For Robert, winning the Heisman was definitely special – truly – but it wasn’t even that big of a deal for him.  He has other plans.  Hopefully Baylor does too, and I’m not referring to trivial things like the new football stadium, or even football.  Nonetheless, I think it’s still appropriate to call last night’s award and several of Griffin’s key drives and plays this season “forever moments” – moments in which, as my friend Craig Nash pointed out, “the veil between heaven and earth is especially thin.”  It has certainly been a fun, redemptive and joyous occasion to witness.  And for the players themselves, what an incredible privilege and experience.  Many don’t get to see the fruit of their labor like that.

In my mind, there’s nothing quite like getting out and throwing the football around with friends.  It renews my appreciation for the talent of certain players every time.  Actually though, the place of football in my life has waned significantly in relevance since I’ve gotten older.  I don’t like how much time it takes from people.  I think it deters many of us from concern for things that matter.  Of course not having cable since college and now living on the West coast has made this a lot easier.  We still check up on Baylor, but even this year I managed to watch only two games live.  So I had done my best throughout the past few seasons to resist indulging in the RG3 frenzy – yeah, and then two nights ago Whitney and I both dreamed that he would win the Heisman.  Seriously?  I wasn’t even thinking about it before I went to bed.  And yesterday before the ceremony I couldn’t stop reading articles and watching highlight videos.  I was loving all the facebook noise – status updates, the profile pictures of the stiff-arming bear, and of course the temporary name changes (though mine will not be temporary)… I give up.  For better or worse, people can’t help but cling to their tribal identities.  Baylor fans are no different despite what some may want to believe.  I’m only human and just being faithful to my alma mater, right?  Griffin fever it is.

Albeit halfheartedly maybe, I have to speak personally about this.  When you’ve at some point dedicated a substantial portion of your life to playing, it’s hard not to.  The former quarterback in me that never amounted to greatness wants to live vicariously through this superstar.   After all, we both played Texas high school football for programs that took the game way too seriously, both went to Baylor, both ran hurdles in track, and both go by “the third” – has to count for something!  So what if my post-high school career was spent on the intramural fields with the Lawn Wranglers and Kappa Omega Tau?  And the fact that Robert is by no exaggeration infinitely better than I ever could have been?  Details!  If only he was left-handed.  We’d be brothers.

Like many Texas boys, I grew up playing touch football in the backyard and at recess, always wearing my Aikman or Irvin jersey.  Like my dad who played runningback for the now Westlake rival Austin High School, and like my younger brother, I had small private school white-boy speed   The other thing I did growing up at least a few times was go to Waco for homecoming with my family and watch the games.  Then we moved to Westlake, and well, that was a much bigger pond than I was used to.  This was the school that Drew Brees had taken to the state championship only a few years earlier.  At best, I was lucky enough to be an athlete who could marginally if inconsistently fulfill the role expected of me.  At worst I disappointed but managed a few shining moments because of my talented teammates.  Senior year I was only able to play in a little more than half of my games due to a thumb injury I received during an inner-squad scrimmage.  There was even a bit of a quarterback controversy as a result.  It was still a good season for me, but not enough to get any real attention from most schools – not that I would have otherwise necessarily.  I was the first, and still am, I think, the only quarterback from WHS not to go on and play college football in a very long time.  But I did get to go on one recruiting visit that year to Floyd Casey Stadium, which was Kevin Steele’s least year and Baylor finished yet again with no Big 12 wins.  Things have come a long way since then, thanks in part to Griffin’s decision to follow Coach Briles.

All this to say – though my experience is hardly comparable – in a very insignificant, limited and remote way, I feel like I can relate to the pressure and challenges Griffin has faced in terms of football – just enough to assert that the poise and poignancy with which he responded to adverse conditions is arguably unmatched.  His stats are some of the very best, but the coolest and most fun thing about watching RGIII play for those who know the sport is that even when he’s not doing something outstanding, you still feel in your bones – unambiguously – his presence and potency for excellence, like a sprinter about to take off out of the blocks.  He commands sovereignty over the field because he just knows he can do whatever has to be done.  Most recently he proved this in the Kansas and Oklahoma games.  And when you’re that electrifying and your execution is that timely, it’s just a matter of having a Kendall Wright, Terrance Williams, Terrance Ganaway or Lanear Sampson on your team – with a decent offensive line – and things coalesce into something great.

When I think of Griffin, I think of other Texas college quarterbacks that I have admired in recent years who could throw and run – many from Texas, like Vince Young, Reggie McNeal, Colt McCoy – two of whom our team played against in high school.  Now, Griffin is easily counted if not noticeably distinguished among them. He’s not as big and strong as Vince or Tebow or as slippery of a scrambler as Colt, but in my mind, with his speed, intelligence and deep ball accuracy he still takes the best from all three of them and combines it into one unprecedented package.  Griffin actually reminds me of my one high school teammate year old than me, Chad Schroeder, who went on to be a standout Aggie receiver (I think he should have played QB!).  And as is often remarked, Robert’s character and behavior off the field is equally admirable.  I don’t care if he becomes an NFL standout.  I don’t think he does either – though he very well could.  He’s not interested in all the social “perks” that could come with his celebrity status on campus.  My brother-in-law is one of his teammates, and he confirms this.  Robert is engaged to be married, which might be another mark of his maturity.  In the midst of the hype, he treads lightly, smiles and laughs.  He’s outspoken about his faith, but not in the sometimes premeditated and uninspiring way that other athletes like him have been.  Moreover, Robert has expressed his care for the city of Waco and the positive effect that a win like this could have on the whole community there – a community that is in many areas stricken with hardship.

Related to this, what’s most interesting to me is the extent to which we Baylor folk are drawn into the drama collectively.  Here I am doing the same, wanting to grab hold, participate and claim ownership, however indirectly.  Texas fans remember the indelible bliss of Vince running into the end zone on that final drive against USC in 2006.  I do too.  And since Baylor might not ever have that opportunity, this was that moment for Baylor.  It’s the theme of representation I suppose.  Robert Griffin is seen as a representative of all who have a stake in Baylor’s “success” – a tricky concept, mind you, but intelligible nonetheless.   Isn’t that why we all get excited, whatever team we’re pulling for?  Otherwise, why would there be any pride to speak of?  It’s scary because, one could also call it popular messianism:

Wow. That is great.  Really though, I guess I have a few on-going futile hopes at the end of the day for this moment and however long it lasts: 1) that Baylor fans in general would conduct themselves with humility and respect towards others – besides, this might be as good as it gets for a long time; 2) that students and alumni would not confuse their Christian identities – if they are Christian – with the identity of the university’s prosperity as such or that its sports teams; and 3) that we would be invested enough in other much more meaningful work so as to safely distance ourselves from any real attachment to the quality of performance in competitive endeavors that are measured by conventional, impermanent standards.  It seems to me that Robert would agree, so may we pay honor to him and his achievements in this manner.

The nature of and relationship between original sin and human freedom is perhaps the most basic consideration of a Christian theological anthropology.  The sophisticated and thoroughly systematic outline of these aspects of human nature offered by Thomas Aquinas continues to be relevant for contemporary discussion.  Additionally, the rise of recent feminist, process, and political theologies in particular has rekindled the need for reflection on the role of divine grace and sovereignty with respect to sin and freedom.

It is often questioned for instance whether upholding the classical doctrines of divine immutability, omnipotence and transcendence of space and time is compatible with the belief in original sin and at least some measure of human responsibility for suffering and the fate of the planet.  The specifications of these doctrines themselves are not the primary concern here.  Nor is it the aim of this paper to pay special notice to the novel features of the recent theological developments just mentioned.  Rather it seems that in view of the increasing plurality of perspectives on these issues, a straightforward examination of what exactly Aquinas had said – and to a certain extent the classical tradition as a whole – is appropriate.  The hope in such an endeavor is for the achievement of a newfound appreciation for how Thomas’s understanding of human nature and its good capacities can contribute to creation care and even social theory, as well as a restored recognition of the reverence, piety, and seriousness with which one of the foremost Fathers of the Christian church thought about human responsibility, the dignity of the body, and the severity of sin.

To begin it will be fitting to first look at Aquinas’s metaphysical account of the structure of human beings.  A number of elements treated by Aquinas that concern the relationship between original sin and human freedom cannot be considered here.  There will not be, for example, ample attention given to the topics of sensation, consciousness, natural appetite (ST I, 77-83), of law (I-II, 90-108), the passions (I-II, 22-48), the structure of the human will itself (I-II, 6-21), or God’s government of creatures (I, 103-119) – all of which are important for the theme of this essay.  Brief reference and explanation will be given regarding these articles wherever needed, but the underlying logic of this essay will follow the sequence of these seminal questions: 1) What is the nature of a human being, its place in the order of creation, and its level of freedom such that it is said to be responsible for sin?  2) What, therefore, is the original and effect of sin? 3) Is God’s will sovereign over the relationship between original sin and human freedom, and if so, how? 4) Finally, what might be critically retrieved for contemporary theology from the facets of Thomistic theology heretofore considered?

HUMAN NATURE: BODY AND SOUL

Aquinas takes up Aristotle’s description of human beings as hylomorphic (literally hyle or wood, and morphe or shape in Greek) in which, as substances composed of substantial form and primary matter, the soul is related to body as form to matter; that is, the soul is the form of the body, and the body is the essentially or substantially (in the secondary sense, as ousia) determining, individuating matter of the soul.  The body is activated and specified by the form (in contrast to “second matter,” which is said to be “designated”), while the soul, as intellect and will, is the efficient and transcendent cause of the body.  What makes human beings distinct from other animals as a consequence of this composite union is their intellectual capacity to reason and self-reflect, the immaterial power to abstract from the sensible, and thereby also the ability to apprehend the universal (e.g., treeness rather than just particular trees).  This is why Thomas attributes complexity rather than simplicity to human beings.  Thomas calls simple those “lower,” embodied creatures as well as the “higher” disembodied angels or “separated substances” (“substances” in the first sense).  Human beings in contrast are regarded as complex because they are “situated at the juncture of the material and the immaterial”[i] and contain the perfections of both orders.[ii]

By implementing this structure, Aquinas objects to Plato with the accusation that he has “confused the mode of our understanding with the mode of being of things.”[iii]  Abstraction accounts for the modal difference between what is known as a sensible singular and knowledge itself as universal.  This serves to explain why Thomas would see as unnecessary any separate order of Forms corresponding to ideas.  The species or concept of a thing known by the human intellect, for example, is not another thing in itself, but is the very activity of the intellect as it is informed by the thing in the act of knowing it.

It would be misleading to characterize Aquinas’s account of the body-soul/matter-form composition as simply a position between dualism and materialism.  Both dualism and materialism deny the notion that the soul as the animating, organizing and directing principle of the body.[iv]  So while for instance Descartes’s rejection of the body as constitutive of human directly opposes Hobbes’s denial of any immateriality in humanity, neither is concerned with the question of whether there is anything distinctively human about the body.  In both cases, one is left without the essential language of the body as informed by the soul, which surrenders the body’s status to the command of biology.[v]

At the same time, in keeping with the distinction from Plato, Thomas and Aristotle before him are certainly not setting the essence of human being in opposition to nature.  Instead they consider human beings part of nature, and as such strive to simply accentuate the commonalities of the human species.  Etienne Gilson elucidates the point that “it would be completely foreign to the Thomistic perspective to regard the material universe as the result of some calamity and the union of soul and body as the consequence of a fall.”[vi]  The body is not the prison of the soul.  Union of soul and body is not only natural and appropriate, but also provides a suitable vehicle for the communication of love.[vii]

HUMAN BEINGS IN CREATED NATURE

Thomas’s view of nature in general, which includes human nature, regards it as creation, capable of being neither enemy nor friend of humanity but rather the mere context within which relations of enmity or friendship develop between human beings and God.[viii] Aquinas recognizes the role of teleology and final causality, appreciating the importance of hierarchy in nature, and understanding the natural “part” in light of the “whole.”[ix] In this regard, nature is an instrument in God’s service.

Speaking of creation, Aquinas refers to it as the mode by which all things emanate from God as their principle – the producer of being as such, but not necessarily the direct or immediate producer of particular beings.[x]  Incidentally, the evolution of a particular species or even the emergence of life itself is not incompatible with this idea.[xi]  Yet Thomas affirms that, “to create belongs to the action of God alone,” so one need not envision an exaggerated distance, disinterest or disengagement on the part of God in the creation process of particular species or beings either.[xii]  The Divine Will undoubtedly extends to particular goods for Thomas.[xiii]  It is also true to say that God has willed interdependence of natural organisms whereby some creatures survive by the deaths of others, and this does not contradict the “good” of created nature.[xiv]  Nature is good in that it has being.  Consequently, all things move toward God as their suitable good.  They “desire” (appetunt) God as their end in an analogous sense,[xv] “whether this desire is intellectual, sensible, or natural (that is, without cognition).”[xvi]  To illustrate a case of “natural” desire, Stephen Pope cites the example of a plant obtaining sugars by means of photosynthesis.  Concerning human beings and beings in general, Pope explains that

Attaining one’s own good is simultaneously “attaining” God in the sense of becoming more like God. This is because God is that Being who is fully actualized, that Being whose existence is the full and perfect attainment of God’s own good. Thus, to the extent that a particular creature attains its own good and actualizes its own nature, it “moves toward” God (see ST I-II, 1,8). This is the meaning of claiming that nature in its parts and whole is good “by participation.”[xvii]

Furthermore, Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s order of philosophical pedagogy, which begins with logic and mathematics followed by natural philosophy, ethics and politics, and finally metaphysics.  Accordingly, Aristotle’s approach differs significantly from one that begins with the mind-body problem.  Whereas modernists start by examining the “special nature of mental activity,” Thomas and Aristotle proceed via a “general interest in characterizing the relationship, in things of many kinds, between their organizing or structure and their material composition.”[xviii]

It could be observed therefore that from the perspective of Aristotle and Aquinas, the modern quest for certainty is a preoccupation beyond the scope of a human being’s role in the hierarchy of being – namely, to embrace one’s location in the world already, rather than to desperately search for reliable rational entry.

The same degrees of certitude are not available in all kinds of inquiry by human beings.  Unlike the tendency today to privilege scientific or empirical knowledge, the classical tradition as a whole is interested in and motivated by what is assumed to be the natural human longing to acquire wisdom about ultimate principles with respect to the whole of being.  Knowledge is possible only through the senses for Aristotle and Aquinas, meaning that receptive knowledge is essentially sentient.[xix]  The intellect’s transcendence of materiality, on the other hand, gives access to phantasms or sensible images.  And yet the separated existence of the soul is not in accordance with its nature; it receives species by an “influence of the divine light” (lumen glorie) as a materially constituted body.[xx]

Thus an apparent or even arguably irresolvable tension is present between the status of the soul as at once a form and a substance – form emphasizes our likeness with animals in sharing their genus, while substance designates our similarity to angels sharing their intellect.[xxi]  But Thomas holds that something can only be subsistent if it is complete in nature and existing in its own right as a particular thing (hoc aliquid).[xxii]  And since it is essential and not accidental of the soul to be designated by matter, human nature as Aquinas sees it is necessarily associated with bodiliness.[xxiii]  Therefore the soul is only said to be a substance separate from the body in a diminished or analogical sense.  Such is the mysterious union of the body and soul in Aquinas, which ultimately requires recourse to theology for full intelligibility – but not because he is inattentive to laying out the metaphysical principles.  Nevertheless, it is this theological perspective that will ultimately frame the discussion of original sin.  Beforehand, however, it is necessary to address Aquinas’s notion of human freedom.

HUMAN FREEDOM

As can be deduced from the borrowed Aristotelian metaphysical structure of the soul and the body, Aquinas expounds that the existence of human beings is accidental rather than essential to its nature.  In other words, existence is always at some point only a potentiality, whereas for God it is always essentially actualized.  This difference between esse and essentia – which is much more basic to Thomas’s thought than that of Aristotle – is perhaps Thomas’s most profound and valuable contribution.  Thomas holds that God is essentially a “self-subsisting Being” (Ipsum esse perse subsiste)[xxiv] and the “First Agent, who is agent only.”[xxv]  Unlike all finite beings, God as the First Agent does not act to acquire another end – as to attain what God does not already possess – but only “to communicate the divine perfection which is God’s goodness.”[xxvi]  As Pope correctly observes, “this form of action expresses the greatest liberality because it comes, not from need or utility, but from the divine goodness alone.”[xxvii]  It is only with the presupposition of this basic distinction then that a discourse on human freedom can be adequately elucidated.

For Thomas, the human will necessarily desires happiness.[xxviii]  Of course force and coercion manipulate the likelihood of realizing such happiness though, so it is said that human beings have free choice only in means, not ends.[xxix]  The intellect moves the will by proposing various ends to it, but the will moves the intellect “as an agent, as what alters moves what is altered, and what impels moves what is impelled.”[xxx]  Moreover, the will is even able to move itself.[xxxi]  Thomas asserts that the passions reside in the sensitive appetite, but not in a manner independent from the rule of the will.[xxxii]  The passions are subordinate to but also participate in reason as well.  In this way, Aquinas defends that the will is indeed free insofar as humanity is rational.[xxxiii]  For he says that, “reason in contingent matters may follow opposite courses, as we see in dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments . . . particular operations are contingent, and therefore in such matters the judgment of reason may follow opposite courses, and is not determinate to one.”  Hence, it could be argued that Thomas understands reason to be indeterminate, as human beings engage in comparison and are able to amend their judgment of the goodness in things and potential happiness derived from those things.[xxxiv]

This apparent freedom in human decision and action notwithstanding, the influence of Augustine on Aquinas in this particular matter is clear enough.  Unlike the nonvirtuous person, for example, a virtuous person has a proclivity to choose the common good (bonum in comuni) over particular goods.[xxxv]  The question is, “which agent is freer?” And according to Augustine, it is the one who is most contently participating in the universal good, i.e., God.  Freedom then in Thomas’s view is not a product of individual self-creation but rather is fulfilled by “embracing in a concrete and personal way the hierarchy of goods appropriate to our nature.”[xxxvi]

As already stated, Thomas’s explication of human freedom falls under the broader heading of theological anthropology and hence cannot be properly presented without regard for the theocentric orientation of this anthropology.  Thomas says in the Summa Contra Gentiles that the Divine Will does not remove contingency from things; nor does it impose absolute necessity on them.[xxxvii]  The efficacy of the Divine is not only such that what God wills should be, but also that it should be in the mode intended for it.  Therefore, necessity by supposition rather than absolute necessity is the condition of many contingent movements.  Aquinas gives the following example: if Socrates runs, he must also be moved.[xxxviii]  Thus God’s relationship to human freedom and the activity of creation in general is one characterized by intermediary and immediate causes respectively, which are not reducible to each other.  Similarly, Thomas explains that “[virtue] and vice do not originate in the same way: since virtue is caused by the subordination of the appetite to reason, or to the immutable good [perfection], which is God, whereas vice arises from the appetite for mutable good [privation].”[xxxix]

The challenge for Aquinas’s account of human freedom comes by accepting the concept of the will.  Aristotle had not developed such a concept; it seems to have come from Augustine.  In order for free will to be intelligible, the act of the will must be thought to either erupt into the world without a cause or consist of a freedom that is simultaneously compatible with having been caused – that is, not being the source of its own origin. According to Robert Pasnau, “Aquinas’s theory of free decision falls into the class of views now described as compatibilist – accounts on which freedom can coexist with cognitive and volitional systems that function in entirely deterministic ways, necessitated by the sum of prior events.”[xl]

This appears to relegate Aquinas’s philosophical system to some kind of determinism, but this is not the complete picture.  Thomas is elsewhere insistent that free decision is not compatible with determinism.[xli]  Pasnua observes further, however, that,  “Aquinas explains human freedom without any recourse to an uncaused, undetermined act of will or intellect – as if only an uncaused decision could count as a free decision.”[xlii]  Thus, despite the earlier claim to reason’s indeterminacy, supposing that the will is free to make a choice between two options is now in danger of incoherency.

How is it, then, that Aquinas can purport that human beings have free will?  Since Thomas claims with Aristotle that something is free which occurs by cause of itself,[xliii] a tension must be resolved by distinguishing between degrees and qualities of causality.[xliv]  Freedom for Aquinas then does not require that what is free be the first cause of itself; for Aquinas also submits that the will’s movement comes directly from the will and from God.[xlv]  Still, “human beings are in control of their acts because of a capacity for higher-order judgments and higher-order volitions.”[xlvi]  This is why one can choose to abstain from eating despite great hunger.[xlvii]  In this respect, that Thomas situates human beings above the animals is significant – lest the power of human volition be forgotten.

The discussion of freedom inevitably broaches the doctrine of predestination, which is where this analysis must culminate; but one discovers in Aquinas as well that the free will of human beings has been weakened by sin, whereby it is hindered from good by the corruption of nature.  Hence the subject of original sin and its relationship to human freedom must now be considered.

ORIGINAL SIN: CAUSES

The separation of reason and the senses, however it is broken down, underlies much of the difficulty with respect to morality.  The traditional Christian response to this quandary has been to speak about nature with recourse to the doctrine of original sin.  As one proceeding by way of faith seeking understanding, Thomas writes primarily as a theologian by declaring that the human will “would be naturally capable of complying with the orders issued reason” save for original sin. [xlviii]  Because of this sin, however, any natural moral virtue not informed by charity is judged to be a weakness or imperfection.

Moreover, it is but by revelation that human beings know their true end as union with God.  Hence Gilson explains, “it is essential to purely natural moral virtues that they have ends that fall short of [humanity’s] supernatural end,” and “[s]ince all natural moral virtues suffer this limitation, none of them is fully capable of satisfying the definition of virtue.”[xlix]  Concerning humanity’s culpability for falling short of this end, Thomas writes the following, making an important distinction between original and actual sin:

So too the disorder which is in an individual man … is not voluntary by reason of his personal will, but by reason of the will of the first parent, who through a generative impulse, exerts influence upon all who descend from him by way of origin, even as the will of the soul moves bodily members to their various activities. Accordingly, the sin passing in this way from the first parent to his descendants is called “original,” as a sin passing from the soul to the body’s members is called “actual.” Similarly, even as an actual sin committed through some bodily member is a sin of that member only as part of the man himself, and so is called a “sin of man,” so also original sin is the sin of the individual person only because he receives human nature from the first parent; and it is called “a sin of nature.”[l]

Furthermore, Aquinas calls original sin, as opposed to actual sin, a habit.  He distinguishes between two different kinds of habits, however.  The first kind is that by which power is inclined to an act.  The second kind is “the disposition of a complex nature, whereby that nature is well or ill disposed to something, chiefly when such a disposition has become like a second nature, as in the case of sickness or health.”[li]  A habit in this second sense then is not “infused” or “acquired” but “inborn”; that is, transmitted from humanity’s origin in its “first parent.”  One objection cited by Thomas suggests that original sin is a privation, but in response Thomas insists that it is only a partial privation, which is better expressed as a “corrupt habit.”  This corrupt habit is equally present in all.

Next, Thomas insists that original sin is not ignorance.  In a certain sense he is once more following Augustine who says that, “concupiscence is the guilt of original sin.”  Given that everything takes its species from its form, the species of original sin is taken from its cause.  The cause of original sin, Thomas explains, must be considered with respect to the cause of original justice, which is its contrary.[lii]  The differentiation to be made here is that, materially speaking, original sin is concupiscence, whereas formally speaking it is privation of original justice.  There is some debate about which of these aspects is of greater significance for Aquinas.  Original justice consists in humanity’s will being subject to God’s will, whose function is to move everything else to itself as the end. The qualitative deficiency of nature then – as privation of original justice – might rightly be considered the principle nature of original sin, whereas derivatively sinful acts are better called concupiscence.

The privation of this justice, as already implied above, entails humanity’s inordinate turning by its own will to mutable good as its end, as opposed to the ultimate good, which is God.  This turning away from God by human beings is made possible by the nature of the aforementioned freedom of the will, thus characterizing the relationship between original sin and human freedom.  This does not yet satisfy the requirements for explicating the full extent of the relationship, however, as the function of grace and God’s providence must also be examined.

In an effort to defend Thomas’s account of the relationship between original sin and human responsibility for sin as plausible, Jeremy Cohen offers this assessment:

In the state of original justice, man would have been capable of realizing the spiritual end of communion with God, for which purpose God had indeed created him; without original justice, man can no longer properly order his various drives and appetites, and he falls subject to the frailties of human existence. Original sin, then, defined simply as the loss of original justice, does not of itself produce vice in man or in any active way induce him to sin.[liii]

And though Aquinas concedes that mortality, ignorance, passion and a whole host of other negative consequences resulted from original sin, the view of original sin as the privation of original justice amounts to keeping human nature essentially intact.

To further disclose the cause of original sin, an important question for Aquinas is whether sin infects an individual through the soul or the body.  It would appear at first that if sin comes to us through the soul, God would be the author of sin – a postulation that Thomas rejects, since God cannot will evil.[liv]  There are two ways in which sin can be in something – by principle or instrumental cause on the one hand, or as in its subject on the other.[lv]  Despite being generated by the flesh from parent to child, sin is still originally a condition of the will before the other powers, whose cause is the human subject.[lvi]  This follows the order of perfections from the will down to the passions.[lvii]  It is the soul that is the subject of guilt, not the flesh and its parts.  Furthermore, bodily semen does not by its own power produce the rational soul, but only disposes the matter for it.

At the same time, Thomas maintains that the soul’s stain by sin is caused by the infusion of the soul and the body through carnal generation.  Moreover, he later states that while original sin belongs chiefly to the will, the infection and corruption of sin insofar as it is transmitted belongs specially and proximately to the generative power, the concupiscible faculty and the sense of touch.[lviii]  Hence the will is only remotely infected by the transmission of sin.  The motivation for such a distinction seems to be God’s exoneration from the authorship, or at least from the immediate creation and participation in the transmission of original sin during the generation of new human life by infusing the soul in the body.  But this still leaves an apparent contradiction to be discussed below, particularly since the soul for Aquinas does not exist prior to its infusion with the body.

THE EFFECTS OF SIN (ON HUMAN FREEDOM)

Covetousness and pride are judged by Thomas to be the root and beginning of all sin respectively.  Thomas identifies covetousness as a “genus comprising all sins” because it denotes a propensity of a corrupt nature to “inordinate desire for any temporal good.”[lix]  The primarily means by which we obtain temporal goods, however, is through riches, which is the interpretation Thomas provides for St. Paul’s maxim that “philarguria is the root of all [kinds of] evil” (1 Tim. 6:10).  Every sin grows out of the love of temporal things, and as Qoheleth says, “all things obey money” (Eccles. 10:19).  The love of God, on the other hand – caritas – is the  opposing virtue.  About pride, the teacher of wisdom also claims that it is the beginning of all sin (Eccles. 10:15).  At its most original level, pride is contempt toward subjection to God’s commands as a result of an inordinate desire to excel.[lx]  So though it denotes a special sin in one sense, it nonetheless is the beginning of every sin in another sense.  A special sin refers to the execution of an intention rather than the intention itself.  Yet again we are given a distinction so subtle – between covetousness and pride that is – that one might wonder whether there is a distinction at all.  Thomas uses “self-love” synonymously with pride, which would seem to be the opposite of caritas in the same instance – just like the love of money.

Going a step further, besides the sin of covetousness and pride, there are still other sins that Aquinas calls “capital vices.”  A capital vice is “one from which other vices arise, chiefly by being their final cause, [whose] origin is formal . . . wherefore a capital vice is not only the principle of others, but also their director and, in a way, their leader: because the art or habit, to which he end belongs, is always the principle and the commander in matters concerning the means.”[lxi]  Thus Thomas nominates the seven capital vices: vainglory, envy, anger, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, and lust.  And still further it is shown how derivative sins can be traced back to the capital vices, such as ignorance to sloth, which pertains to negligence by one who “declines to acquire spiritual goods on account of the attendant labor.”[lxii]

Sin diminishes the good of nature by corrupting and wounding it.  The good of nature was the gift to “the first man” in the state of original justice, and as such comprised an inclination to virtue.[lxiii]  What has been destroyed entirely, however, is precisely this inclination, which is why Thomas says there is a diminution.  This diminution does not consist in such things as being, living, and understanding, however; but neither is it a mere accident to the good nature of the subject.  Rather it affects human nature both by an action of the soul and by the passion of an object acting on the subject’s power – by moving its sensitive appetite – which inclines the reason and will to sin.

At the same time, while he conveys with the tradition that death and bodily defects are the effects of sin and therefore unnatural, Aquinas holds that the good of human nature itself cannot be completely destroyed by sin.  The reason for this is found in the Augustinian notion that evil does exist except in some measure of good.[lxiv]  The natural inclination to virtue in the human nature that is diminished by sin was proper to its rational capacity.  But sin has not totally removed reason from human nature.  What is diminished each time that a human being sins is not its root inclination in sum, but “only the part of the obstacle which is placed against its attaining its term.”[lxv]  What Thomas means here is that sin only destroys by way of sin that has been added on to other sin, as in the example of a finite thing being diminished indefinitely through a continual subtraction of a proportion, not quantity.  For even the “lost,” Thomas avows, retain something of the natural inclination to virtue.  Otherwise they would have no power for remorse.

Sin leaves the powers of the soul destitute of their proper order, which Aquinas terms a wounding of nature.  He explicitly lists the wounds of ignorance, malice, weakness, and concupiscence, which are the result of other sins causing the reason to be obscured, the will to be hardened to evil, good actions to be more difficult, and concupiscence to be more impetuous.[lxvi]  This wounding also includes the privation of mode, species and order.[lxvii]  Remembering that “every being and every good as such depends on its form which it derives its species,” Aquinas avers that mode, species and order are also consequent upon every created good and therefore are subject to the same privation.  This is because “forms of things are like in numbers” so that a form has a certain mode corresponding to its measure.[lxviii]

In addition to being wounded, human nature is said to be stained by sin.  Aquinas affirms that this act of staining causes a loss of “comeliness” in human nature, which is twofold: of the natural light of reason and of the Divine Light (lumen glorie) or Divine Law.  The stain is a privation of union with the Divine and natural light as a result of sin.  Thomas compares sin in this manor to “a shadow, which is the privation of light through the interposition of a body, and which varies according to the diversity of the interposed bodies.”[lxix]  In speaking of these various sins, Thomas declares that the stain on a human being remains after the act of sin has passed. Once moved by grace, however, that individual can return to the Divine Light and to the light of reason as a consequence of the change in his or her will, which is more than simply ceasing to commit the sinful act.[lxx]

GRACE

From here it is possible to proceed to an account of the function of grace in healing the wounded, stained nature.  This will confer a more comprehensive inquiry into the coherence of the sin and freedom dialectic in Aquinas’s theology.  To review, humanity’s state without grace has been wounded by original sin with a consequent disordering of concupiscence, which prevents acting at all times as reason prescribes.[lxxi] Just as theology does not suppress philosophy – and in the same way that the supernaturally infused virtues do not suppress the natural virtues – neither does grace suppress nature (gratia non tollit naturam); on the contrary, it adds to nature and brings greater perfection to it.[lxxii]

In Thomism, no choice is necessary between nature and grace. Instead, grace presupposes nature, and by way of healing and elevation, perfects it, restoring it to its original capacity.  It does not contradict nature. This reflects the basic theological optimism in Aquinas.  Similarly, theological virtues assist the natural virtues to fully realize fully their proper perfection as virtues.[lxxiii] By extension, a human being can know truth apart from grace, but this does not mean that truth can be known apart from God who is the First Act and Mover; for to know truth is to act by intellectual light, which is a motion produced by creation and subject to the plan of God’s providence.[lxxiv]

When it comes to doing good, because human nature is not entirely corrupted by sin, human beings can work some particular good, “as to build dwellings, plant vineyards, and the like; yet it cannot do all the good natural to it.”[lxxv]  Even if in the state of perfect nature, however, human beings would still need a “gratuitous strength” (grace) infused to natural strength in order to do and wish supernatural good.  In the state of corrupt nature, on the other hand, grace is necessary for healing the corruption of nature, which otherwise follows its private good according to the fallen appetite of rational will.  So too then grace is needed to carry out “works of supernatural virtue, which are meritorious,” which includes fulfilling the commandments of the Divine Law.[lxxvi]  In both cases, therefore, the Divine help is necessary for good acts.  It follows from this for Thomas that human beings can neither merit everlasting life without grace nor prepare themselves to receive this grace.[lxxvii]  With free will, sin, and grace just considered, it is apposite to examine the doctrine of divine election according to Aquinas – the auspice under which freedom, sin, and grace can be reconciled.

PREDESTINATION AND REPROBATION

Despite the positive light shed herein on Aquinas’s theological anthropology, what is often thought to be a negative side of his theology is exposed upon the consideration of predestination and reprobation.  A full exposition of this doctrine cannot be conducted here, but failing to give a short synopsis would leave a one-sided impression.  It has thus far been noted that in humanity’s corrupt nature, the aid of healing grace is needed not only to love God and neighbor, but finally to obtain salvation.  This grace is always given in mercy, however, so its refusal should not pose an inconsistency in Divine justice.[lxxviii]  For this reason, if unbaptized children or pagans die in a state of unforgiven original sin, Aquinas maintains that their potential for union with Christ has remained unactualized for lack of election.[lxxix]  Predestination consigns some to the attainment of Christ’s saving passion through and faith and charity, while reprobation “permits” others to be excluded from this merciful end.  Predestination therefore is the cause of grace, whereas reprobation is not the cause of sin.  Reprobation is God’s abandonment, however, which leads to eternal punishment.  At the same time, the inculpable unbelief of those who have not heard the preaching of revelation is not what damns, but instead the other sins that cannot be taken away without faith.[lxxx]  This unbelief itself is already a form of punishment for original sin.[lxxxi]  The withdrawal of original justice and grace that makes a human being vulnerable to the stain of sin in the first place has the character of punishment as well.[lxxxii]

Evil and sin are understood as the consequence of God’s creating corruptible beings in a world marked by finitude and chance, and as such are not in conflict with the perfection of creation in its entirety.[lxxxiii]  Since both the generation and corruption of creatures is willed by God, however, in one sense God can be said to will evil – but only to the extent that such evil is assigned to serve the larger good.[lxxxiv]  And in spite of his otherwise optimistic tone regarding nature, “Aquinas’s focus on the good of the whole, and the “fittingness” of the multitude and diversity of creatures, allowed him to acknowledge the real presence of evil in nature.”[lxxxv]

God’s providence over all things is twofold in this schema: immediate and intermediary.  In the first place, the divine mind contains the “ratio” of all causes and effects and therefore the eternal ordering of everything to an end.[lxxxvi]  This is so because the “the order of divine providence remains immutable and certain insofar as all things happen as they have been foreseen,” and as they originate and participate in the actuality and source of all Being.[lxxxvii]  In the second place, however, there are finite, secondary causes by God’s consent and goodness to give creatures the dignity of causality.[lxxxviii]  As Anselm Min explains, these two senses are not mutually exclusive.[lxxxix]

Rational creatures are subject to God’s providence and foresight in such a way to be responsible for their deeds, but this responsible agency cannot be meritorious of grace; nor is it a foreknown, determining factor in God’s election of some and reprobation of others.[xc]  Hence predestination already includes within itself “the dialectic between salvific grace and human freedom.”[xci]  Concerning the reason for such a mysterious vision, the most one might say is that the logic of reprobation is founded in the permission of defect, for the promotion and greater manifestation of the good and perfect ordering of the whole.[xcii]

Nonetheless, one must not take Thomas’s doctrine of predestination in isolation.  Min makes the case that Aquinas – specifically in his earlier work – allows for the possibility of implicit faith and a “moral” way to God: “Aquinas’s God is as supremely “reasonable” God, who provides the means of salvation for everyone according to the nature of each, with full respect for the differences of times, persons, and conditions, never requiring the unnatural or the impossible of anyone.”[xciii]  Min acknowledges as well, however, that Thomas’s agreement with Augustine on reprobation would seem to negate what elsewhere appears to be a “preeminently reasonable, positive, and universalist dynamic of saving grace so evident in Aquinas’s theology.”[xciv]  Aquinas is not as pessimistic as Augustine, but the doctrine of predestination and reprobation certainly seems to portray God’s generosity as somewhat ambivalent or limited.

How might one charitably read this paradox?  Min advises the appropriation of hermeneutical suspicion on the one hand and retrieval on the other.[xcv]  Min underscores the prominent place of the absolute ontological priority the creator over the creature in Aquinas’s theology.[xcvi]  Thomas insists upon not measuring divine justice by human standards and, like Plato, relies upon the “harmony of the order in which each is rendered according to its due.”[xcvii]  Ultimately, God’s will is incomprehensible.  Aquinas is in seamless continuity with classical tradition as a whole by placing a successively glaring emphasis on the transcendence and otherness of God.  In terms of what can be retrieved then, it is exactly this kind of wonder and fearful respect for God’s lordship over creation on the one hand, and a humble appreciation for the thoroughly dependent and finite nature of human beings on the other that has been deficient in so many recent theologies.

With regard to criticism, it not clear given the logic just underlined that the damnation of reprobate human beings is solely their own fault.[xcviii]  Nor is it patently evident how God has not willed sin in creation.  For these reasons, one can justifiably hold deep reservations about the logic of reprobation.  In sum, however, Min’s conclusion is

not that the later Aquinas turned pessimist from his early soteriological optimism but that the [Summa] still bears the unresolved tension between the legacy of the Augustinian doctrine of sin and grace and the more positive directions Aquinas was creatively exploring and ultimate between his own sense of the incomprehensible ultimate sovereignty of divine freedom and his appreciation of the absolute generosity for the divine offer of salvation to all in view of Christ’s death and resurrection for all.[xcix]

A POST-CRITICAL CONCLUSION

There are a plethora of other elements worthy of retrieval in Aquinas, a few of which have roughly been touched on here.  In brusque summation, it is palpable that Thomas is affirmative in his view of nature.  In thinking about sexuality, for instance, he did not see reproduction as unnatural or sinful as a result of “the fall”; nor did he regard the bearing of children as a punishment for original sin – both of which are in contradistinction to Augustine for example.[c] The significance here is that original sin is not a positive trait, and that the goodness of nature holds precedence.

Proceeding from this same reasoning, one can also recall that Aquinas sees organized associations and government as part of the natural order enabling humanity to realize its capacity.[ci]  For Thomas, trade, commerce and the manner of properly ownership could also be performed justly under humanity’s obligation to care for the earth’s resources.  Thus without denying the effects of Adam’s fall on humanity, it is safe to conclude that “the Thomistic position comprised a noteworthy break with previous religious thought and did much to change the prevalent attitudes of European Christendom toward such basic worldly activities.”[cii]

In a time of mass migration, urbanization, depleting, non-renewable and vital resources – in essence, an unprecedented ecological crisis – a high volume of literature and rhetoric that emphasizes humanity’s kinship with nature and responsibility thereof has ensued.  Not only can Aquinas’s theological vision of the goodness of human nature, sin and freedom serve as an authoritative resource for advocating the protection of the planet, but it also proposes a balanced insight into both humanity’s liability for and ability to improve the corrupted condition of things.

Merold Westphal has amusingly remarked that “[c]ompared to Augustine, Luther and Calvin, for example, Aquinas does epistemology as if in the Garden of Even . . .”[ciii]  In doing so, he has typified the tendency on the part of Protestantists and neo-Calvinists specifically to accuse Aquinas of being too naïve about the damaging effects of sin own humanity’s ability to reason and will the good.  In response to such shortsighted criticisms, R.J. Snell retorts: “Original sin [in Aquinas] does more than simply deprive humans of a supernatural gift, for the privation of that gift is the loss of harmony, and that loss diminishes the soul’s natural inclination to virtue.  [For Aquinas,] that the metaphysical structure of the powers is not affected does not mean that the diminishing of inclination is not destructive of proper functioning.”[civ]

What is more, Thomas’s analysis of sin can even speak truth into an era of economic turmoil and globalization.  Relying on the work of Bernard Longergan, Snell extrapolates from Thomas’s portrayal of original sin and comments further about the latent social implications:

[S]in is the cause of decline, of failure to attain our natural good(s).  As a “component in social process,” sin is the “opposite to the development of civilizational order,” and society becomes “in favor of the powerful, the rich, or the most numerous class,” and there results “from sin a bias in favor of certain groups and against other groups.”  In the decline of civilization, creativity is abandoned as those insights which might lead to new policies are refused by the contraction of consciousness, or if those constructive insights are made by some they are rejected as the intelligent policy or idea “has to combine with power, with wealth, with popular notions, before it can be realized.”[cv]

Maurizio Ragazzi echoes Snell but also links this social analysis back to human freedom by arguing that the social dimension of sin does not exclude, but instead is rooted in the free will of each [human being] who remains responsible for all human action attributed to him or her.[cvi]

Thus one finds still another retrievable dimension of Aquinas’s work in these thinkers on the subject of sin and freedom – even with having inventively extended his thought to the modern political realm.[cvii]  With a proper critique of Thomas’s somewhat deterministic theological framework notwithstanding, a myriad of other contemporary reclamations can be made regarding these doctrines.  The nature of the task for modern-day theologians, therefore – with regard to the important job of recovering the many redeemable facets of Thomism – is perhaps better seen in this post-critical light.

Related articles

• Aquinas, “Nature” – and Sex. (opentabernacle.wordpress.com)
• Aristotle and the Higher Good (dinmerican.wordpress.com)
• Aquinas’s Posture of Humility to the Tradition (theophilogue.wordpress.com)
• Aquinas, idolatry, and the previous post (liturgical.wordpress.com)

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.

Two Prayers:

“I have already formed many habits of consuming and acting.  Guide me in aligning my personal priorities to conform to my awareness of a world hungry.  May my life-style become more compatible with our biosphere and supportive of people around the world.  Lord, help me choose a simpler life-style that promotes solidarit with the world’s poor, helps me appreciate nature more, affords greater opportunity to work together with my neighbors, reduces my use of limited resources, creates greater inner harmony, saves money, allows time for meditation and prayer, incites me to take political and social action.  May all my decisions about my style of life celebrate the joy of life that comes from loving you.  Amen.”  - From Visions of a World Hungry by Thomas G. Pettepiece

“If I pray God that all people might be inspired by me, I would find myself repentant at the door of every house.  I would rather pray that my heart be pure toward them than that I changed something in theirs.” – Amma Sarah

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.

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.

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.

Friedrich Nietzsche is without question infamous for, among many other things, how much he despised Christianity.  Especially significant, as many also know, is Nietzsche’s portrayal of Jesus in contrast to the Pauline version of the faith that energized and proliferated the widespread religion of Christianity that Nietzsche knew and that people still see today.  The villain for Nietzsche is not Jesus but Paul of course.  No doubt Nietzsche’s view of both Christianity and Jesus has been substantially called into question,[i] but it simultaneously has served to correct some less than praiseworthy attributes of the Church in some cases, and to hold the faithful accountable in others.[ii]  In addition, significant attention has been given to Nietzsche’s analysis of Buddhism as compared to Christianity.  While Nietzsche’s clearly regards the former to be more realistic, he still considers both to be nihilistic and decadent.  Others have also wondered about the degree to which Nietzsche’s depiction of Buddhism is consistent with authentic Buddhism – it may depend on which Buddhist tradition is being considered.  This is partly of what will be considered in this essay.

What is discussed less often, however, is the extent to which Nietzsche’s selective picture of Jesus parallels his (mis?)characterization of the Buddhist worldview.  Hence, what will be conducted here is an overview of how Nietzsche construes Jesus of Nazareth, placed alongside of a synopsis of his appreciation and understanding of Buddhism.  A short assessment and response will follow.  Less background in Buddhism than Christianity is assumed on the reader’s part, so a very basic and pithy overview of the features of Buddhism that are related to Nietzsche’s treatment of it will be supplied in necessarily broad strokes before drawing any conclusions.  Beforehand though, it will be useful to give a short account of what Nietzsche says about two of the other great world religions.

NIETZSCHE ON HINDUISM AND ISLAM

The Law of Manu is considered to be words of Brahma recorded in the Dharmasastra tradition of Hinduism.  As such, for many it has an authoritative tone.  The Bible, as we have already seen, can only be used for bad purposes according to Nietzsche: “negation of life, hatred of the body, the degradation and self-violation of humans through the concept of sin,” but Nietzsche gets the opposite feeling when he reads the law book of Manu (AC 56).[iii]  For this reason, Nietzsche regards it as a far superior work.  The main reason for this is because it permits the noble classes to embrace and defend their privilege.  In other words, it preserves the natural order – the order that Christianity corrupts.

Via an approximate application of the cast system, Nietzsche maintains that three main levels of society should exist.  The highest class consists of those who are the most “spiritual” and therefore the “strongest,” which is essentially to say that they are the most knowledgeable (AC 57).[iv]  This group is small.  The second class is also strong, but more so in the physical sense.  This level includes the vanguards of the law – those like the king, the judges, soldiers, and anyone who works to ensure protection and security of the political order.  These actors behave in accordance with the interests of the first class – the nobility.  Lastly there is the mediocre caste, which makes up the vast majority.  It might be acceptable to name these people the laborers.  They are the farmers, traders, factory workers, and even many of the artists.  To summarize what Nietzsche means here, “Everyone finds his [or her] privilege in his [or her] own type of being . . . [m]ediocrity is needed before there can be exceptions: it is the condition for a high culture.”[v]  Said another way, rights are only privileges.  Thus, injustice – as opposed to Christianity’s notion of injustice – only arises when rights are demanded as warranting equality for all, which disrupts the necessary social ladder.  This happens, for instance, when “chandala-apostles” – those promoting Christian values (chandala refers to the lowest caste rung in some Indian societies) – challenge the otherwise happy and modest sentiments of the mediocre class by encouraging them to expect equality and act with ressentiment, or revenge and envy.

Though this might sound politically incorrect at best or like outright discrimination and prejudice to many modern readers at worst, it would perhaps be too simplistic to completely dismiss Nietzsche’s argument without further consideration.  The word “mediocre” is not meant to have the same derogatory connotation that people today typically associate with it.  It is rather simply describing the way life is for Nietzsche as he observes it.  The description coheres with what Nietzsche believes is instinctive and natural.  Religion as reflected in books like the Law of Manu merely serves to authorize or normalize what has already been true throughout human history.  It is not mean to necessarily be explicitly evaluative.  What Nietzsche judges to be misleading, however, is the extent to which such teachings are presented as having been inspired by a higher power once and for all rather than developed and superimposed after much reflection and experimentation on the part of rulers, priests, and other elites.

So while Nietzsche appreciates the more realistic philosophical underpinnings of the Indian traditions he knew, they still posed a threat to the good of European society because of what Nietzsche determined to be a renunciation of the world in their thought:  “Knowing him, the Atman, Brahmans relinquish the desire for posterity, the desire for possessions, the desire for worldly prosperity, and go forth as medicants.”[vi] According to Richard Brown, Nietzsche “falsely regarded Hinduism (Brahmanism, Vedanta), like Schopenhauer, as singularly life-denying.”[vii]  Indian philosophy in general was seen by Nietzsche as essentially pessimistic, supporting the ascetic denial of the will.  Because Nietzsche read Shopenhauer, it is likely that that he understood the text of the Bhagavad Gita as a predominately non-dualistic or Advaitic variety following Sankara.[viii]  As such, Nietzsche equates the concept of maya with the unreal and illusion in general, which is textually inaccurate.[ix]  Ironically, as what will be highlighted below concerning Buddhism, it has been suggested that maya resembles something similar to Nietzsche’s will to power.

In a similar vein, Nietzsche believes Islam to be a “lesser evil” compared to Christianity, and for analogous reasons.  Muslims assert noble values through masculine instincts, for example, and say “Yes” to life in this way (AC 60).[x]  More specifically, Nietzsche expresses admiration for Islamic culture, which Europe lost when the Moors and the Jews were expulsed from Spain.  Christians were sure to take their riches, which empowered their propagation in Europe and beyond (to the “new” world) even more than Nietzsche acknowledges.  Lastly, Nietzsche complains about how this money was used by the Church to buy German aristocratic support over the centuries.

NIETZSCHE’S JESUS

            The first issue Nietzsche addresses in this second portion of The Anti-Christ is the notion of the “psychology of the redeemer.”  Particularly problematic for Nietzsche is Renan’s concept of Jesus’ type as a “genius” or “hero,” which Nietzsche calls  “unevangelical.”  Jesus’ teachings negate struggle and immoralize the “capacity for resistance” according to Nietzsche (AC 29).[xi]  Thus the world that matters is completely internalized.  The eternal kingdom lives inside each of us.  Consequently, Nietzsche says Jesus promotes 1) a hatred for every kind of reality, and 2) an understanding of natural instincts like reluctance, aversion to pain, and self-preservation as inherently harmful.  These two principles lay the groundwork for the doctrine of redemption, which Nietzsche also describes as a “refined development of hedonism,” and somewhat related to Epicureanism (AC 30).[xii]  Pleasure or bliss then, as Nietzsche reads Jesus, can only comes by adopting love for all, even enemies.  This is the religion of love that inevitably develops as a result of the fear of pain.

In this way, Nietzsche challenges Renan’s depiction of Jesus as a “fanatic of aggression” and as a “mortal enemy” to the priests and the theologians of the day (AC 31).[xiii]  Instead, Nietzsche insists that the redeemer psychology is a “childlike” faith – not a “hard-won faith” (AC 32).[xiv]  And this respect it seems, Nietzsche associates Jesus more closely with the teachings of Buddhism, which as we’ve seen he holds in slightly higher esteem.  Hence, Nietzsche sees Jesus committing to a faith that is not formulaic, and certainly not combative.  Jesus is an anti-realist, so the Last Super, or language about the “Son of Man,” or the “Kingdom of God” for instance, only functions allegorically and is limited by the Jewish religious context.  In Nietzsche’s reading, everything Jesus believes as “true” is just an inner light – nothing solid.  He is a “free spirit.”  Thus, dogma is only symbolism, in spite of every crude ecclesiastical temptation to suggest otherwise.  Indeed, Nietzsche calls Jesus “the great symbolist” (AC 34),[xv] implying that the outer, material world is just that – a symbol, nothing more.  It’s a symbol that can tell us something about the world that truly matters, which is the inner world.

Doctrines like the Trinity, or even the personhood of God, are complete inventions and without base in “the redeemer,” according to Nietzsche.  Furthermore, Jesus’ knowledge is “stupidity” concerning worldly systems and structures like religion, culture, or the state.  Guilt, punishment, sin and hope for reward are apparently absent from the mind of the “evangel” (AC 33).[xvi]  The blessedness of the “glad tidings” announced by Jesus is not conditional by Nietzsche’s rendering – meaning, not a promise.  It’s a fully realized way of relating to the world in the present – of practicing and acting, not believing (e.g., having no enemies, not showing favoritism, letting one’s “yes be yes,” and not getting angry).  This kind of life would make a person feel divine, eternal, and perfect.  This is what Jesus means when he promises “paradise” for the thief on the cross.  To take an example, Nietzsche claims that the word “father” expresses this feeling itself, and the word “son” represents the “entrance” into that feeling (AC 34).[xvii]  Furthermore:

“Atonement and praying for forgiveness are not the way to God: only the evangelical practice leads to God, in fact it is ‘God’ – What the evangel did away with was the Judaism of the concepts of ‘sin’, ‘forgiveness of sin’, ‘faith’, ‘redemption through faith’ – the whole Jewish church doctrine was rejected in the ‘glad tidings’” (AC 33).[xviii]

In sum, the psychological reality of redemption consists solely in material and interior rather than otherworldly terms.  Jesus promises nothing about afterlife in Nietzsche’s view.  It is this life that matters – a new life, not a new faith, which is everywhere and nowhere as an experience of the heart (AC 34).[xix]  John Charles Evans has shed light on Nietzsche’s Jesus in very positive terms: “The abolition of sin in deference to conceptions of living and acting is a dramatic and critical interpretation.  It connects Nietzsche’s Jesus, not only with life affirmation, but also Nietzsche’s concept of ‘beyond good and evil.’  Nietzsche ascribes to Jesus the concept of value creation through living rather through the pursuit of a higher moral code.”[xx]  The suggestion that Nietzsche understands Jesus as life affirming might be somewhat a misinterpretation here.  It is fair on the other hand to highlight Nietzsche’s appreciation of Jesus’ value creation.  Jesus just doesn’t create the values that Nietzsche is convinced are best for people, but Nietzsche is willing to admit that Jesus’ spiritual program is a viable option.

A Christian might immediately object and reply that Jesus at least appears to directly and intentionally oppose the political powers and religious leaders of his day, but Nietzsche doubts whether Jesus was even conscience of or concerned about this at all, leaving some readers to suspicious of Nietzsche’s hermeneutical key.  It is not the concern of this essay to analyze at any length the exegetical problems posed by Nietzsche’s rendering of Jesus. Nietzsche was surely aware of the discrepancies between his construal and that found in Gospels; he just thought that the psychology of the disciples and the first followers would reconcile the differences.

NIETZSCHE AND BUDDHISM

A Very Brief Philosophical Background

“It was Nietzsche who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth.’” – Richard Rorty[xxi]

Nietzsche rejects Hegel’s dialectical unfolding of historical progress with hierarchical stages in the world (though Nietzsche does seem to maintain that there is an inner logic at work in history, a process and a dynamism, as Hegel did).[xxii]  But his revaluation of values can be expressed in positively Hegelian terms insofar as he negates a negation, for he considers Christianity as the ‘revaluation of all the values of antiquity.’”[xxiii]  And this double negation does not lead back to the same place, but beyond – beyond pessimism and optimism, and even theism and atheism.

Nietzsche is far more concerned about the individual, however, and takes a psychological approach in his work more than that of an attempt to conduct a totalizing synthesis of history.  As Gianni Vattimo has put it, Nietzsche is convinced that “seeking metaphysical consolation in essences and the rational structure of the universe was characteristic of an enfeebled and decadent culture.”[xxiv]  In this manner, Heidegger paints a stark picture of Nietzsche:  “The suprasensory world is without effective power.  It bestows no life.  Metaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche, Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end.  Nietzsche understands his own philosophy as the countermovement to metaphysics, and that means for him a movement in opposition to Platonism.”[xxv]  Consequently, Nietzsche rejects the root idea that morality is in place with its source in something transcendent.  And even if some metaphysical reality existed, and one could somehow know it, such knowledge would be useless for Nietzsche.[xxvi]

Nietzsche criticizes Kant for drawing what Nietzsche thinks is an epistemological boundary line, but Nietzsche misunderstands Kant on this point, as Kant only means to make a limit distinction.  So Nietzsche really accepts Kant’s view of the empirical limitations of knowledge in a certain sense, but vehemently disallows for any kind of faith – a position at which Kant never arrived – as faith for Nietzsche would only reflect human misguided desire instead of anything about truth.

The trouble with the enlightened thinkers then, irreligious as they may be, is that they still conceive of reality in a two-world framework.  The Socratic pursuit of knowledge about reality is their chief objective and is presumed to lead to happiness.  Like Hume before him, Nietzsche understands reason to be a slave of the passions.[xxvii]   Bearing this in mind, once one has detected the “human, all too human” foundation of metaphysical systems, there is nothing remaining on which to stand.  Nietzsche has perhaps moved the farthest away from Descartes at this point.  And to a significant degree, Nietzsche has followed Leibniz’s awareness that human perceptions and beliefs are not always conscious, and certainly that they are not static; nor is reality dependent upon these thoughts, though on the other hand we are constantly being shaped by them.  Nietzsche “thus helps us take seriously the possibility that there is no central faculty, no central self, called ‘reason.’”[xxviii]

Nietzsche adheres to Feuerbach’s admonition that Gods are the result of a projection of unconscious human qualities,[xxix] by assuming that “religions are created by humanity according to perceived spiritual needs.”[xxx]  Nietzsche goes further than Feuerbach though, because Feuerbach is still conceiving of a common humanity.  As soon as humanity is universalized, Nietzsche is appalled.  Instead Nietzsche inverts Feuerbach by individualizing this truth.  God can no longer be the idealized objectification of the best possible human being because, not only is there no such agreed-upon human being, but the Christian God would be antithetical to the kind of God Nietzsche would idealize.  The only common nature is that some are strong and others are weak.  Epistemologically then, it begins to become clear why Nietzsche shares more with Buddhism or Hinduism than Christianity.

Nietzsche on Buddhism

Buddhism presupposes a very mild climate, extremely gentle and liberal customs, the complete absence of militarism, and the existence of higher, scholarly classes to give focus to the movement.  The highest goals are cheerfulness, quiet, and an absence of desire, and these goals are achieved.  Buddhism is not a religion where people only aspire to perfection: perfection is the norm (AC 21).[xxxi]

As mentioned above, Nietzsche does judge Buddhism to be superior to Christianity, as it is situated beyond good and evil, departs from morality and has no conception salvation from sin or sin itself for that matter: “This is the main distinction Nietzsche makes between the two nihilistic religions: Buddhism has no ground in ressentiment against life whereas Christianity – or, as we might say, Christendom – is a product of it.”[xxxii]  By confronting the reality of suffering, Buddhism is at least for Nietzsche not dishonest.  It doesn’t manipulate suffering or purport to overcome it in a Christian fashion by conjuring up a masochistic redemption or heavenly reward story a result of innocent death and sacrifice.  It has no ‘idea’ of God, and as such is phenomenological and positivistic rather than metaphysical (AC 20).[xxxiii]  Prayer, asceticism, and compulsion are absent.  Buddhists do not hope for any eschatological or judgmental triumph – unlike Christianity, whose values are otherworldly.  They concern themselves instead with living the present life.

Nietzsche cites the Buddhist maxim, ‘enmity will not bring an end to enmity,’ which illustrates well the difference between Buddhism and Nietzsche’s experience with Christian ressentiment.  On the other hand, this notion discloses some of Buddhism’s anti-instinctive tendencies in Nietzsche’s view, like the suppression of the self and the ego. Nietzsche wants to overcome resistance more so than self (AC 2).[xxxiv]  Preventing trouble by not acting – what a terrible way to live, Nietzsche might charge. It is withdrawal for Nietzsche, fatigue of civilization having grown too sensitive to pain.  Furthermore, Nietzsche is troubled by the aversion to suffering demonstrated by both religions.  Suffering for Nietzsche is not to be feared or escaped, nor sought, but utilized.  It is an opportunity (BGE 201).[xxxv]  Nietzsche gives his diagnosis of Buddhism and its perspective on suffering as follows:

Buddhism has two physiological facts that it has always kept in mind: first, an excessively acute sensitivity that is expressed as are refined susceptibility to pain, and second, having lived all too long with concepts and logical procedures, an over-spiritualization that has had the effect of promoting the ‘impersonal’ at the expense of the personal ones. These physiological conditions give rise to depression (AC 20).[xxxvi]

“According to Nietzsche, both Christianity and Buddhism define redemption as the absence of suffering.”[xxxvii] What is problematic for Nietzsche is that, like Christianity – even though it does so in a more natural way – Buddhism gives itself the disease for which it claims to be the cure.  It is too weak, Nietzsche would say, to truly welcome suffering as that which life entails.  Buddhists rightly see that the condition of suffering itself must be accepted.  But that is precisely where they stop and turn to seek Nirvana, which for Nietzsche is the life of enlightened self-interest – just not in a noble way.[xxxviii]  Nobles are not afraid.  Accordingly, the Buddha has to come up with all kinds of tricks:

The Buddha took hygienic measures against this [depression], including: living out in the open, the wandering life, moderation and a careful diet; caution as far as liquor is concerned; caution when it comes to all affects that create bile or raise the blood temperature; no worrying about either yourself or other people.  He insists on ideas that produce either calm or amusement – he comes up with methods for phasing out all the others.  He sees goodness and kindness as healthy (AC 20).[xxxix]

Nietzsche is convinced that the same process he sees happening in Europe already occurred with the Buddha five centuries before “the European calendar.” The age of idealism had reached an end there as well, leading to the depression described above.  Nietzsche is proposing an alternative solution – one that does not end with the move from “Christian conscience” to “scientific conscience,” the latter of which interpreted history with “divine reason” (GM iii. 27 – he quotes The Gay Science here).[xl]  Instead, because “all great things destroy themselves by an act of self-cancellation” – a reference to the Hegelian dialectic – the “will to truth” itself has become aware of its own problem (GM iii. 27).[xli]  And with this Nietzsche is able to conclude the following about suffering: “Man, the bravest animal, the one most accustomed to suffering, does not deny suffering in itself.  He desire it, he seeks it out in person, provided that people show him a meaning for it, the purpose of suffering.  The curse that earlier spread itself over men was not suffering, but the senselessness of suffering – and the ascetic ideal offered him a meaning!”  Thus, Buddhism for Nietzsche is exactly what he has predicted for Europe: “man will sooner will nothingness than not will . . .” (GM iii. 27).[xlii]  None of this will do for Nietzsche, since humanity is better off with “I will” rather than “thou shalt” (Zarathustra, 60-64):[xliii] “The world seen from within, the world described according to its ‘intelligible character’ – it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else” (BGE 36).[xliv]

Nietzsche’s Alternative

Insofar as will to power relates to freedom, it is not freedom from [suffering, for instance, out of fear] but freedom to – freedom to act and realize oneself.[xlv]  This is what Nietzsche does not find in Buddhism.  Though they both have an ambition for a kind of self-overcoming, their respective motivation and means are incongruent.  And while an extensive excursus on the will to power cannot be done here, it should at minimum be clarified that the idea does not denote a superficial, corrupt idea of power that leads to ruthless evildoing, for example.  It is rather an “enobling” of the mind for Nietzsche.[xlvi]  The truly powerful as he sees it would never intentionally harm, as that would be a display of weakness.  Harm could happen, but only as a byproduct of creative enactment.[xlvii]  This is why some artists and philosophers can be considered by Nietzsche to be the most valuable, powerful people, while barbarians for him are some of the weakest, most uncultured, and least valuable.[xlviii] At the same time, the will to power is more than a “struggle for existence” as Darwin has it; it is what drives enhancement, growth, and the generation of life.[xlix]

No less important is the idea of the will itself as a type of desire for improvement and not just the fulfillment of any fleeting impulse.[l]  As Rorty has argued in his interpretation of Nietzsche, “The drama of an individual human life, or of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in which a preexistent goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not reached.”  Self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s mind therefore is something definitely divergent from Christian redemption and Buddhist enlightenment.

BUDDHISM: ANOTHER LOOK

Whereas orthodox Indian religions claim that every person has an eternal soul (atman) as part of the metaphysical absolute of Brahman, the Buddha denied the existence of any such eternal or immutable spiritual essence.  The principle end for Buddhism is the cessation of suffering and rebirth, which is defined negatively, but the path is construed positively, aiming to fulfill humanity’s potential for goodness and happiness.  The final and highest goal is the summum bonum of Nirvana, which literally translates to “quenching” or “blowing out,”[li] but Nirvana does not have an unambiguous, fixed meaning.[lii]  Though the means by which one reaches Nirvana is often assumed to be by way of virtuosity, living morally as such is considered by some Buddhist scholars to actually be a hindrance. [liii]  This is because it reproduces karma, which binds one to the cycle of rebirth. Hence it can be explained instead that virtue and wisdom – a profound philosophical understanding of the human condition – are fused together in Buddhist thought.  The latter, however, seems to takes precedence.

Concerning wisdom, what must first be acknowledged and embraced is the truth of suffering (Dukkha).  There are different levels of suffering though ranging from sickness, pain, and grief to not getting what one wants and discovering a lack of control of one’s environment.  It’s not that pleasures and fleeting enjoyments are ignored in Buddhism, or even unappreciated, but the futility of pleasant moments is definitely underlined.  Addiction to the desire for these moments and experiences is what causes reincarnation.  Even a pain-free life can be incredibly unsatisfying.  The teaching here is not implying that all desire is bad.  It is “bad” only when excessive or perverted, described as Tanha (greed, hatred, delusion – not unlike ressentiment). Buddhist sources also speak of desire in more positive terms as chanda.[liv]  This understanding of desire, however – which evokes the idea of wanting to reach a particular goal, for instance, like Nirvana itself – departs from Nietzsche’s rendering of the primal instincts.

Cravings and thirsts are inevitable, but what must be remembered in the Buddhist universe is cyclic change, whereby everything that exists is characterized by unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), impermanence (annica), and the absence of self-essence (anata).[lv]  Thus the burning flame of these cravings and thirsts must be put out.  It should not be inferred that Buddhism is a suicidal route to annihilation, however – though one can see why this might be deduced by Nietzsche or anyone else opposed to nihilism.[lvi]

The eightfold path, which is the fourth noble truth, is intended to exhibit how a Buddhist would live, and how one would eventually become like the Buddha and reach irreversible liberation from worldly existence, or samsara.  It is comprised of three kinds of practices and categories that steer between indulgence and austerity: morality, mediation, and wisdom. Beginning with wisdom, one develops the right understanding and resolve.  In morality, right speech, action, and livelihood are cultivated.  This is achieved by right effort, mindfulness, and meditation.[lvii]

The word Mahayana specifically means the “Great Vehicle.”  It is the universal way to salvation.[lviii]  This immediately poses a problem for comparison to Nietzsche, since he would be bothered, if not scandalized by the audacity of universal and salvific claim.  As will be noted below, however, Nietzsche was primarily exposed to Theravada Buddhism and apparently was not as familiar with the role of a bodhisattva.

ASSESSING NIETZSCHE’S VIEW OF BUDDHISM

It has been argued by Jay Garfield that through the Mahayana tradition, one can see Nirvana not as an escape from the world but as an enlightened and awakened engagement with it.[lix]  Correspondingly, Garfield finds resemblance between joyful participation in the world seen as divine play in Mahayana Buddhism and the will to power.  If this is the approach one wishes to take is evaluating Nietzsche’s interpretation of Buddhism, however, the same could be said of various types of Christianity – one in which followers orient themselves around the kingdom of God as a reality to be realized here and now, for instance, rather than a personalistic focus on individual salvation for the life hereafter or evacuation to heaven.  Zen Buddhism especially, because it so stresses monism, has some equivalence with “beyond good and evil.”  Even Zen presents difficulties though, with its quasi-Kantian understanding of language itself as dualistic.  Nietzsche does not have the same confidence in a referent.  What appears is all there is.[lx]

It has been concluded that Nietzsche probably studied primarily texts from the Theravada tradition rather than the Mahayana, because the former tend to be more focused on the phenomena of Buddhism’s historical origin, which was Nietzsche’s interest, and he had access to sources for both.[lxi]  Moreover, we know that Nietzsche read Hermann Oldenberg’s book Buddha, which provides further corroboration for this theory.

In his comments noted above about Buddhism, it could be inferred that Nietzsche is submitting something like the following: “For those not strong enough to respond to this challenge of the open sea, the appeal of a cheerful and refined nihilistic and non-theistic religion like Buddhism might be irresistible.”[lxii]  It is evident from a personal letter to his friend, Carl von Gersdorff, that Nietzsche himself was perhaps tempted by and struggled with the lure of obtaining tranquility in life through the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as the very drive for the will to live, as this ideal is comparable to Nietzsche’s comprehension of Nirvana.[lxiii]

Buddhism is a particular renounced form of nihilism for Nietzsche – a passive nihilism in fact.[lxiv]  Nietzsche thought this nihilism could be overcome.  While this overcoming eliminates the categorical imperative, utilitarianism, or any universal justice, Nietzsche was only a nihilist himself insofar as this is taken to mean that he intended to abolish the old “lies” in order to make room for creating something new and an “increased power of the spirit” (WP 22).[lxv]  The Buddha in some sense for Nietzsche may have done a noble act by coming up with the Dhamma teaching to help others not necessarily overcome their psychological despair, but relate differently to their recognition of life’s meaninglessness in such a way that cheerfulness rather than depression constitutes one’s attitude toward this perceived emptiness.  It can be and has certainly been argued that Buddhism is one feasible way of responding to existential Angst.  It serves to overcome insecurity and “incompleteness” by equipping persons to cheerfully welcome their annihilation after death.[lxvi]  Indeed, some have even posited that if Nietzsche would have had access to more profound elaborations on the depths and varieties of Buddhism, and particular its notion of citta-bhavana, which is rooted in humanity’s psychological makeup, he might have even considered the Buddha himself to be an Ubermensch.  As the argument goes, Buddha, unlike some of his followers, advocated a practical, spiritual path of which the purpose was to “become such as can see things as they really are.”  From this point of view, there is admittedly some analogy to Nietzsche’s project.  What Robert Morrison has put forth, for instance, is the explanation that transcending consciousness leads precisely to a new level instinctual being, or something like the governing nature to which Nietzsche says we must be true.

Is not this instinctual existence, however, of which Morrison speaks, more akin to what results after the Christian concept of the sanctification process has begun, whereby a person “puts on” the character of Christ and is conformed to “God’s image”?  Though with difficulty at first, a person is eventually thought to develop his or her own identity more fully, confidently, and determinately, as it should be.  And while this is obviously a different notion than that of Nietzsche’s primordial, animal nature that must be retrieved and embraced, it is not as drastically counter to Nietzsche’s idea of self-overcoming as he lets on.  But ultimately, whereas Buddhists are striving on the whole and in general to overcome selfhood, ambition, desire – that is, disentanglement from natural or default instincts (i.e., Nietzsche’s view of instinct) – doesn’t Nietzsche’s unequivocally digress from this, if not directly opposes it?  It is true that both Nietzsche and Buddhists can speak of mastering desire or instinct to a certain degree, and perhaps this is where they share some inhabitance.

The Buddhist, however, is not to be concerned with or “fettered” by the “wrong views” of other religions (or miccha-ditthis).[lxvii] Nietzsche, on the other hand, is transparently disturbed by Christianity’s “wrong views.”  In other words, one could submit that Nietzsche is much more “evangelistic” than any good Buddhist ever could be.  In the additional ending to the AntiChrist, Nietzsche even advises very coercive, legal measures that should be taken against the practice of Christianity for the greater good of society.[lxviii]

If Nietzsche had a genuine precursor in Spinoza, why not wonder whether he defended a new Dionysian, pantheistic religion much like what Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani said was similar to the standpoint of Meister Eckhart, who speaks of ‘living without why, within the Godless desert of divinity’?”[lxix]  This might seem like a stretch, but Graham Parkes makes the case that Nietzsche comes close to Mayana Buddhism, which he didn’t know as well, with ideas like amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism.[lxx]  Later on in his career, however, under the influence of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche (Nashitani studied with Heidegger), Nashitani himself was much more critical of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and in particular of the will to power, thereby problematizing Parkes’ theory.    

A bodhisattva is one who refuses to enter Nirvana until all beings have become enlightened.  This sounds remarkably like Zarathustra at the beginning of the Nietzsche’s book.  But while Zarathustra proclaims his love for humanity, he is not striving for the realization of self-emptiness through interrelatedness with all things – regardless of how naturally his existence gives way to an overflowing “generosity and re-engagement with the world.”[lxxi] In a limited respect, Nietzsche does order an outlook of the world as divine, but whether this makes him a Mahayana Buddhist is another question:

For Zarathustra, as long as human beings feel themselves subordinated to transcendent forces in the form of divinities, they will lack confidence in their own will to create.  But if they are able to face up to the impermanence of ‘becoming’ and fully engage the cycles of death and rebirth and destruction and creation that characterize the world of a deity like Dionysus, such self-overcoming will allow the force of the creative will to work at play – perhaps even dance – through them . . . atheism is merely a provisional stage in the transformations of the human spirit.[lxxii]

This argument citing Zarathustra provides perhaps the best support for identifying any parallels between Nietzsche and Buddhism.  Both Nietzsche and figures like the Daoist sage or the Zen master are unified to an extent in their alignment against anthropomorphism, in saying “Yes” to cosmic life, in underscoring the tremendous contingency of human existence, and in their affinity with the Buddhist teaching of ‘dependent arising’ (pratitya-samutpada), which emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things and the consequent ‘emptiness’ of any ‘self-nature’ to them.”[lxxiii] Furthermore, as was noted before about Nietzsche’s appreciation for the caste, the modern, secularized Christian idea of human “rights” and equality before God is absent in these philosophies.

Andre van der Braak has framed Nietzsche’s revaluation of values as a reinvention of a soteriological scheme, albeit after for a post-theistic age, in place of the perverted Christian one.[lxxiv]  The need for redemption is a sign of decadence for Nietzsche, as has been noted already.  But what if “being healed from a spirit of revenge and resentment is how Nietzsche envisions redemption, where all life is considered to be justified and worthy of ecstatic affirmation . . . embracing passionately the horrifying reality of eternal recurrence”?[lxxv]  In this light, redemption is seen as neither a static state nor endpoint but a process of functioning without the friction of the conscious ‘I’:[lxxvi]

The crucified innocent one (EH) is a condemnation of life for the sake of redemption in the afterworld.  The suffering of Dionysus on the other hand, is a natural and ecstatic expression of the fullness and richness of life, not an objection to life but its celebration.  Therefore there is no need to give it a meaning beyond itself.  It is part of life, and does not need any further justification . . . The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich and capable of deifying to do so.[lxxvii]

Thus van der Braak too tries to assimilate Nietzsche to another take on Buddhism, or visa versa.  At the same time, he points to several major weaknesses, only in this case he does so via the Christian tradition, remarking and confirming once more that Nietzsche does in fact take insist on a different outlook toward suffering.  In several places, it is apparent that van der Braak can’t help but recognize the difficult truth that Nietzsche is unable to sufficiently deal with the horror of suffering, specifically in the Nazi death camps.  Van der Braak cites an implicit reference to a theology of the cross analogous to Moltmann’s crucified God as the best Christian response.

THE ANTICHRIST: REDEMPTION, ENLIGHTENMENT OR SOMETHING ELSE?

Nietzsche is adamant about the importance and centrality of being governed by natural instincts in a way that much Eastern thought would shun.  But in the same way that Nietzsche grossly misrepresents the nature of Christianity and Jesus’ teachings on occasion, so too is there little reason to doubt that he does the same with Buddhism, and drawing attention to these mischaracterizations is a constructive and necessary exercise.  It is also probable that Buddhism and Christianity are made into straw men for Nietzsche at times.  In certain light, it can be shown that far less conflict exists between these various ideologies than Nietzsche is inclined to concede.  Is it not reasonable to suspect that Nietzsche partially fed off of this antagonism?  This notwithstanding, and while I profess no expertise on Buddhism, it is nevertheless quite speculative in my view to recommend that Nietzsche himself be understood as having elicited anything remotely congruent to the kernel of historical Buddhism or Christianity in his concepts like the will to power, eternal recurrence,[1] or the Ubermensch[2] – as vast and diverse as the Christian and Buddhist streams are.

What can be asserted, however, is something to which has already been alluded – namely, that Jesus and Buddhism mirror each other substantially in Nietzsche’s study.  It is they who are the worthy competitors with the AntiChrist, and who present plausible redemption plans.  This is a sign of respect.  Christianity on the other hand, is straightforwardly condemnable.[lxxviii]  One could summarize by delineating things thusly: About Christianity, Nietzsche abhors both its form and content, though that content as Nietzsche saw it was not spelled out in any detail here.  Regarding Jesus and Buddhism, however, it is content rather than form that troubles Nietzsche.  The form is that of which Nietzsche approves.  The reason is that both Jesus and the Buddha were more interested in incarnating practices than dogmatizing systems of belief, and concerning this very limited formulation – without saying anything more – it is perhaps safe to concede that Nietzsche is right.

Related articles

• Christianity and Tragedy: Is Something Missing? (billwalker.wordpress.com)
• Dialogue with Nietzsche (barthsnotes.wordpress.com)
• A Caution for would-be prophets and critiques from the “Fringe” (billwalker.wordpress.com)
• Some more Nietzsche aphorisms on religion & other follies (isiria.wordpress.com)
• Zarathustra Shrugged (resnikoff.wordpress.com)
• Why I Believe In Friederich Nietzsche (burningatthestake.wordpress.com)
• The Nietzschean Prophecies (whitelocust.wordpress.com)
• Nietzsche – Twilight of the Idols (scissorskick.wordpress.com)

Narrowing the Question: Who Can/should/want to Speak?

In this essay I subordinate the questions of “who can” and “who wants to” speak about globalization[1] to what is in my view the more fundamental question of who should speak about it.  Nevertheless, some clarification must be offered regarding the first two questions, as both can shed light on how the third is answered.  In terms of who can speak, this question highlights the extent to which power plays a central role in the discussion.  In other words, to put it plainly, those with the most power tend to be the ones who can most effectively speak, and a broad survey of history seems to confirm this.  One the other hand, it is generally supposed here that those at the “center” of society, the margins, and everywhere in between have sufficient reason to want to speak about globalization, regardless of whether they are able.  This is because all three “groups” potentially stand to gain or lose much depending on whether they speak.  Even so, one must recognize that many voices have been silenced, ignored, and unheard, and this can have a tremendous affect on the incentives for speaking in the first place.

Who Gets to Speak?

“Much of the work of twentieth-century philosophy on difference and otherness has drawn attention to the fact that the world as conceived by a white professional male is not quite the same world as conceived by one who is marginalized (by gender, race, class, religion, or disability).”[ii] Should someone like me speak about globalization then?  Alone, and without the accountability of others unlike me, I certainly should not.  Thus, at the risk of overlooking other important factors and variables, the issue addressed from this point forward is who should speak about globalization, and largely due to the affirmation above, I begin with the epistemological priority of “the other” as outlined by Enrique Dussel: “the other is the alterity of all possible systems, beyond “the same,” which totality always is.”[iii] This “other” becomes a person according to Dussel when “the face of [that] person is revealed as other . . . extracted from our system of instruments as exterior, as someone, as a freedom that questions, provokes, and appears, as one who resists instrumental totalization.”[iv]  At this moment, a person is realized as someone and not merely something.  For Dussel and for myself, however, this “other” is not just any other, but must be the poor and oppressed other.  The word “other” here has two meanings: first, in the ethical, Levinasian sense, which forbids reduction to a system of identity and totality, and secondly, in the sociological sense, suggesting that those who have been excluded or marginalized are victims of precisely this kind of reduction.  From here then it is resolved that, “the 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.”[v]  It is henceforth assumed that this “pathology” is a determining cause of many negative externalities brought about  “globalization.”

In one his book Voice of the Voiceless, Oscar Romero echoes Dussel by insisting that, “it is the poor who tells us what the world is.” Though he is influenced by liberation theology and has been cited as a source for much of the work in the movement, Dussel’s philosophy is not first and foremost theological in nature.  For this reason, he provides and perhaps creates a more appropriate space and starting point for talking about why the oppressed deserve the privileged position than a biblical or Christian reading might for many.  With this said, a so-called secular perspective has problems as well.  The key is to acknowledge the limits of all perspectives as conditioned by setting-in-time.  So for this reason, while I will try to speak generically, I cannot separate myself from the Christian faith I confess.  It is inherent to the point of view I present.  Regardless, philosophy of liberation and theology of liberation both depart from the prevailing Western historical construction and align themselves instead with a narrative founded on “the preferential option for the poor.”  At the same time, Gustavo Gutierrez himself anticipates and warns against the temptation to romanticize or sentimentalize the idea of the “poor.” This reminder cannot be forgotten, and the best cure for such forgetfulness is attention to praxis.

The category of praxis supplies a rupture of the metaphysical priority given by modernity and Western philosophy to the subject and to the Cartesian cogito.[vi]  Theory, despite humanity’s ability to transcend itself, always happens within history and not over it.  As a result, the tension between the one and the many or between identity (or unity) and difference cannot be divorced from the “practical demand and . . . 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.”[vii] Conversely, in order to move forward in an intelligible fashion, one must be able to achieve some minimum measure of objective knowledge, however uncertainly defined.  Otherwise communication breaks down and all common ground for conversation is forfeited.  In this vein, Antonio Gonzales defends that while the liberation of philosophy from the primacy of the subject enables the possibility of thinking in radical “alteridad” (otherness), it does not follow that subjective identity is consequently lost.

The feminist Pauline scholar Davina Lopez argues that “assimilation into one stereotype will not accomplish the goal of solidarity among the ‘defeated’” (quotations added).[viii]  To illustrate, she suggests that even from the Christian viewpoint, Judaism for Paul was not necessarily meant to be overcome.  In this regard, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion, and so on (Gal 3:28) are not irrelevant, but the contemporary, “progressive” reduction of the truth question to a linguistic form must likewise be withstood.[ix]  The maxim that “every other is totally other” leads to an unlivable situation.

Along these lines, I take the idea of human rights to be useful and necessary to a degree, but not without qualification.  To presume the universal and non-ideological validity of such rights is to immediately abstract and thus paralyze any concrete applicability.  On the other hand, identity politics can quickly turn the discussion into merely subjective and relativized claims from a particular class or privileged group perspective.[x]  Hence, as Jon Sobrino and many others have argued, a dialectical historicization must be in place whereby human rights are not conceived from any “neutral” place.

What Might This Voice Say?

Though one party has been identified as the chief “spokesperson” for discussing globalization, the criteria for selecting the poor and oppressed other cannot rest solely on the grounds of their having otherwise been “voiceless.”[2] The more telling and substantial evidence is found precisely in what the poor and oppressed “other” has to say.  The difficulty at this instance, however, is determining who can speak on behalf of this “other.”  Nonetheless, some have claimed to do just this, while others have perhaps assisted indirectly.  A few deliberations from both groupings will be examined below.

Only after considering the contingency and fragility of one’s own being-in-the-world (Dasein) can an individual fully appreciate the “already-ness” of existence itself.  Human beings do not choose where they are born.  This profound yet simple insight implies that the determinacy of history by the institutions that guard it should be taken very seriously when inquiring about globalization.  With this in mind, it behooves us to look at just one account of among many others depicting how colonialism shaped the lives (and deaths) of multitudes:

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.[xi]

Upon reflection of and living through some of this history, the assertion has been made that “if we consider ‘America’ from the perspective of the coloniality (not modernity) and let the indigenous perspective take center stage, another history becomes apparent.”[xii]  Furthermore, some assert that, “it is not modernity that will overcome coloniality, because it is precisely modernity that needs and produces coloniality.”[xiii] The “geopolitical knowledge” of the poor and oppressed testifies to the inextricable interdependency existing between modernization and colonization rather to a merely coincidental or even correlative relationship between the two.

In spite of a history that was built and even arguably still stands on this colonization, today neoliberal arguments usually attribute a failure in “growth and development” on the part of “developing” nations to their government interference, centralization, and overall reluctance to adopt the free market capitalist ideals in general of deregulation and tax reduction for the owners of the means of production.  Within the capitalist model, self-interest regularly becomes public virtue.  Confidence is placed in the trickle-down theory of wealth, and politics is believed therefore to be subservient to the more important reality of economics.  Thus “while economic gain is privatized, losses are typically socialized, as the bailouts of large corporations show.”[xiv]  By extension, free trade agreements favor the strong or oligarchic participants in the market over and against the smaller or weaker ones.  This has happened since the war in Iraq, and it continues to happen in other places like the U.S.-Mexico border for instance.

The widely embraced acceptance of capitalism in the West as the way of the future is not without opposition, and Alan Badiou is one who brings a penetrating critique, as he charges capitalism with monetary abstraction, which is a homogenizing singularity, but one “that has no consideration for any singularity whatsoever . . . on the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.”[xv] Moreover, what fundamentally must be appreciated is that the so-called developed world is not unrelated to the political instability of the poor nations and regions: “They are involved directly or by proxy in the fortunes of poor nations by consuming disproportionately and immorally high shares of the resources of the earth.”[xvi] It is no surprise that poor nations appear to be more prone to violence.  Survival is at stake.  Without this equality, a world of interdependence turns into a world of dependence where the “weak” becoming dependent upon the “strong” which, as history as shown, leads to a perpetuation and proliferation of this very inequality.

Other major drivers of this system include the Protestant work ethic and the myth of individualism – a modern notion so radical that it is even foreign to Adam Smith himself. When the narrative of “progress” is interpreted and constructed by those in the West, often a kind of euro(american)-centric, Hegelian meta-narrative or teleology is operative in the depiction of history.  Consequently, it can and has easily presupposed that one group, nation, or civilization/culture/religion is “farther along” than others.  Christianity and more exactly, theocracy, has at times been complicit and directly responsible for this ideology.  What the rhetoric of modernity touted by the IMF, the world bank, and the Washington consensus would say is that “Latin” America is just waiting for its turn to “develop.”  From a “first world” perspective, present disparities in quality of life are usually attributed to “difference,” but this difference cannot be understood without first assigning significant homogeneous characterizations to nations, “civilizations,” and people groups across the globe.  Catherine Walsh has describe the situation aptly:

This phenomenon of recognizing diversity, incorporating it inside the state apparatus while at the same time promoting it as a set of particularisms external to the state, is representative of the new forms of universality advanced by the discourse and politics of neoliberal globalization.  This cultural logic of global capitalism comes to serve as a modern-day form of colonization that obfuscates and at the same time maintains the colonial difference through the discursive rhetoric of multiculturalism. In the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing metropolis of the nation-state, this rhetoric treats “each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studies and ‘respected’” (Zizek 1997, 44), all the while maintaining a Eurocentric distance. As such, multiculturalism establishes a relationship with Western cultural imperialism that is exactly the same as the one between the self-colonization of global capitalism and traditional imperialist colonialism . . .The official discourses of pluriculturalism assume a fundamental value in the new order, attempting to control the particular by converting differences into identities that can be integrated into the globalized, neoliberal all-world order. This integration is not aimed at creating more egalitarian societies but rather at controlling social conflict and insuring social stability, all in order to push forward the model of accumulation.[xvii]  

With respect to the notion of accumulation, Sobrino has called it a fetish and the “deification of prosperity,” which is not motivated by a desire for humanization but is a neurosis stimulated by the drive for endless wellbeing, comfort, security, and entertainment without regard for the cost to others.  Once a level of expectancy for these amenities beyond what is basic to existence becomes normalized, protectionism and preventative defense by whatever means necessary ensues.  Addressing this issue, Slavoj Zizek asks these provocative questions:

What if, when we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as “having a good time,” what we ultimately lose is life itself?  What if the Palestinian suicide bomber on the point of blowing himself (and others) up is, in an emphatic sense, “more alive” than the American soldier engaged in a war in front of a computer screen hundred of miles away from the enemy, or a New York yuppie jogging along the Hudson river in order to keep his body in shape?[xviii]

Walter Mignolo persuasively argues that it is precisely a climate of fear provoked by the difficulty after the Cold War of containing the “proliferation of knowledges and ideologies that differ from the hegemonic.  They can no longer be easily packed into one enemy (communism).  The US tried to substitute Islamism for communism, but the rules of the game were no longer the same.”[xix] Furthermore, Mignolo suggests that Samuel Huntington’s two books, The Clash of Civilizations (1996) and Who are We? (2004), “document the fear experienced most intensely right-wing, Protestant, White political elites that they will lose the economic and epistemic privileges that they have accumulated over two hundred and forty years . . . A strong sense of property (economic and political capital) entitlement supports the fear and racism that are shared today by a large portion of the country’s population.”[xx]

Here Huntington has been selected to represent a normative constitution of globalization from the standpoint of policy-makers in the dominant, ruling, or elite class of the Western world.  Huntington and other rulers have spoken, and their access to effective marketing and media channels has caused his voice to be heard by many.  Another less vocal vantage point must contend for prominence in exchange.

A Modified Liberationist Approach

What has consistently been stressed in liberation theology – the preferential option for the poor, the structural nature of sin, and the “reign of God” as a manifested, social and material reality for realization in the present – is not what immediately concerns us here.  Rather, contra traditional liberation theology and even the hypothesis for the existence of a new imperial sovereignty in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, the issue at hand is how to avoid repeatedly affirming these generic ideals and conducting analysis primarily in terms of sweeping abstractions about pure, impassible, omnipresent, and binary totalities like capitalism vs. socialism or democracy vs. authoritarianism, and instead imagine these constructions as “partial and contradictory creatures amenable to change and recombination.”[xxi] This non-idealist approach increases the chances for a building a future in any place with genuinely participatory and democratized market economy rather than unmixed anti-capitalism or utopian socialism.[xxii] And yet social transformation and justice are still its agenda.[xxiii]

Returning to the predicament of plurality, I employ what the Korean, Catholic liberationist Anselm Min has called the “heterological imperative” and a “solidarity of others,” where the former refers to “exploring within the best and deepest of one’s own [religious/cultural/ethnic/ideological] tradition the possibility of making room for the other, and exposing oneself to the dialectic of dialogue and interacting with the other,”[xxiv] while the latter implies that “there is no privileged perspective . . . that we as others to one another are equally responsible, and that all are subjects, not objects.”[xxv]

In sum, to repeat what has been alleged already, I contend along with Min that identity is not irrelevant, but that its “absolute accentuation is philosophically incoherent, historically naïve, and politically counterstrategic.”[xxvi] This conception of difference coheres closely with a transmodern perspective as espoused by Dussel while also allowing for an economic outlook of the “socialization of power” (Quijano).

Preserving distinction and the irreducibility of identity per se is not the most urgent task.  Some religious/cultural/ideological structures and expressions are destructive and antithetical to the aim of historical liberation, and as a result must be challenged and confronted. Anthropologically, one does not have to posit an absolute or fixed essence to human nature in order to have “solidarity of others.” Someone could always adopt an “as if” approach to the intrinsic value of humanity.  In many respects, the categorical imperative of a Kantian ethics does this.  The danger is that if someone points out the emptiness of this gesture, it can quickly crumble.  Instead, a mutual recognition and respect for human dignity – enough to justify working together toward fortification from threats to life itself – is the goal.  Nobody wants to starve or be murdered.  The immediacy and relative universality of suffering is difficult to deny. Therefore, how to live together with a reasonable degree of solidarity despite differences is the life-and-death issue.  The poor and oppressed other cries out against all that kills life: hunger, poverty, sickness, debt, and all forms of injustice.  We must proclaim that which brings the fullness of life: justice, education, health, housing, and bread for all.

Related articles

• A Liberationist Reading of United States Foreign Policy on Trade and Border Traffic with Mexico: NAFTA, Immigration, and Drug Violence (billwalker.wordpress.com)
• A Sermon on Christian Social Justice (billwalker.wordpress.com)

“The U.S.-Mexican border “es una herida abierta” where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” – Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

“The dead and missing linger like a bitter wine on the tongue of the city.” – Charles Bowden, Murder City

In December 2010, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz was gunned down while protesting the release of the man who raped, mutilated and murdered her daughter two years early.  This man confessed his crime in detail but was discharged under the auspice of insufficient evidence.[i]  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.

On a larger scale, femicide isn’t even the worst of Northern Mexico’s problems.  In 2006, President Felipe Calderon took office after campaigning on the promise to be tougher on the drug cartels.  That was a promise he kept, and since then tens of thousands have died as a consequence of narco violencia.  Moreover, there is little reason to suspect the severity of the situation will wane anytime soon.  In a recent interview, Charlie Min, who is the director of the recent documentary film covering the violence in Juarez entitled “8 Murders a Day,” said that what has been happening in Juarez is the greatest “human rights” crisis in the world today.[ii]  Whatever one makes of his statement, it at least underscores the urgency of the circumstances.

To even begin a discussion of the causes and contributing factors of these on-going killings, it is necessary to highlight the changing political and economic landscape in recent Mexican history.  An epistemology derived from the philosophy and theology of liberation is presupposed here, and I do not pretend to speak for those who do have a voice.[1]  Rather, many of them have spoken; some have heard, and this is an attempt to respond in responsible fashion.  The point of departure for this analysis then in economical in nature:

We speak of “economics,” and not of economy, as the moment in which praxis and poiesis, in a concrete synthesis, are articulated in order to constitute the practical-productive level par excellance.  If Liberation Philosophy departs from the reality of misery, poverty, exploitation, then the relation person-to-person (practical) is always already a priori institutionalized and reproduced historically from a given economic structure, as practical (social relation) and productive (technological) presupposition.[iii]

A comprehensive understanding would require that one start her historical research into a time long before the United States became a world power, by recalling the Spanish Conquest and its resourcing, followed by a survey of the events the led up to the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which required that Mexico forfeit to the United States the present-day territory of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas – a expanse of land that is close to the size of Mexico itself.

Additionally, Mexico has its own rich, complex and difficult history since the Treaty that can obviously not be outlined here.  As for the purposes of this analysis it will be best therefore to begin with the events immediately preceding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the rise of globalization, or neo-liberal capitalism, as an ideology and political project that emerged in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.[iv]  By way of further introduction, what has taken place can be contextualized thusly:  

Americans’ demand for drugs has created many national security problems for Mexico and for Mexican-U.S. relations.  Mexico has made considerable efforts to stop the shipment and production of illegal narcotics, but has made little headway in stemming the flow of drugs across the border.  The implementation of NAFTA has only made this easier[v]. . . Under the Fox administration Mexico’s economy [grew], becoming the 9^th largest in the world.  With the impact of NAFTA, exports increased dramatically, but employment has not kept pace.  Furthermore, the effects of NAFTA have devastated rural Mexico, the predominant source of the poorest families.  At the same time Mexico has become less attractive to foreign investors, and many manufacturing companies are relocating their assembly plants to cheaper competitors, notably China.  Many of the structural problems, as they relate to income distribution, poverty, and marginalization, remain relatively static.[vi]

These words were written by a prominent Mexicanist and political scientist well before the escalation in violence at the border between U.S. and Mexico beginning in early 2008.  In the wake of President Felipe Calderon’s election and declaration of war on the cartels, followed by the deployment of troops from the Mexican Army to the state of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez, which only led to increased clash and conflict, and therefore more deaths (of course it would be unfair to talk about Calderon’s “war” without mentioning the forty-year “War on Drugs” that began during the United States President Richard Nixon’s term).  As of 2011, some polls taken estimate that approximately 34,550 Mexicans have died since 2006 (others now project numbers closer to 50,000) as a result of the conflict and competition at the border for trade smuggling routes between the different DTO’s (drug trafficking organizations).[vii]  An overwhelming percentage of the murders have been concentrated in just four of Mexico’s thirty-two states.  Of the cities where the killings have occurred, Ciudad Juarez has experienced approximately five times more recorded deaths than the next most inflicted city.

Mexican government reports insist that ninety percent of the victims of this violence are “dirty” – namely, members of rival gangs, which implies that these killing are less “concerning” and that these men (they are indeed mostly men) have other options for employment.  After a closer look, however – as will be taken below – the difference between guilty and innocent might not be so easy to demarcate.  In order to understand what has led to this crisis, however, it will be necessary to start by briefly revisiting the nature and origin of Mexico’s liberalization.

WHENCE NAFTA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

All old-established national industries have bee destroyed or are daily being destroyed.  They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remote zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.[viii]

Never before had a trade agreement been made between a rich industrial country and a relatively poor developing country.[ix]  Though Mexico’s tariff reduction process began with its accession to the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) as of 1986, NAFTA would have a much more significant effect on removing trade barriers overall.[x] The goal from the U.S. standpoint was fairly straightforward: to obtain tariff-free access to the Mexican market and to open the door for FDI (foreign-direct investment).  In a sense it was always the U.S.’s attempt to reward Mexico for embracing market liberalization.  Debates over NAFTA’s implementation centered on how it would affect jobs, labor, and the environment.  Would multinational corporations set up export platforms, and if so, how would wage suppression and increasing income inequality be prevented?  These questions were not adequately addressed, and the consequences have been severe in certain cases.

Some Background

Beginning in the 1980’s, under the leadership of Miguel de la Madrid, Mexico followed the lead of the United States and the recommendation made by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) to conform to “orthodox” economic guidelines – that is, to follow neoliberal practices of reducing government expenditures and imposing controls on salaries, prices, and inflation.[xi]

Naturally, the U.S. media responded favorably to these changes, as newspaper publications like the Wall Street Journal praised Mexico for embracing a free market economy.  When the Mexican agricultural industry started feeling the pressure from U.S. corporate competition, the Mexican government introduced Procampo, which was designed to provide stipends to small-scale farmers in lieu of subsidies and price support.[xii]  This program was supposed to ease the transition, and slowly be taken away as local and grassroots farming better situated itself to survive such a dramatic change.

For example, it was observed that in its public statements, the U.S. government glossed over major problems with Mexico’s 1994 presidential election in order to nonetheless give the appearance of legitimacy to the public so as to gain support for better international business relations.  Along these lines, some have accused the administration (both Clinton and George Bush Sr.) of having pursued development strategy strictly for the purpose of getting NAFTA approved.[xiii]  Increased FDI by the U.S. in Mexico corresponded with little to no enforcement of labor rights.[xiv] In many respects Mexico has been forced to move away from an agriculturally dominant society to an economy represented by manufacturing, commerce, and services.[xv] Thus the overall impact has varied tremendously depending on the region.

In addition, without even speaking to the direct and covert intervention by the U.S. in Latin America in general during the second half of the twentieth century, one should at  note the involvement it has had with Mexico through various processes of confronting struggles like for instance with the EZLN (Zapatista Army for National Liberation) in Chiapas in early 1994.  And needless to say, heightened “cooperation” between the two countries in an effort to curtail drug trafficking and illegal immigration has only presented greater potential for tension between the two countries.

NAFTA and Neoliberalism

One of the most predominant features of globalization is the increasing mobility and power of global capital flow.[xvi] According to Queen’s University development studies professor Susanne Soederberg, this change in economic and political policy has been characterized by a shift from a variety of Keynesian demand management tactics and the advancement of a welfare state to neoliberal forms of government intervention: “one of the main characteristics of competition states is that traditional policies aimed at achieving social justice through economic redistribution have been challenged and profoundly undermined by the marketization of the state’s economic activities and its focus on attracting and retaining capital flows.”[xvii] Soederberg further argues that while the Mexican state has take on some of the defining traits of an AIC (advanced industrialized country), the assumption of neoliberal practices has neither succeeded in reducing the country’s “excessive vulnerability and dependence on external sources of capital, nor [in] bringing about conditions for sustainable economic growth.” [xviii]  The tension between domestic and international policy imperatives has failed to be resolved or balanced. In the end it seems that efforts to restructure in accordance with international (Western) expectations – though they have led to further integration in the world economy – have generally increase the divide between rich and poor and greater financial vulnerability as a result of such tenuous forms of capital accumulation such as the phenomenon of the maquiladorizacion of the economy.[xix] These factories (maquiladores) are primarily located near the northern border so as to as to ensure cheap transport of product to the United States.  The average daily salary for workers at the maquiladores is around seven dollars for ten hours of work.[xx]  Furthermore, the real wages in Mexico are lower today than they were before the1982 debt crisis,[xxi] and the minimum wage is the same.[xxii] In absolute numbers, substantially more Mexicans live without sufficient food (approximately 26 million).[xxiii]

International financial markets have reached considerable levels of influence in the global political economy.  Daily turnovers in foreign exchange markets are often $1.3 trillion or higher.[xxiv] This number “dwarfs the less than one trillion dollars available to those governments of advanced countries for exchange rate stabilization purposes.”[xxv]  Moreover, the major players in the exchange rate game are no longer big international banks but insurance and pension fund managers and other portfolio investors who are mobile and less vulnerable.[xxvi] Consequently, private investment capital is a major source of financing for developing countries.  Not surprisingly then, new national policy is increasingly established with both current and prospective private investor interests in mind.  Such interests inevitably include low corporate taxes and fewer state-sponsored welfare programs.  Even more significantly, policy makers know that new creditors are going to want easy entry and exit investment strategy options.  Therefore, the stability and growth predictability of developing countries has become increasingly tied to and proportionate with international financial markets and fluctuations of stocks on Wall Street.  Countries finding themselves squarely in this dilemma have sometimes attempted to manipulate their exchange rates by devaluing currency in order to boost exports for instance, or by pegging currency value to interest-rates.  Practices such as these are in part what led to the peso crisis not only in Mexico in 1994 but also in Argentina for example, which culminated in 2001.

Inherent to the liberalization of Mexico’s political economy were the steady belief in the trickle-down theory of wealth, putting industrialization and modernization before democratization, and assuming that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) government’s corporatist structures represented the interests of the average Mexican.[xxvii]

Finally, Soederberg sums up the situation appropriately with the following diagnosis:

 In the case of Mexico, the attempts to commodify relations of production via deregulation, privatization, and the shift from welfare to workfare principles, fiscal austerity, and so forth, has no only exposed to economy to more rigorous international competition but has also compromised the social reproduction of over half the population.  The latter have found themselves falling through the extremely thin thread of a rapidly unraveling welfare net, resulting in a process that has seriously undermined the government’s legitimacy required to maintain neoliberal policy continuity aimed at signaling a sound investment environment to financial markets.[xxviii]

What is particularly intriguing is that NAFTA was enacted in the same era that stricter policing of the border began.  The free trade agreement represents the relaxation of state controls and the opening of the border, while the crackdown on illegal narcotics and immigration concurrently is an exercise in restraint.  What was this really about?  Brown University’s Peter Andreas contends that the escalation in enforcement has less to do with reducing the immigrant and illicit drug trafficking and more to do with “re-crafting the image of the border and symbolically reaffirming the state’s territorial authority.”[xxix]

For Mexico’s antidrug campaign then, the most important audience is the United States – both its media and political voices.  The U.S. drug control performance on the other hand primarily attempts to impress its domestic audience, including many of the same voices about which Mexico is concerned.[xxx]

Now it is necessary to zero in on Cuidad Juarez in particular and examine more closely what Hoard Campbell has called “The Drug War Zone.”

THE DRUG WAR ZONE, CORRUPTION, AND OTHER AMBIGUITIES

I have more compassion for common workers in the drug trade – who, above all, work to make a living and provide for their families – than for Washington policy wonks or well-aid drug-war bureaucrats, who are often insulated from the dirty work in the streets but whose actions and decisions may negatively affect hundred or thousands of families, especially those whose members have been incarcerated for selling drugs.  One could be equally critical of everyday drug smugglers, yet one could also argue that they engage – at least in marijuana commerce – in victimless crimes.  But I am also critical of the drug kingpins who routinely order the brutal murders of dozens of people, and I am well aware of the social harm caused by heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine addiction.[xxxi]

When UTEP anthropology and sociology professor Howard Campbell speaks of the DWZ (Drug War Zone), he’s not only referring to “historically contingent, constructed geographical location but also to a mental place and a symbolic domain” – similar in Foucauldian terms he says, to the dialectic between “real society” and “heterotopia,” which links drug producers, smugglers, and consumers “to their police, military, and intelligence counterparts in a strategic, tactical, and ideological fight” – such that it reminds of “Kafka’s claustrophobic writing [which] prefigured the secretive, duplicitous, unpredictable texture of the DWZ.”[xxxii]  In this sense it is also a “cultural matrix with logics, practices, patterns, symbols, and worldviews that crisscross and transcend international boundaries, moral categories, social classes, and ethnic groups.”[xxxiii]

The temptation on the part of U.S. citizens is often to dismiss organized crime as outside the “clean legal system,” rather than to recognize how interwoven official government is in drug trafficking.  This is what makes the U.S. government’s deployment of the phrase “war on drugs” so hypocritical and misleading.  And despite being an illegal form of capitalist accumulation, the drug industry is a substantial part of the U.S. and Mexico economic systems.  What is more, when poverty takes its toll on the economy as it has in border cities like Juarez, often young, “uneducated” and unemployed men (“ni-ni’s,” as they are called – ni estudiar ni trabajar) in particular are faced with the option to either join the DTO’s or go hungry.

Yet while neo-liberalism has been prevalent and effective in shaping drug flow, it is crucial in understanding the DWZ to see the fragmented nature of capitalism such that it fails to play a totalizing or all-determining role, however dominant.  In other words, as Campbell further explains, “topologies of domination increasingly combine vertical impositions or organizational power with capitalist exploitations around and outside this power and, in the process, open new spaces for transnational and sub-national resistance. These formulations help us understand how political-economic globalization and neoliberalism are not one-dimensional but instead create both domination and counter-hegemony across international space and territory.”[xxxiv]  Alternatively, Campbell submits, the DWZ could be described as an interplay between order and chaos, structure and anti-structure.

There has been much disagreement about whether a U.S. or Western empire now turned global and viral can be said to somehow lead or control the world (Hardt and Negri 2001, for instance, which Campbell also mentions).  What is most fascinated in light of this, however, is the degree to which DTO’s in Mexico, despite their collusion with the state in many cases, have generally frustrated efforts by the military and police to curb their smuggling progress and success, in spite of their billion-dollar budgets.[xxxv]  Campbell testifies that many DEA agents admit this much and confess the policy to be untenable; but it still pays their bills.  The “drug war” machinery employs them.

And yet as the top U.S. officials themselves are fully aware, “First World” demand for and consumption of illicit narcotics is the impetus for supply at any cost, as the profits to be made are virtually limitless.  Perhaps the most important contributing factor to the violence then is how much “drug markets hinge on consumer demand from within the imperial metropole.”[xxxvi]  It’s a business that responds to the market.

“La Linea” and Immigration

The problem of immigration is closely related and further complicates the extent to which capital can be construed is “omnipresent” and universal – that is, whether it can be said to allow for “external” space. State and non-state forces are operating on the same social field.  As mentioned above, deeming something illegal can almost function as a pressure release valve just enough to make things appear “under control”:  “Drug trafficking, thus, is similar in this respect to the way that ‘illegal’ immigration self-supplies [cheap] labor to the U.S. agricultural, industrial, and service industries, although in this case, a commodity – one used for ‘self-medication’ – not labor, is supplied.”[xxxvii]

Officials in charge of enforcing anti-drug laws both in Mexico and the United States have tremendous incentive to appease the public eye by capturing major drug kingpins or seizing large amounts of illegal shipments to be self-validating – “even though the drugs confiscated constitute only a fraction of the overall quantity crossing the border, and the smugglers arrested are easily replaced, these policing practices are politically popular expressions of the state’s moral resolve.”[xxxviii]  Peter Andreas sheds light on the “border game” in this way:

As an unintended consequence of U.S. efforts to interdict the smuggling of Colombian cocaine through the Caribbean, the cocaine flow was pushed to the U.S. Mexico border at the same time as the United States and Mexico were beginning to forge a new and more intimate economic partnership.  To help secure the smooth passage of NAFTA, U.S. and Mexican leaders orchestrated a law enforcement buildup on both sides of the border which signaled a joint commitment to drug control.  Highly visible but misleading indicators of state resolve – increased arrests, drug seizures, bilateral initiatives – helped sustain an image of cooperation and progress and obscured the failings, flaws, and negatives side effects of the enforcement effort.[xxxix]

To repeat and encapsulate: although efforts to control and intercept illicit transit of any kind at the border has failed to substantially reduce the flow of both immigrants and narcotics – while also leading to the unintended consequence or negative externality of making organized migrant smuggling a much more profitable endeavor – it has ironically and paradoxically made border crossings virtually invisible and more disseminated– and thus giving the projection of success and an image of more secure border.[xl]

The Incarceration Problem

It’s not just the consumers, suppliers, and drug enforcement agents themselves that share a “mutually parasitic relationship” though.  Entire bureaucracies, career industries and prison systems have been created and institutionalized in response.  The on-going criminalization without correction preys on the poor black communities in the United States as well.  Noam Chomsky once sarcastically remarked in a lecture that this is the U.S. version of “ethnic cleansing.” We’re putting “them” in jail rather than just letting them slaughter themselves like the Mexicans do, so it gives the impression of greater civility.[xli]

The NCAAP recently released a report indicating that while white Americans are almost as likely to use marijuana as African Americans, African Americans are exponentially more likely to be arrested for it.  An overwhelming percentage of people in prison for using drugs are African American in spite of the fact they are not a disproportionately consuming ethnic group.  According to the California Department of Justice crime figures from the document, “Arresting Blacks for Marijuana in California: Possession Arrests in 25 Cities,” the reality is even more disparate:

The report, which looks at three years of data … indicates that this is not an anomaly but a consistent pattern, where African Americans are being arrested at two, four, 10, even 12 times the rates of whites” for marijuana possession, said Stephen Gutwillig, state director of the pro-Proposition 19 Drug Policy Alliance . . . In Pasadena, for instance, police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at 12.5 times the rate of whites. While blacks make up 11 percent of Pasadena’s population, African Americans accounted for 49 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession between 2006-09, the report showed.[xlii]

Some have made the argument that the trend has adversely affected and stagnated a needed increase of investment in education – the very tool that is crucial to treating this problem as many conceive of it: “California, where I grew up in the 1970s, the state spent 3 percent of its budget on incarceration and 11 percent on education. Last year, the state spent 11 percent on incarceration and only 7.5 percent on public higher education. That trend is repeated across the country.”[xliii]

The Violence

Beyond the social inequalities, the arbitrary and brutal violence that has characterized the “war” is a kind of terrorism in itself, and very effective one, instilling fear in the minds of Mexican citizens.  Many of the unimaginably sadistic murders and public killing tactics used by NGO’s appear to be borrowed and learned from other terrorist groups in the world.  Afghanistan is another major drug trafficking stronghold, and cooperation between these various internationally related groups is becoming increasingly evident.  At this point the executions are seemingly ceaseless, and “the consuming countries clearly have the most power in this context – power to cut domestic drug demand, the power to pressure the policies of drug-producing countries and otherwise meddle in their internal affairs, the power to demonize and otherwise stigmatize producers.”[xliv]

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Campbell recalls their “ruminations on the schizophrenic feeling of contemporary capitalism, on the anxiety-laden ‘ordered disorder’ or ‘state of emergency’ provoked by the ‘Nervous Sate.’”[xlv]  The picture depicted here is gripping and disturbing: “on the streets of Mexican cities, bodies without identification, but sometimes bearing cryptic, threatening notes or signs of stylized torture, turn up wrapped in blankets, stuffed in barrels of acid, or crammed into car trunks.  Other individuals are simply picked up (levantado) by hooded commandos armed with AK-47s and sometimes wearing Mexican military or police uniforms, never to be seen or heard from again.  Are they alive or dead? Who killed or ‘disappeared’ them?  Was it cops or narcotraffickers?  Who is more violent and treacherous, the cops or the traffickers?   Are they one and the same?”[xlvi]  Quien Sabe?  The government blames the incident on the victim’s “association” with the “narcos,” but without doing any investigation to corroborate such accusations.  Democracy is virtually non-existence in the localities most effected.[xlvii]  It’s terror and moral ambiguity as usual for residents of Cuidad Juarez and the surrounding region.

Problematizing “Corruption”

The U.S. has been giving substantial monetary assistance to Mexico in its offensive against the DTO’s, and it has also provided military training.[xlviii]  The effectiveness of these actions, however, depends largely on the degree to which the military in Mexico operates without any infiltration into the army by the DTO’s themselves.  Unfortunately, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest a high level of “corruption” at almost every pay grade.  Not only many soldiers and officers in the military, but also local and federal police have admitted to taking bribes and payoffs from DTO’s.  In fact, some consider it practically commonplace.

But DTO’s do not represent “parallel power,” separate from those of the state, “but rather a form of economic activity connected with, tolerated, promoted or protected by various sectors of the state.”[xlix] All this to say, there can be no complete isolation from the national political context that sustains and permits large-scale drug trafficking, or from the international political-economic context within which they function.  The discursive and semiotic dimensions of drug trafficking must be taken into account, even if it is impossible to paint a definitive portrait.

Narco-identity is a quintessential example of contemporary cultural hybridity, not an expression of an essential Mexican culture: “Mexico’s northern frontier and being narco do not respond exclusively to a Mexican identity but, rather, to a wider transnational dialogue between the neocolonial U.S. empire and the postcolonial existence of Latin America.”[l]  There is a constantly fluid and negotiated relationship between all actors in the drama.  Clear lines are difficult to be drawn on the ground between victim and victimizer, at one level; at another level – on the broader and international scale – there is a blatantly sharp distinction between who is most culpable as oppressor, and who is being oppressed:

This, then, is the larger context within which border drug trafficking occurs: an alienated North American and Mexican populace self-medicating with illicit drugs and suffering the social costs of addiction and drug-related crimes; a hypocritical U.S. government and national culture that espouse puritanical values regarding drugs while consuming them in enormous amounts as part of the “psychoactive revolution”; a political system and economy founded and structured on U.S. dominance of Mexico (whether by U.S. government certification or decertification of Mexico’s antidrug policies or coercive and unequal economic treaties such as NAFTA, etc.) and other countries; and a poor drug-producing, drug smuggling, and drug-consuming country (Mexico) that needs drug profits in order to survive economically, even though drug-related violence, corruption, and public insecurity devastate the country.[li]

A BRIEF RESPONSE AND ASSESSMENT FOR AN ALTERNATIVE VISION

What neoliberal globalization has permitted and encouraged for the United States is the outsourcing of the real, detestable repercussions of drug consumption and trafficking, displacing the responsibility to the subaltern neighbor, and consigning the burden onto a disposable, invisible class – the wretched of the earth, the non-persons, and those whose memories have been erased from history.  Fear of the immigrant other, demand for an exploitable service-sector workforce, and capital consuming fetishism and addiction are the death-drive motors of this gruesome apparatus.  As Roderic Camp correctly assessed, “the United States has been primarily interested in political stability, not political liberalization” in it’s long-term relationship with Latin America, including Mexico and the Third World generally.[lii]

One should not expect the fundamental character of imperialism to be malleable enough to accommodate genuine Mexican liberation.  There is an abundance of Mexican elites preventing this as well.  Institutional power structures simply do not change quickly or paradigmatically without a revolution, and that is not being recommended here.  At the same time, the U.S. is one empire among many in history, and if it continues to exercise unchecked habits of blatantly unjust foreign policy, it inevitably runs the risk of violence begetting more violence, and will likely succumb to the vicious dialectic of rising and falling political regimes sooner than later.

The great majority of Latin Americans must be mobilized politically to remove from power the oligarchic leaders that cooperate with foreign interests.[liii]  A rejection of developmentalism as the path for Latin American political and economic advancement is necessary, along with resisting full integration into the international capitalist system (Bonino).  Many Mexicans themselves have been tenacious, resilient, and mobilizing in their protest.[liv] They have cried out loudly and clearly in staunch disapproval of their own government’s philosophy of confronting the DTO’s head on. A fine example is journalist Marcela Torati who has argued that the media coverage in both the U.S. and Mexico of the “drug war” functions mostly to normalize the number of victims[lv] She has also been outspoken against the brutality of the cartels in their threats and intimidation killings to silence transparent and detailed reporting). In her article “‘Ya Basta’ Se Globaliza . . .”,[lvi] she denounces the mythological folklore of the “campo” that praises the drug lords for their charity in the community (many DTO’s give their money to churches and welfare organizations).

Hence the question also becomes one of what those on the northern side of the border can and will do upon learning of this.  Is there any hope for solidarity and collaboration?  Considering that millions of Mexicans live in the United States, there already is extensive potential solidarity and collaboration.  The bigger issue is how to get the attention of policy makers and policy influencers, and that is where the challenge has left those with “ears to hear.”

What must be done might very well include a long list of new (old) domestic policy initiates like legalizing drugs;[lvii] renegotiating the NAFTA terms in accordance with Mexico’s desire to protect infant industries, wage floors, and growing second-rung economies (much like the United had to do when it seceded from Great Britain);[lviii] U.S. prison reform and decriminalization by means of integrating corrective treatment facilities more fully into the law enforcement system; better control of weapon sales and productions (a minority-majority of the illegal arms trade in Mexico is supplied by U.S.-manufactured high-powered guns and ammunition),[lix] and so on.  But solely attending to reform of the Empire will not suffice in the long run.

As mentioned above, a Mexican consciousness must be ignited that can reverberate along the veins of an already-America-permeating Mexican/Latino/a citizenry and migrant workforce.  Their economic power and influence is substantial enough to organize unified constituency representation and command the attention of politicians. [lx] Now it must be instigated.

The marginalized people of Juarez do not need or want the privileged Westerners to save them, but that does not mean we cannot partner in their cause via an alternative project, and that project should be able to supplement theirs by fostering a correlative geopolitical knowledge for embrace by middle to upper class U.S. citizens of similar conscience.  There can be a conversion so to speak, and that is the hope.  In the interest of peace, if it is a priority at all, some alliance between an empowered Mexican identity and a repentant U.S. minority populace must form.  This is where the baton gets passed on to the true militants for emancipation.

This is a nice, safe, balanced stance, kind of like saying that people needed to calm down about Rob Bell, but that he also said some problematic things.  I definitely fell into that category at times, as lame and unexciting as it may be.  What I tried to take away from Love Wins, however, was, “don’t miss the point,” which for me was the opportunity to dialogue about the questions Bell was asking, rather than spend all the time debating over the legitimacy of the book itself.  That has been a healthy exercise.

So can the same logic be applied to “The War on Terror”?  Is this subject more sensitive since it involves the lives lost or sacrificed by so many?  By some people’s standards, the questions raised in Bell’s book might actually be even more urgent, depending on how inclusively or generously one believes salvation to be given, and depending on what one believes about hell.

Many Christians have been quick to cite Old Testament passages, essentially equating ancient Israel with the United States, while others invoke Paul’s discussion of God-sanctioned government in Romans 13.  We should be extremely cautious in taking such interpretive leaps.  Another popular reaction has been to express sadness that Bin Laden didn’t “come to know the Lord.”  Francis Chan did a video on this.  But there are lots of other dead and “guilty” people who didn’t become Christians for that matter – why worry about Osama?

But about “missing the point” in terms of Bin Laden’s assassination: First, a few disclaimers are in order, not surprisingly on this one: I do not think being anti-American and supra-american are the same thing.  Despite my growing interest recently, I am far from especially knowledgeable on the subject of our intervention in the Middle East, and I offer these comments as a humble attempt at modest theological reflection for anyone interested.  I have the utmost respect and gratitude for those who willing risk everything for the sake of others to live freely and without fear.  By extension, those who have lost loved ones in this conflict, whether from 9-11 or the war thereafter, are always deserving of the deepest possible sympathy and condolence.  Furthermore, I am trying to be decidedly nonpartisan in my approach to this issue.  I’m also not claiming any special insight into what the right or wrong actions are for U.S. forces in this situation particularly, or in others generally.  Finally, I’m not at all interested in relativizing, by way of some comparison to the U.S., the cowardly and atrocious acts committed by terrorists, as some post-colonialists might be in the habit of doing, however problematic the term “terrorism” might be (if I were to empathize at all with violence – not condone it – it would be more in revolutionary terms, since as Americans our very founding rests on it, though I recognize that revolution is not always possible from the standpoint of subjugated peoples, but that is another discussion).

Two major elements seem to be consistently overlooked in almost every so-called Christian analysis that I have read so far (Roger Olson and Brian McLaren are two notable exceptions, and I’m sure there are others).  In reducing the question of forgiveness to a unilateral exchange across what is a vast range of historically mediating factors with many layers and tensions, the first missing element is the role that coercive power and systemic violence (as distinguished from violence committed by individuals) plays in any discourse about politics, and the second is with respect to a lack of global rather than national consciousness when it comes to solidarity with the victims of our war.  In order to illustrate, I just want to list some fairly simple, and relatively undisputed facts – and they are going to be mostly negative, but this does not mean that I am unaware of the many possible “positive” counterparts.  Rather, I’m stressing the following points because they seem to be less emphasized in the mainstream rhetoric right now, and I am not necessarily meaning to insinuate what political conclusions should be drawn from all of them:

• violent revolution, genocide, slavery, racism, neocolonialism, and imperialism (and in basically that order) have characterized our nation’s heritage to a significant degree at one time or another

• related to the above point: as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world for more or less the last sixty years, we have often acted like it, especially when it has come to our direct military involvement in the Middle East (decades before 9-11) and in Central or South America in order to maintain stability and protect our economic and political interests, and this has included supporting various oppressive authoritarian regimes

• Since the War in Iraq, and because of the 60 billion dollar annual narcotics industry that our abuse sustains (I’m referring to murders in Mexico), actions by our country and the people in it have been the direct or indirect cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the last decade, many of the victims being innocent by conventional standards (and this is not even to speak of the alleged responsibility as a result of inaction for those who have died due to a lack of food, clean water, etc., while we have lived in relative prosperity).

• the loss of innocent Iraqi lives since 9-11 exponentially exceeds the number of U.S. lives lost, and the cost of the war has reached the trillions

• many men and women (certainly not all) who join the military are doing so today largely out of perceived economic necessity and lack of job alternatives rather than because of conviction about our mission in Iraq or Afghanistan

• Historically speaking, despite his teachings to the contrary (render to Caesar what is Caesar’s), Jesus was crucified because he was perceived to be a threat to the established order, both religiously and politically – in a certain respect, to national security.  He taught that his kingdom was not of this world (though this is not a reference to an otherworldly heaven), and that his followers are to be citizens of this kingdom that resists cooptation by the incentives of the state (unlike the zealots, pharisees, etc.).  This same Jesus said that the poor would inherit this kingdom, and that for the rich it will be very difficult to enter . . .

While I think we need to leave some room for pragmatism and realism, I also believe we should be slow to distance ourselves too quickly from any part of this side of the story, some of it very recent if not current, however “clean” and “law-abiding” we might feel.  In light of what should be a sobering reminder then, is the American Christian response at this time really foremost and simply about whether to forgive or celebrate, however condemnable or in need of forgiveness Bin Laden’s deeds are?  This would seem to take for granted our own position as innocent and justified, even if only in a “worldly” sense.  More importantly and urgently – speaking mostly to “non-[direct]-victims” of course – could it be most appropriate instead, to see how much we ourselves need forgiveness in this moment – before claiming the right to extend it to another?  Perhaps it starts merely by recognizing our own complacency, undeserving privilege or complicity in a system of inherent violence that can only be stopped not by forceful or preemptive opposition but by seeking a more proximate justice in all realms of society.