of God in the concrete, historically revealed Christ, and the communication of God in the present work of the Holy Spirit, giving humanity the perfect freedom and fullness of life it seeks.  It is also through this process that the mystery of God’s self-emptying and self-revealing nature is disclosed by an absolute freedom-in-love; namely, the radical love that is God.  God acts exactly to have communion with humanity even as humanity “is in quest of signs in which the absolute mystery of an unconditioned freedom addresses [humanity] and communicates itself”[xii] to people in the world.  In this way, Kasper’s soteriological and Trinitarian doctrine of God is not without an implied anthropology.  This “absolute mystery” and “perfect, unconditioned freedom” that Kasper speaks of is one that humanity actually “pre-apprehends.”[xiii] The human being is the one “who lives in the presence of the infinite mystery and who waits and hopes for the free self-revelation of this mystery.”[xiv]

While it was mentioned above that Kasper regards God as the reality which determines everything and in which everyone participates, citing Wolfhart Pannenberg, Kasper boldly admits that such a reality must even now “be substantiated by the experienced reality of man and the world.”[xv] Thus, while God is wholly and qualitatively other in essence (substantia), existing without contingency, Kasper’s doctrine of God does depend in a sense on the possibility of contemporary application.  This is exactly what obliges him to proclaim that “precisely because dogmas are true they are in constant need of new interpretation.”[xvi] At the same time, one can also say with Kasper that “knowledge of God . . . presupposes illumination by the truth which is God,”[xvii] and so his approach is at once anthropological and theological, resulting perhaps from an effort to hold the two in tension.  Furthermore, with the following contention one can see that while Kasper acknowledges many arguments from below in anthropological fashion (his theodicy for example), he does so from the starting place of fides quaerens intellectum (Augustine, Anselm), or with the “reason of the heart” (Pascal), making the whole of his theology still a project from above: “It is therefore possible for theology to develop the anthropological relevance of what it says only if it remains theology and does not turn into anthropology.”[xviii] Someone like Pannenberg is alternatively more comfortable with anthropology.

SOTERIOLOGY AND ITS MYSTERY

Kasper relies on anthropology, as one can now see, not for empirical verification but to bear witness to the revealed mystery that is the saving truth of God’s “turning to us” in unreserved grace and love.[xix] The culminating event wherein this disclosure is made manifest occurs with the death and resurrection of the Son, the consequence of which is the reigning of the kingdom of God in the present aeon. Proceeding in apologetic prose, Kasper traces the language of suffering love back to the Greek Fathers of the Church and relies upon Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen to support the claim that God suffered with Jesus on the cross.  For Kasper, such an assertion exonerates God of blame for the suffering in the world.

Though Kasper does not explicitly espouse or develop a tidy theory of atonement here, an erudite volume such as this one on the doctrine of the Christian Godhead inevitably leaves remnants for the reader to piece together.  It is necessary to consider what Kasper might say in full about Christ’s atoning work in order to both educe a more comprehensive soteriology and make a comparison below.  About this one can notice that Kasper seems to want humanity’s justification to be non-violent in nature.[xx] Perfect obedience and weakness are part and parcel of what is accomplished in Jesus’ death.  Despite this, however, as a Catholic cardinal, Kasper does elicit ransom speech and even suggests that the cross is the very purpose of the incarnation.

In response to God’s saving will and saving action, human beings, suspended between the infinite and the finite in the search for freedom, must open themselves to the truth of this mysterious self-revelation of God and, inspired and assisted by grace, believe – not because the “natural light of reason” has made the “inner truth of things” known, but because of the authority of God’s revealing self.[xxi] The revelation exists in human, historical mediation so that the message is not concerned with theoretical speculation but is a “practical message of judgment because it ultimately says that man has no power over the mystery of God either through knowledge or through action.”[xxii] God confers revelation in order to evoke a decision from people.  Faith, therefore, is not a sheer momentary act of emotion, volition or comprehension, but encompasses all of these powers through an on-going choice and a “comprehensive mode of existing.”[xxiii] In Kasper’s estimation, the revelation of the mystery of God is essentially and decisively the revelation of the mystery of humanity’s salvation.  In light of this very mystery, soteriology becomes doxology,[xxiv] and is professed in faith as the revelatory and saving action of God the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit who gives absolute freedom and love.

HUMAN NATURE AND SIN FOR KATHRYN TANNER

Plainly working from a completely different starting point than that of Kasper, the Protestant and feminist theologian Kathryn Tanner begins her Christological exposition from a fairly a-historical perspective.  While she relies heavily on the Cappadocian Fathers (Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa in particular), the veracity of the tradition is merely presupposed for the purpose of an artful and almost playful experiment with the usefulness of the Christian faith.  If the Trinity is the hermeneutic for Kasper, Christ is the key for Tanner, and the Christ of the hypostatic union at that.  Assuming Jesus saves, or more accurately, justifies human beings primarily by means of the incarnation, Tanner seeks to answer other questions about human nature, sin, grace and the Trinity through the same interpretive filter.

In Tanner’s view, human nature is not innately flawed (here she differs from many other Protestants).  She says instead that humans are “neutral” (neither corrupt or nor predisposed to God) in this regard but as a consequence highly malleable and open.  Designed for strong participation in the divine life, human beings will inevitably venture astray when detached from relationship with God through Christ.  This participation is akin in some measure to what Pannenberg calls humanity’s destiny to participate in God’s eternal presence.[xxv] Nothing about humanity naturally lends itself toward seeking God, however.  Contra Kasper in some respect, grace does not merely assist or guide people further along in the right direction.  Even if grace is absolutely necessary for salvation as both Catholics and Protestants affirm, this grace in Tanner’s mind is performing a far more radical transformation in the way that human beings are subsequently able to live.  Said differently, and in this respect allied with Kasper, Tanner following Saint Thomas emphasizes the categorical disparity between the essence of God and creation (Tanner and Kasper both depart from, however, the Thomistic or mostly Aristotelian confidence in reason for knowledge of natural law).  Grace therefore is made available because God dwells in human flesh with Christ making visible the incomprehensibility of God.  Even Christ’s perfect imaging itself of the divine nature incomprehensible.  As a result of humanity’s strong participation made possible only by the advent of the second person of the Trinity, human beings too can experience the sanctification that leads to this incomprehensible nature.  As a kind of “Christian version of the basically Platonic understanding of participation . . . all that derives from a perfect exemplar for that reason approximates it.”[xxvi] Nonetheless, the imaging of the divine by those who are not participating in Christ is quite weak.  One could even say that there is really no imaging happening at all in this case.  Strictly by merit of being a creature, however, people have intrinsic value that still appoints them to be participants in a faint sense.[xxvii] It is necessary for Tanner to stress this weakness in order for grace to be bestowed upon the world in spite of the absence of a desire for God.

JUSTIFICATION BY GRACE

Like Kasper, for Tanner the Holy Spirit has a critical role to play, but rather than applying what the imminent Trinity may or may not tell us about politics (unlike Moltmann, Volf, Boff, etc.), again, Christ is the key.  As with later statements in the book about the Trinitarian Life, Tanner asserts early on that, “By virtue of that Spirit within us, we come to lead informed lives in imitation of him.”[xxviii] Thus, “In being attached to Christ, we gain the power of the Spirit to renovate our lives,[xxix]” so justification takes precedence over sanctification.

By this attachment to Christ, human beings are justified because of what Christ is (righteousness) and not because of what we are.  For this reason, nothing about humanity in and of itself has to change in order to be justified.[xxx] God forgives through Christ’s emptying of equality with God and lowering himself to the status of an obedient servant, subjugated to the waywardness and rejection of society.  One could say the resurrection is God’s resounding “no” to death, and the power demonstrated therein provides the hope for a final consummation.  In a certain sense, Christ’s coming and life are atoning, whereas his death and resurrection are instructive, but Tanner is prudent not to polarize these respective meanings.  There is still something indispensably justifying and solidifying about Christ’s death.  It is the ultimate act of solidarity with human beings and a loud protest against their detestable situation.  The incarnation is therefore the process of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection and not one immediate, saving moment.  Conversely, the West has customarily construed saving significance vis-à-vis the cross either in the form of ransom, victory, or penal substitution.[xxxi]

Due to her commitment and sympathy to feminist criticism, Tanner is convinced that the many common appropriations of sacrificial imagery in the Bible are outdated and in urgent need of reinterpretation: “the death and suffering of an innocent victim, in and of themselves, are in no respect good; there is nothing saving about them as such.”[xxxii] Tanner finds no evidence for propitiation as contractual or as a byproduct of payment as a penalty for satisfaction in the ritual sacrifices of the Jewish temple services.  Instead of being practiced for reasons of a moral sort, Tanner argues that, “sacrifice is all about the establishment of communion and exclusion in social terms, and about how community is to be organized.”[xxxiii] There is a function in these sacrificial rites for wiping away fault or impurity, but the purpose is not to plead for mercy from a wrathful God.  God is already desirous of communion.[xxxiv] In other cases the sacrifices are for thanksgiving.  The full sway of her argument cannot be brought out here, but it is imperative to understand that in Tanner’s view, this is not some new theory.  She believes it is the oldest one.

Tanner states that the succeeding decline of the incarnational model in modern theology could be attributed in part to the concurrent distaste for “the Platonic reification of universal terms such as ‘humanity’”[xxxv] and the charge of Hellenization raised by Adolf Harnack and Protestant Liberalism.  She appears to successfully counter this charge, however, and remarks further that rather it is likely the incorrectly assumed concentration of the theory on the birth of Christ over and against his death that turns people away – a criticism already addressed above.

A SHORT COMPARISON AND REFLECTION

An ecumenical spirit is much more recognizable in Kasper than in Tanner, especially with regard to reconciling divergent ideas on the Trinity (East vs. West or Barth vs. Rahner) or between contrasting conceptions of human nature and grace. While Tanner probably holds some kind universal or, at minimum, collective position on salvation, her low view of humanity’s orientation to the divine requires a correspondingly low view of other world religions.  Kasper’s willingness to maintain a hint of natural human inclination toward God, however limited, enables him to posit a more optimistic anthropology.

Kasper’s soteriology on the other has a trace of mystery to it.  Tanner is more straightforward insofar as she is christocentric and stresses the incarnation.  According to Kasper, because humanity seeks freedom and fulfillment, a process of interiorly opening oneself to this truth brings about a posture of faith in response to the revelation of God’s self-communicating love as portrayed in Christ’s sacrificial love.[xxxvi] Salvation is not earned but mysteriously gifted.  For Kasper, like Pannenberg, the basic form of faith is not to believe some thing (concept) but to believe someone – that is, to trust God.  This is what Pannenberg juxtaposes with humanity’s inherent yearning and reaching for control.[xxxvii] Trusting implies moving toward and depending upon something.  It also includes risk.  In short, it is to give up control or mastery of both one’s own existence and that of others (something Tanner capably characterizes in her treatment of ethical, political and social implications for the Christian life).[xxxviii] Kasper, however, because he explicitly strives to refute modern atheism, could be indicted for positing dogma precisely where reliance on a better reinterpretation of natural law and analogy would fortify his admittedly polemic rhetoric.[xxxix]

Tanner on the other hand, despite what is an otherwise a lucid explanation, does not sufficiently support her conclusions on the topic of sacrifice in the ancient world.  To the extent that she intends to show why focusing on “the death of Christ to the exclusion of attention to the social and political circumstances that surround it”[xl] is off-based and thereby dethrone this view, she obviously succeeds.  Regarding the perfectly sensible wish to expunge all seemingly atoning significance embedded in the event of the crucifixion and to  the apparent biblical references to such significance, however, there is much wanting.  At one instance her argument boils down to the following declaration: “Propitiation is not the reason why the rite wipes away sin; no real explanation is offered.  God simply wants to reinstate God’s people to full communion with God and this is what God tells God’s people to do in such cases.”[xli] While Tanner is clearly not naïve about this, if there is any hope of overturning what has for better or worse been the foundation of the Christian faith for millions of people since Luther and Calvin, a feat like this would require a far more extensive and less sentimental investigation.  Others have sought to refute penal substitution more convincingly,[xlii] but in circles where the authority of Scripture in undisputed, though such an undertaking is doubtful to be forcefully realized without painstaking effort.

The exegetical questions aside, one relatively major concern for some will be the question of what exactly is being forgiven in Tanner’s constitution of both atonement and human nature.  If the term sin has any reference to actual wrongdoings (maybe for Tanner it does not), one gets the impression that what is forgiven is not sin but the condition of separation – separation from participation in or attachment to God – which if anything only need be blamed on God, since for Tanner we have no “natural” desire for God and thus can’t be culpable.  This  outlook would be permissible only if either (1) one felt that judgment for specific sins committed by individuals, however atrocious, was unnecessary, or if (2) the testimony of Scripture and the Christian tradition could defensibly be shown to not promise some kind of repayment to evildoers in the eschaton, even if such punitive action were only provisionary and pacifying.

Tanner goes to great lengths to distinguish herself from the contemporary Catholic position of human nature by accusing it of failing to uphold the integrity of gratuitousness (God’s grace), precisely because it maintains a spectrum between natural and supernatural grace.  Though the distinction should not be reduced to a level of ambivalence, it seems to me that Tanner’s insistence on this discrepancy is moderately unsubstantiated.  Supposing that, as many Catholics believe, human nature did somehow naturally entail an identifiable desire for relationship with God that could potentially direct one toward God apart from supernatural grace, wouldn’t Tanner still have to admit that it is God who orchestrates this natural desire in the first place, rendering the alleged divide between nature and grace to be something of an allusion – much in the same way for instance that some evangelicals want to distinguish between micro and macroevolution?  Tanner herself concedes that humility before God is the proper attitude regardless of humanity’s sinful or severed condition.  In my judgment, while the resistance to anything resembling a works-based soteriology is warranted, the apparent chasm between sanctification and justification might be, in spite of historical (the selling of indulgences for instance) or biblical justification (Ephesians 2:8), a bit reactionary or invented.[xliii] Why else could one find such resemblance of strong participation in adherents to other faith traditions if humanity was not at least fragmentarily disposed to God?  Case in point is Pannenberg’s characterization of human nature as at once open to God/world/future and yet egocentric.[xliv]

Interestingly enough, such an alternative reading of justification language in Scripture is quite compatible with the incarnational model of atonement espoused by Tanner.[xlv] Moreover, for someone who depends mostly upon the classical tradition for a depiction of historical Christianity, her doctrine of justification sounds surprisingly like one birthed out of the Reformation.  She is Barthian and obviously Protestant in this regard, but her formulation and utilization of key aspects from both traditions (the Reformed and Eastern) should be praised and appreciated, as it accomplishes something anew and is truly constructive.  But while Tanner’s methodological approach to theology from above is not philosophically developed or defended on historical grounds like that of Kasper, she should not be accused of being extraneous or impractical.  For example, she made this startling assertion in a recent publication: “Theologians are now primarily called to provide not a theoretical argument for Christianity’s plausibility, but an account of how Christianity can be part of the solution—rather than part of the problem—on matters that make a life-and-death difference to people, especially the poor and the oppressed,” implying that “Theology’s closest analogue can no longer be a perennial philosophy.”[xlvi]

In this brief and rough comparison it may seem that the differences in the soteriology and anthropology of these two theologians outweigh any similarities elsewhere; but in my reading, the reverse is true.  In effect, I see their respective endeavors as complimentary.  The unifying themes found in Kasper and Tanner in my assessment are threefold: (1) a willingness to think critically about the Christian tradition and even amend it without dismissing it altogether, (2) a reinvigoration of God’s otherness and ineffability without reduction to absolute negation or inaccessibility, and (3) the courage to hold the Christian faith to a standard of historical contingency (though they do this in very different ways).  On this last point, like Pannenberg, Kasper and Tanner agree that “The Christian tradition opens a free view for the future of the world in the light of God’s future, yet does not rob men of an orientation to the richness of the forms of life in earlier times.”[xlvii] In other words, Tanner and Kasper exhibit in masterful form what Pannenberg describes as the balance between devotion to tradition and revolution.  There is unity amidst the diversity, maybe even as a direct result of the diversity,[xlviii] and working from the classical doctrine of God and Christology with contemporary yet faithful modifications may be the crux that conserves an authentic expression of faith in both of their accounts.

Belief Statement

We believe in the divinity of Jesus (Matthew 16:13-20, Luke 22:70, John 8),1 the atonement for sin (though there are divergent theories here, and some variation in interpretation is acceptable – 2 Corinthians 5:19-22, Ephesians 1:7, Romans 5:9-10, 1 John 2, John 1:29, Romans 3:25, 1 Corinthians 15:3, 1 Peter 3:18, Hebrews 9:12-22, Acts 20:28, 1 Corinthians 10:16, Ephesians 2:13, Colossians 1:20, Hebrews 10:19, Hebrews 13:12, 1 Peter 1:19, 1 John 1:7, Revelation 1:6, Revelation 5:9, Revelation 7:15, Revelation 12:11, 1 John 4:10 – I list so many because this might be the doctrine upon which the necessity of Christianity stands or falls) his resurrection (Mark 16:6, Luke 24:6, Matthew 28:6) and that the Kingdom of God will be fully realized some day (Matthew 19:28).  We trust that the Bible is inspired and authoritative (2 Timothy 3:16) and should be interpreted through the lens of Christ’s personhood, as he and the Father are one (John 14:9).  We understand the purpose of life to be discipleship (Matt 28:19) – that is, being transformed more and more into the image of God by the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, and inviting others to take part in this journey with us.  The cost of this discipleship (Dietrich Bonhoeffer – The Cost of Discipleship) is our whole selves.  We are above all called to love God and others, and even our enemies (Matthew 5:44, Luke 6:27,35), and forgive the way Jesus has (Matthew 26:28).

We make it our aim to be a confessing community of these things by embracing both the scandalous particularity of God’s redemption of the world through Jesus (John 14:6), as well the radical inclusivity with which Christ welcomed the other (1 Timothy 2:4).  This implies a special concern for the poor and the needy as those for whom the Church should be a primary advocate We are called into solidarity with those who live in poverty and should protest their condition as inhumane and contrary to the will of God (Gustavo Gutierrez – A Theology of Liberation, Leonardo Boff – Jesus Christ Liberator).        The instruction to care for the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant, and to not pervert justice (Exodus 22-23, Amos 5, Zechariah 7) might be the greatest commandment given to the church for our time.  With this should come the steadfast abandonment of materialism (Matthew 19).

We find in Jesus reconciliation to God by the forgiveness of our sinful tendency to serve self, be independent, and worship what has been created in place of the Creator (Romans 1).  We must constantly turn back to the Lord and be a community of repentance (1 John 1:9, Mark 1:15), living in a spirit of humility and contrition (Psalm 51), but we know that it is by grace through the faith in and of Christ that we have hope in abundant/eternal life.  The Lord is concerned with all of creation and has given us the responsibility to be stewards of everything on earth (Genesis 1:28).

The Church is to be an active participant in the mission of God (David Bosch) restoring everything and entering into communion with all people.  Each one of us has been gifted accordingly to contribute, and we have the privilege of being co-laborers in this effort (Romans 8, 12).  The local church does not necessarily need to be institutionalized in any way, and in fact it is better and healthier if it is not (Neil Cole – Organic Church).  This does not mean we should be without leadership or structure (1 Timothy 3).  Rather, to the degree the church becomes a self-preserving entity apart from the body of individual members (not members in an official sense), its true function is likely being at least somewhat inhibited (Juan Luis Segundo – The Liberation of Theology).  For this reason, methodologically and organizationally speaking, decentralization and multiplication should be preferred to centralization and duplication (Bob Roberts Jr. – The Multiplying Church).

Along these lines, each “church,” however defined, should be autonomous (Baptist Faith and Message).  We make this observation based on an approximately object look at a rough and messy two thousand years of history.  This should not discourage, however, the networking of churches together across borders and even great distances, and the occasional gathering and celebration of the masses – even coordination on some level (a good example would be CBF).

By prayer and petition we are asked to intercede and plead with God to interact with the world in such a way for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).  We should conceive of God as neither male nor female, but instead as both and beyond (Galatians 3:28).  Men and women are equal (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, Dorothy Day).  As such, women can and should “preach” or teach as often as they feel called (1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 5).

As followers of Jesus, it is necessary for us to practice emptying ourselves of all egocentrism (Philippians 2).  A great cloud of witnesses before us has strived for this by practicing the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, solitude, silence, meditation, and other means by which we too should seek formation into the likeness of Christ (recent devotional masters like Henri Nouwen, Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton, Dallas Willard, etc., but also many in church history like St. Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Clement of Rome, Saint Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairvaux, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Soren Kierkegaard who among other things wrote many timeless prayers).

God will one day judge all injustice and make right by those who have suffered at the hands of oppression in a way that is consistent with who God is as revealed in Jesus (Philippians 3:20).  Everything will eventually be as it should (Isaiah 45:23-24), and because of this we put faith in the resurrection of our own new bodies somehow (2 Thessalonians), but we do not know if this is immediate or soul sleep (might depend on if God is outside of time or not, which we also do not claim to know).  We have this assurance by faith that comes from reason, experience, tradition, and Scripture (Wesleyan “Quadrilateral”).

As Christians we regard people of other religions, faith traditions, or skepticism to be created in the image of God just as ourselves, and we want to respect whatever integrity there is and might be in their heritage (Acts 17).  In this way we do not claim a monopoly on truth (John 16:13).  At the same time, we do maintain that Jesus is the fullest picture of God available, and most complete mediation of genuine salvation (John 14).  For all intents and purposes, he is co-equal in the Triune God (see above, divinity).  For this reason, non-Christians should always be lovingly encouraged and invited into relationship and discipleship with Jesus (1 Corinthians 2:2, Galatians 2:20).

Those who are not Christians should not be pressured in any way to become “Christian” in the most common and generic sense of the word.  They should however be told about Jesus’ desire to make them children of God and Kingdom citizens who follow him (Roger Olson – Finding God in the Shack), learn to love him and regard him as Savior, and thereby become more like him.  Whatever hell is, it is not “eternal conscious torment” in the traditional understanding.  We dare to hope that anyone and possibly everyone will one day be saved, but there is no guarantee (John Sanders, Clark Pinnock, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, S. Mark Heim, Jaques Dupuis, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, C. S. Lewis, Karl Barth, Greg Boyd, Billy Graham).  Go may or may not exhaustively know the future.  There’s no reason to take a strong stance on this (Terrance Fretheim, William Hasker, and some of the names).  Either way He is still sovereign.  Hyper/neo-Calvinism is a dangerous heresy (Matthew 18) as it pollutes the church’s witness to the character of God.  Some form of purgatory is a fascinating, plausible concept (Dante, Pinnock, Heim, Lewis).

We do not feel the need to hold strong to the doctrine of “once saved always saved,” simply because we believe this idea is the bad fruit of the wrong question (Peter Rollins).  We are not hereby suggestion that salvation is a process in the sense that it is a work, but rather that relationship with God is typically an inconsistent journey hopefully found on a somewhat consistent trajectory.  Building on this, salvation or damnation is not a matter of human identification, and it is better to concern ourselves first and foremost with thoughts of this world and becoming more like Christ in fear and trembling, trusting all the while still in God’s sufficient, undeserving and overflowing grace (Ephesians 2:8, Philippians 2:12).  We do not earn salvation, but neither can we put a date on it.  This is not to negate conversion experience, however (Acts 9), nor does it undermine God’s faithfulness to his promises and Paul’s guarantee that nothing can separate from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8).  Above all, salvation is probably dependent upon a posture of the heart that only God can judge (Brian McLaren – More Ready than you Realize, Luke 23)

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1 Where Scripture and persons are used for support, this evidence is meant to be neither conclusive, necessarily self-evident,nor exhaustive

 

At the turn of the 20^th Century, it was speculated by some that “non-Christian” religions would eventually die out.  Instead what has been seen is a “powerful resurgence of the so-called world religions: Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.”[1] And now as the world grows consistently flatter[2] because of globalization and the information revolution, a “melting pot” society of religious conglomerates makes the issue all the more pressing.  As a result, Christians are faced most directly with the question of whether or not their faith “is indeed something essentially different, something special.”[3] Hence the burgeoning field of theologies of religious pluralism.  Traditionally, there have primarily been three distinct paradigms through which Christians view the religious other: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.  Paul Knitter calls exclusivism the replacement model, inclusivism the fulfillment model, and pluralism the mutuality model.[4]

In general, exclusivists and inclusivists agree that salvation is obtained solely through the mediation of Jesus Christ.  Exclusivists hold that explicit faith in necessary for this salvation to be realized, whereas inclusivists do not.  Pluralists deny that Jesus Christ is the only means constitutive of achieving salvation.

Despite the multitude of options within and between these three models, many in the postmodern milieu determine these paradigmatic alternatives to leave much wanting.  None herein seem to adequately consider the true breadth of the major world religions.  Exclusivism leaves so many people both now and throughout history closed off to God’s grace that such a view can hardly be considered plausible if one wishes to uphold any sense of God’s goodness.  Inclusivists find Christian “bits and pieces” in the plurality of other religions, thereby rendering them subservient or inferior, and ultimately obsolete.  And lastly, though pluralists attempt to level the playing field as it were by giving every religion the same starting place, they end up undermining the very aspects of these religions that make them necessary and distinct for their adherents.

By either claiming that one religion is absolutely true, even while granting that others might have indirect participation with this one, or by arguing that all will be consummated by The Real or unknown ultimate reality in the eschaton,[5] inclusivists and pluralists effectively “deemphasize both the integral unity of other traditions . . . and the possibility of finding significant separate religious truths there.”[6] The mistaken approach by both groups that “blurs the distinctive features of the religious landscape” has been to assume other religions are seeking salvation.[7] Indeed, “no longer does it suffice to ask whether and what religious traditions have to do with the mystery of salvation of their adherents in Jesus Christ.  More positively and profoundly, the question is what positive meaning the religious traditions themselves have in God’s single overall plan of salvation.”[8]

So what then is the proper way to address this issue?  The first “rule of engagement” proposed by S. Mark Heim is to say that, “such theories stand among and not above religious accounts of the world.”[9] In other words, nobody has a “bird’s eye view.”  Everyone works from a specific context and worldview that has been conditioned by his or her environment, language, culture, upbringing, and so on.  It is impossible for someone to completely step outside of his or her respective point of view and be entirely objective or fair in judgment.  Like everyone, even the pluralists are forced to develop a value orientation, which is usually derived from existing religious traditions ironically enough.  Thus Heim says theirs is not the most generous hypothesis.

Following his own rule mentioned above, S. Mark Heim, though a convinced inclusivist, submits that the “’finality of Christ’ and the ‘independent validity of other ways’ are not mutually exclusive.”[10] It is only necessary that one be given up if only one religious goal can be effectively reached.  Heim suggest that from a Christian perspective, a scenario where other religions actually achieve the fulfillments they seek is permissible.  How he imagines this is a somewhat complicated picture, and admittedly a speculative proposal.  Heim’s hermeneutic strives to grant other traditions the maximum amount of legitimacy without diminishing his own Christian commitment or negating the confessions therein.  So for instance, “Nirvana and Christian communion with God are contradictory only if we assume that one or the other must be the sole fate of all human beings.”[11] Furthermore, while a single person cannot realize both ends simultaneously, there is no reason to think that the two ends could not be realized by different people at different times, or even the same person at different times.

One key advantage to Heim’s view is that other religions can adopt the exact same model from their perspective – that is, a Buddhist could still hold that their faith tradition is the fullest revelation of truth and reality, but permit that Christians might also realize some form of the end experience they seek.  Another important factor in this model for Heim is that while there is an effort on the part of the Christian to optimize the integrity of truth claims in other religions, it remains acceptable and even necessary for the Christian to believe there are some errors in these other religions, and likewise for other religions to believe this about Christians.  In other words, “the more incommensurable religious ends appear, the less the question of supersession seems even strictly applicable.”[12]

At the same time, Heim wants to emphasize the role that diversity within individual faith traditions plays and thereby recognize for instance that an especially devout Advaita Vedanta Hindu might very well be closer to the truth and to experiencing or relating to God than some Christians.  Not only that, but this Hindu would be encountering “the depth of the riches” of the Trinity in Hindu terms.  There is no need then to understand this Hindu’s experience as “anonymously” Christian.  Insofar as it does not directly contradict Christian teaching, the Hindu’s religious quest is an authentic pursuit with a real end.

It is noted by Heim and many others that the New Testament lacks a “definitive statement on the fate of the unevagelized.”[13] Because of this, Heim must “practice a kind of triangulation in which various texts on related issues are coordinated.”[14] In doing so, Heim aims to “tread with humility.”[15] To be sure, Heim is not postulating yet another pluralistic approach that acknowledges a more fundamental reality behind both the Christian understanding of ultimate truth and those of other religions.  Rather, Heim means to envision a Christian eschatological structure that is much akin to that of Dante’s Divine Comedy in principle and the Thomistic theology that influenced Dante’s “prose skeleton” within the allegory.[16]

Fully aware that the Bible typically lacks reference to gradations with respect to eschatology (though there are exceptions, i.e. Luke 12:47-48) and that when discussed it is primarily done so in dualistic terms, Heim does not say that this is in fact how the afterlife will be; but he does want to draw heavily from Dante’s schema.  First of all, by doing so Heim is convinced he taps into what had already been a developing and accepted part of the Christian tradition for centuries – namely, the concept of purgatory.  Citing the Church Fathers and other ancient Christian writings, Heim notices that Christians very early on began to recognize the logical inconsistency of a simple, two-fold division between heaven and hell.  It just didn’t make sense that all who fell short of being spiritually “reborn” would endure everlasting torment, nor that the most mildly committed Christian would be transported immediately into eternal communion with God.  So then we find traces unfolding of a third or “middle way” for purification and purging that would prepare people for fuller exposure to God’s presence.  The purpose is to make God’s creatures strong enough for the joy they cannot yet bear.  “It is about getting used to glory.”[17] Consistent throughout all levels in The Divine Comedy is the absence of suffering as brute or meaningless pain.

The operative criteria for Dante’s literary analogy of the afterlife is one centered on upholding human freedom at any cost.  God does not force Himself on anyone, and while there is recognition of sin before entry, the choices made by individuals largely determine their fate.  In this sense, nothing about hell is so much punitive as it is experienced as loss.  What is more, mobility exists between levels of hell, paradise, purgatory, and heaven.  This component is crucial to the overall concept and is all the more important within the discussion of various religious ends.  Somehow it is imagined that almost any place on the Heim’s eschatological map is potentially only penultimate.  If a state is deemed final, it has become so only because of a creature’s autonomous decision.  While Heim does not defend universalism, he sees it as still compatible with this model.  This feature of Heim’s eschatology is what allows him to believe that “honest mistakes” and “place of birth” will not ultimately privilege any one religion.  He wants desperately to preserve equal opportunity to salvation for all.  Whether or not and how he can maintain this is not entirely clear.

Each prospective end for Heim has its own internal coherence, and governing this logic in many ways is the extent to which the individual chooses to maintain relationship with God and others.  The degree to which relationship is retained depends on the pursuit by the individual of justice, truth, and love and the remnants discovered of theological virtues like faith, hope, and charity.  Faith for example is characterized by “acknowledgement of the need and gratitude for divine grace.”[18] This is one way in which Heim is able to account for how sin and judgment fit into Dante’s illustration.

A final trait of significance for Dante’s allegory is that “from heaven there is no delight at pain.”[19] It is not as if those in “higher” levels are unaware of the loss in lower levels, but it is the “knowledge of the consonance of God’s will the wills of all creatures that gives them peace.”[20] So like God, saints in heaven honor the freedom of all creatures and the perfect fulfillment of their desires.

At the heart of Heim’s post-mortem arrangement is also a thoroughly Trinitarian understanding of religions in this life.  He states, “The Trinity represents the Christian context for interpreting religious pluralism.”[21] Likened to the nature of the salvation, according to Heim the Trinity is understood most clearly and simply as communion-in-difference.  He follows Gavin D’Costa by crediting the Trinity with providing the “grammar” for relating the particularity of Christ and God’s universality activity and presence in the world through the Holy Spirit.[22] This also effectively sets the parameters for safeguarding against equating exclusive identity with God in Jesus Christ, as well as against creating other saviors.  The question of “What counts as salvation?” becomes more crucial though than “Which one saves?”, because the world religions are not all after the same thing.[23] How comprehensively a Christian theology of religions can acquiesce the widest possible range of data and elements distinct to other religions in Christian terms is a good indicator of its own universal validity.  The plenitude and diversity of the Trinity enables Christianity to do this in a very all-encompassing way.

In the case of Islam, adherents seek “a profound relation with God, characterized by obedience, devotion, love, and awe.”[24] They would interpret the Christian view of God as incarnational and the sought after process by Christ followers of deification or divinization to be extremely misguided at best and outright apostasy at worst.  Stressing the unity and oneness of God, it is also clear why they would reject any notion of the Trinity.  All the while both traditions recognize God as personal and wholly other, so a Christian could see how a Muslim view of God is true in its concentrated but limited sense, and because of this intensified obedience to the law and external conformity, a Christian can also learn from the Muslim.

A Hindu tradition like Advaita Vedanta on the other hand perceives Brahman, the ultimate reality, not to be personal in the way we perceive God, but instead recognize the vast and intricate interconnectedness of everything with the supreme reality that is Brahman, and therefore embrace what many Christians have experienced as “oneness” with God, nature, or universe.  Again, the Trinitarian approach includes this understanding of God but once more would see it as restricted and intensified.

Upon consideration of Buddhism, a heightened awareness of “emptiness” or “nothingness” like much of Hinduism shies away from concepts of knowledge about personal nature of the divine.  Escape from suffering and Nirvana are achieved basically at the point of greatest depersonalization.  It is here that true compassion can be born, and the “other” served, because the relative unimportance of and detachment from “self” has been realized.  Interestingly enough, some correlation can be found here with the Eastern and more apophatic traditions of Christianity, especially in mystical practices like centering prayer and meditation.  In this regard, even the Buddhist narrow concentration on one true aspect of and relationship with the divine can be appreciated by Christians.

This very brief and overly simplistic summary of similarity and difference between Christianity and other world religions serves only to highlight a handful of general themes throughout the faiths that can be accounted for in a Trinitarian vision of God.  It obviously by no means does justice to the complexity and beauty of these great traditions.  It is said in Heim’s work that, “this theory displaces the emphasis religious apologetics has tended to place on superior religious certainty about ultimate norms, and replaces it with an emphasis on the superlative “goodness” which these realities represent for the ideal believer.”[25] In doing so, he successfully shifts the focus from arguments in favor or against specific truth claims to genuine questions about what is best for everyone and what is most lucidly inclusive of other religions.  Heim adds to the conversation a persuasive case for the Christian position’s ability to offer both a more attractive salvation promise as well as a theology that can take seriously the broadest range of unique truth claims and religious ends present in other faith traditions.  At the same time, there is room in Heim’s  analysis for much mutual education and transformation cross-religiously speaking.

Helpful too is Heim’s recognition that while the very different and distinct features of all the world religions should be honored, they cannot be so purely divided so as to not allow any permeation.  The exact lines of differentiation between them are not so easily drawn.  There might even be some room for convergence, syncretism, and coalescence.  But this should only be expected from a Trinitarian standpoint, as it corroborates strong support for the view of God’s immanence and multiplicity.  After all, “discipleship entails working together with all creeds to overcome oppression.  Attentiveness to our neighbor’s faith, in order to learn what the Spirit may be doing there, and praxis for justice are co-essential with Christological devotion in the Christian life.”[26] Quoting the thoughtful comments of George Linbeck about Christians in the first century, Heim feels those today should have an “extraordinary combination of relaxation and urgency in their attitude toward those outside the church.”[27] Theirs was a concern for passionately sharing the gospel while also trusting that God would “do right” by all people.

Some lingering concerns for further inquiry could be the following:  How is this proposal, however elegant and perspicuous, any more inclusive or generous than traditional inclusivism if the end result for so many is something less than Christian salvation?  Perhaps the answer has something to do with continuity between this life and the eschaton in other religions that traditional inclusivism lacks.  Secondly, is salvation best understood as communion?  Forgiveness of sin, liberation, and deification are somewhat neglected in Heim’s description, and are these aspirations only means to the end of communion?  Interaction is needed with a more developed trans-religious atonement theory.

Heim’s work deserves to be challenged and responded to, read by Christians and non-Christians alike.  The issue of Christian witness and mission with regard to religious pluralism is one of the chief obstacles confronting the church of the 21^st Century.  Many questions remain unanswered despite Heim’s useful and extensive project, but it seems he has really opened a door to a new kind of dialogue between the religions that should be more fruitful than most ecumenical efforts in the past.

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[1] David Jacobus Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis Books, 1991), 352.

[2] Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Picador, 2007).

[3] Hans Kung, On Being a Christian (NOVALIS PUBLISHING, 2008), 25.

[4] Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Orbis Books, 2002).

[5] John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Second Edition (2nd ed.; Yale University Press, 2005).

[6] S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Orbis Books, 1995), 6.

[7] J. A. Dinoia, The Diversity of Religions: A Christian Perspective (Catholic University of America Press, 1992), x.

[8] Jacques Dupuis, Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (Orbis Books, 2002), 4.

[9] Heim, Salvations, 9.

[10] Ibid., 3.

[11] Ibid., 149.

[12] Ibid., 162.

[13] S. Mark Heim, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 80.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 81.

[16] Ibid., 277.

[17] Ibid., 115.

[18] Ibid., 118.

[19] Heim, The Depth of the Riches, 114.

[20] Ibid., 112.

[21] Ibid., 127.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Heim, Salvations, 160.

[24] Heim, The Depth of the Riches, 124.

[25] Michael LaFargue, “Radically Pluralist, Thoroughly Critical : A New Theory of Religions.,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60, no. 4 (1992): 713.

[26] Heim, Salvations, 167.

[27] Heim, The Depth of the Riches, 271.

An Example to Follow

“Those who would be church leaders, dare to stand in front . . . and start walking!”   This instruction for me captures well what it means to be a servant leader.  “Servant leadership” is one of those concepts that seems a bit oxymoronic.  Is it really possible to be both a servant and a leader at the same time?  Aren’t servants supposed to follow leaders, and leaders to be served by followers?  These questions presume a conventional wisdom rooted deeply in the world.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that the majority of culture and society would think servant leadership to be a nonsensical endeavor.  How then are we to begin understanding what this might look like?  Striving to operate and think out of a biblical and Judeo-Christian worldview, we ought not look any further than to Jesus Christ himself, the best picture available anywhere of what it means to be a servant leader.  Let us consider the words of Paul to the church in Philippi:  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”  (Phil 2:5-8, NRSV)

Learning from Jesus

Jesus led a life of example, demonstrating to us in both word and deed exactly how one is to live in the dynamic tension between service and leadership.  Every bit of what he said was backed by a lifestyle conformed entirely to the values he taught.  Pure heart and motive characterized each thought and action in the ministry of Jesus.   “But he governed his relationship to their needs on the basis of principle, not their demands.  He would serve them, but they would not determine his decisions.”   Jesus served, but at no point was he ever controlled by those around him, even his closest friends who loved him and had the best of intentions in mind.  This service was born out of a love first and foremost for God, then for neighbor.

Furthermore, Jesus conducted his life in a rhythm that balanced his public ministry with both the needed support of friendship and his private time with God.  He lived for others because he lived for God, and not the other way around.  Similarly, to obey the first command is to necessarily obey the second, but mixing these two up inevitably breaks the first by making the task of pleasing other people out to be an idol.  This is one of the greatest temptations that leaders face – the temptation to do either our own will or the will others would have us do before the will of God.  This is because so often we listen to others before listening to God.  Consequently, it follows that we tend to give others more time than God, and so the problem perpetuates itself.

In Relationship to Others

It is so easy to convince ourselves that we are serving others by putting their needs first.  Ironically though, this only reveals that we are likely more fearful of the public eye than God’s judgment.  As Christian leaders, we should be more afraid of God than the opinions of others.  A leader who knows he or she answers to Christ alone will be remarkably calmer under fire than the one who is torn between serving two totally different masters.

Servant leaders receive criticism well and assume personal responsibility accordingly, even when it’s tough.  It is easy to make excuses for just about anything, and as leaders we will get blamed for much.  Despite to need for honesty and accountability, it is important to note that taking responsibility for our actions and choices is not the same thing as being responsible for the jobs and even mistakes of others.  Even greater than the temptation to please people can also be the temptation to do everything ourselves.  This mistaken mindset can lead to serious consequences.  It is only when we have been released from the pressure of pleasing people and controlling our environment that we are actually free to serve Christ and others, and therefore also lead effectively.

Our burdens are to be shared with a community and a team in the understanding that it is never just one person’s job to carry that weight of everyone else (Gal 6:1-2).  The team mentality will also  shift the focus of a group from a leader-centered model to a more decentralized model where more emphasis is placed on the role of individuals.  Every person is a critical component to the body of Christ, and God has gifted us with unique skills and abilities.  The externally minded, superficial Christian leaders will wonder about buildings, budgets, and baptisms, but this is not the measure of success.  “The reflective pastor considers: in what ways do I empower people, extend covenantal relationships, and build the church?”  Bill Hull, in his book The Disciple-Making Church gives this instruction: “Do not sacrifice your primary task to handle a secondary issue, and multiply yourself through others.”

No doubt there are those of us who will struggle with this more than others, and having said that, one should also recognize this: even though duties are better carried out when they are shared, a leader will usually have to answer at least to some degree for his team members.  No leader is ever completely free from being held accountable for the performance of a teammate.  This reality secures our incentive for taking an interest in the people we work with and investing in relationships that mutually challenge and encourage one another.  Individuality is key, but in an overly individualistic society, some of the individualism inside of us needs to die.   Most churches in America could stand to be more community oriented.  As members of the body of Christ, we are partnering together, forming a unified whole, which serves to do a work greater than the sum of individual parts.  God has fearfully and wonderfully made his children, “gifting each of us differently, allowing everyone to make a unique contribution to the body (1 Corinthians 12:4-30).”   We are God’s fellow workers (2 Cor 6:1).  The sooner we realize this, the more naturally we’ll be able to lead like a servant.

Further developing the idea mentioned above about decentralizing leadership, it is time for the structure in many churches to move “from a pyramid to a circle.”   With exceptions, authoritarian leadership just does not work in today’s culture like it has in the past.  In his book, The Organic Church, Neil Cole says this about leadership:  “In speaking about leaders who rule over others, Jesus said, ‘It is not to be so among you’ (Mark 10:42-44).”   Later on he adds that “authority is distributed to each person to accomplish all God has for the person, without needing layers of intermediaries to pass that authority down.”   He also points out how “the strongest and purest leaders do not need to rely upon position or title,”  though it is not bad to have these things.   We should put more faith in our mission, the love of truth and in building relationships than in democracy or business meetings.  Servant leaders lead by example and calling rather than their place in the system.

Sometimes the pressure and expectation for hierarchy and top-down leadership can come from the congregation itself.  This is because some churches and organizations are rooted in this tradition and somewhat stuck in their ways.  It might be the case that particular groups prefer this strategy and even operate better this way, but that is becoming increasingly less common.  Not only that, but it stands in contrast to the biblical picture we have of church and community.

“Simultaneously Christians entertain the conflicting concepts that the pastor alone can do the important spiritual work and that God equally values all believers.”   This ideology makes it very difficult for the pastor to both lead by example and yet also hand responsibility over to the congregants themselves.  There is a fine line of balance to be walked in this dynamic tension between “leading from the front” and avoiding the “do everything yourself” trap.

Two illustrations from our “Leadership in Ministry” class come to mind and might be helpful here: One is the picture of a shepherd who leads his flock from the head of the herd, not the back.  Contrary to what we might expect, shepherds do not drive sheep like cattle from the rear.  The sheep follow the shepherd, because he or she takes the first steps.  Closely related to this idea is also a metaphor from the battlefield.   Roman generals used to be the most feared and respected leaders, because they were also soldiers.  They did not stand in the back and give commands, passing them on from the top down.  Instead, they fought on the front lines with everyone else.  This gained them the love, and most importantly, trust of the other soldiers who followed and obeyed.  At the same time, obviously the general needed protection and was completely incapable of accomplishing the task alone.  We require the same support from the lay people in our ministry.  The is not a battleground for hired professionals, but for parishioner-driven empowerment.

Another primary task of the servant leader should be to make disciples.  Like the rest of our rules and guidelines for service, we get this idea mostly from Jesus.  He had a small group of close friends and followers with whom he spent the majority of his time.  He did have a public ministry, but it was not his public ministry that gave birth to the Christian Church and movement.  Jesus went deep with a few, and the result was multiplication and exponential growth.  We should strive to do our ministry in the same way.  Because Christ abided perfectly and entirely in the Father, prayed for his disciples, and prayed for us, he has prepared us for this very task (John 17).  We too must be grounded in relationship with the Lord.  We also need the training and support from others who have gone before us as faithful and steadfast disciples, so that we can pour into disciples of our own.  The depth of our sowing will determine the width of our reaping.  This is a very countercultural concept.  The world around us is impatient; it’s a mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes.  Reversing this thinking will enable us to serve and lead like Jesus.

“As good role models, leaders provide the demonstration that demands imitation and leads to reproduction.  As leaders model the vision and values of the church, they lead member to obedience.”   If  leaders are merely telling others what to do, there is very little chance that they will actually go an do it.  On the other hand, if our telling is reinforced by noticeable doing, the chances of seeing some change are much greater.  If we want people to evangelize, we’d better start evangelizing.  If we want people to practice Sabbath, they’d better see us practicing Sabbath.  While acknowledging the importance of leadership by example, Hull still comes back  the necessity for leaders to produce new leaders: “In the long run, sustained real change that focuses on discipling will be lay driven.  Disciple-making pastors must pass on their vision and leadership to laymen who will remain in the churches after pastors leave.  Otherwise, pastoral change may kill the vision.”   That is why we must cast a vision for others to embody, letting them take ownership of it.  A ministry too dependent upon the leadership of one particular pastor is not a truly sustainable and healthy ministry.   That is too heavy a burden for any one person to carry.

Servant leaders should also be prepared to face utter hardship, dissension and opposition.  In ceaseless self-examination, we should ask ourselves the question, “Are we ‘committed to obedience to scriptural truth, regardless of the consequences?’”   The apostles certainly were.  “Disobedient leadership avoids the tough corrective issues, because, if we offend them, we lose money as well as all their friends and extended family.  Obedient leaders face criticism, slander, and everything else that goes with doing the right thing in a tough situation.”

A servant leader should be one who cultivates a community of grace and forgiveness, unified by the love of God, neighbor, and submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ. . “Judgment, criticism, guilt, or shame can produce short-term change, but meaningful, long-term, inside-out change is nurtured by grace.  Creating an environment where an individual experiences acceptance in spite of failure allows personal transformation to take root.”

If we as the body are one in singleness of heart and mind (Jer 32:39), God can transform us by His Spirit.  “When leaders create a loving and accepting environment, people can willingly drop many minor points of difference and work together.”   To the extent that it does not require us to compromise our values or cause others to stumble, we should be willing and able to pursue unity wholeheartedly.  In most cases, if people are led to let go of anger and put down their pride, doing away with defensiveness and protectionism, they will often find much more common ground than reason for discord.

If change is needed, in many cases it is usually best for it to happen slowly.  Sometimes we have to give a little here and there in order to maintain hope for the end goal.  This is a large part of servant leadership – learning to surrender our preferences for the sake of greater cause, and to forego things always being done our way, at our pace.  Servant leaders must be sensitive to the fears of their followers.  They are often asking the question, “What will I lose?”  We should remind them what they will gain.  Ultimately, change is not our responsibility.  God will change people, and therefore also our churches.

There are no easy answers to difficult situations and complex problems.  Servant leaders should be weary of all formulas and quick-fix approaches to anything.  Focusing on the symptoms only treats the surface, and this sort of treatment usually only makes things worse in the long run.  As servant leaders, we should be interested in getting at the root of problems, even if it takes more work.  Every problem is contextual, and we must be able to adapt.

Servant leaders are not CEO’s, and churches are not corporations.  Because of this, all thoughts of selfish ambition and treating church leadership positions as “stepping stones” on the ladder of success must be put to death.  Servant leaders should be approachable.  They are not more important than those they are leading, nor should they necessarily be busier.  Busyness is not impressive, and it should not signify importance.  It fact, all too often it takes the place of real, meaningful work.  Bearing that in mind, as was already mentioned, “leaders must develop the capacity to set boundaries on the things that drain their vitality and establish space for the things that nourish the soul and renew the mind.”

Servant leaders listen.  Servant leaders ask questions.  Servant leaders are teachable.  Servant leaders don’t play favorites, and servant leaders hear the voice of the marginalized.  Not only that, but they become the voice for the marginalized.

Our sinful nature desires so much to be given praise, credit, and attention.  Too many ministers lust after power and honor.  We want the number one position.  We fail to see that we have already been given approval from the creator of the universe, and he has invited us to partake in His service!  Is this not enough?  Servant leadership means sacrifice.  It also means giving up the place of honor.  This race is not about us, because we are not trying to win.  And the fight is not about us, because we do not get the glory.  Rewards are no the goal, nor is “productivity” the goal.  Faithfulness, sincerity of heart, and compassion are the fuel.  Servant leaders don’t need convincing of the truth.  They’ve already bought into it!  Our attitude should be one of gratitude.  That God in His mercy has even allowed us to participate is so much more than we deserve.  We are stewards of our lives and everything God has given us – abilities, resources, and relationships.  Every breath is a gift.  This is the perspective of a servant leader.

In Relationship to God and self

“If we are to have an impact on our world, success will come from changing our own behavior.”   In relationship to others, we have already established that leading by example is an integral aspect of servant leadership.  In order to lead by example effectively, however, we must examine more closely how we become that example in the first place.  Servant leadership is counterintuitive on a number of levels.  One such level is the de-emphasis on influencing others, and instead focusing on changing ourselves.  This happens by engaging with God.  “The classic disciplines of the Christian faith – worship, solitude, fasting, prayer, silence, and study – are essential to the formation of Jesus’ character in our lives.”   True service comes about by resisting the urge to fix other people, and by channeling our energies toward self-improvement in contrast.  Most people are very good at evaluating others.  How much time do we spend evaluating ourselves?  “For ministers to relate properly to their professional colleagues, they must be emotionally mature.”   The emotionally and spiritually mature person will have a contagious and positive effect on those around him or her.  Our aim should be to grow into emotionally and spiritually mature believers.  We need not look any further than to the character of Christ, in hopes that by beholding his divine nature, we will be transformed into his likeness (2 Cor 3:18).

It only takes one drastic mistake to eradicate a host of other good accomplishments, and when trust is broken, it is not easily, if ever, repaired.   Excellence does not require perfection, and by mistake here, I do not mean mistakes of a non-ethical nature that are simply a part of our humanity.  But in reference to mistakes of a moral nature, there is very little room for error.  In a position of leadership, this only becomes a more rigid standard, which is all the more reason why we so desperately need spiritually mature, Christ-like men and women in leadership.  The world needs more of these kind of people anyway, but when a leader with a large platform falls down hard, the results are devastating.

Most ministers and leaders want to be people of integrity, but the journey to this kind of depth is a difficult process.    It is a road traveled by few, and bypassed by many.  Character doesn’t develop by accident.  It is acquired over time with commitment to spiritual disciplines and growth, and we can never do this on our own.  We need trusted mentors, accountability and prayer partners along the way.

In his book, Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard says that “a carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying ‘Why?’”   We must strive to conform every aspect of our being – thoughts, feelings, choices, body, social context, and soul – to godliness.   These components make up our heart or spirit, and we must bring it all under God’s guidance and care, making ourselves worthy of and suitable for His service – to do His will.  We must come to terms with our  sinful condition, fully aware of the desperate state we’re in, seeing our helplessness without God.  We must cry out to Him.  Brokenness, repentance, and remorse precede transformation, so we first need an understanding of our wickedness, and the Bible is clear about where we stand before God (Rom 3:23).  Cling to Him.  Abide in Him.  Worship Him.  Become like Him.  That is the job of a servant.  That is also the job of a Christian leader.

Bibliography

Bass, Richard. Leadership in Congregations. The Alban Institute, 2006.

Cole, Neil. Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens. Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Herrington, Jim, Robert Creech, and Trisha L. Taylor. The Leader’s Journey: Accepting the Call to Personal and Congregational Transformation. 1st ed. Jossey-Bass, 2003.

Hull, Bill. Disciple-Making Church, The. Revell, 1998.

Trull, Joe E., and James E. Carter. Ministerial Ethics: Moral Formation for Church Leaders. 2nd ed. Baker Academic, 2004.

Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ. NavPress, 2002.