By José Míguez-Bonino
An eleven-year-old child of Protestant parents was asked to give the name of the first person to occur to him on hearing certain words. He reacted as follows: Death: "Jesus" Liberation: "Che."
The answers may have been artificial or influenced by conversations he had heard. In any case, it is a curious fact that the answers could have just as well been reversed. And from either of the two sets we could have started the consideration of our subject.
"Liberation" — a multiple term in the vocabulary of economics, sociology, physics, chemistry, law, and politics — has never been absent from religion. The idea of liberation, under various terms and manifestations, appears frequently in the Bible.
Liberation and the Bible
"Liberator" (or "redeemer", which is usually equivalent), is one of the titles most frequently employed to characterize God. This is understandable if, as the specialists tell us, the consciousness of Israel as a people was formed in connection with the experience of the "exodus", the liberation from slavery (Exodus 3:8; and 6:6). The memory of that liberation determines the historic existence of the people and becomes the guarantee that God will not consent to their becoming vassals but will be affirmed as their liberator (Nehemiah 9:9-10, 26-28, and 32-37). This assurance becomes a door open to the future. But it does not deal with an external liberty (emancipation) only; the law that governs the life of the people of Israel must manifest the same redemptive character. The land is God's and may not be permanently transferred. Therefore, its periodic "liberation" is provided for, that is, the annulment of large land-holding accumulations, of the alienation or [68] ruin that the economic system may have created (Lev. 25). The same limitation is placed on the institution of slavery (Ex. 21:1-2). These and other laws which might be cited reflect a more profound fact: God is established as the liberator, the redeemer of the weak and oppressed who are symbolized by the stranger, the widow, and the orphan (Ex. 21:21-24). It is on this basis that the Prophets announce divine judgment on those who oppress the helpless (Is. 1:17; Zech. 7: 8-14; Jer. 22:1-5). The psalms also express the complaint and confidence of those who have no other liberator than Jahweh. (Psalm 10:12-14 and 17-18: 68:5-6; 146:5-9).
It is logical therefore that when Israel grounded its hope in the Messiah, the Anointed One, he was considered as the "Liberator" (I Sam. 2:1-10; Is. 61:1-2; etc.).
The New Testament, far from rejecting this hope, continues it in the proclamation of Jesus Christ. Thus he is received by Zachariah and Mary as the long-awaited liberator (Luke 2:46-55; 68-79). Jesus takes upon himself the programme of liberation announced by Isaiah (Luke 4:18-19) (Matt. 11:1-6). In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a new world has erupted, a new age is inaugurated under the sign of liberation, from the world, from sin, from death, from the law, a liberation that is to be consummated in the Parousia. The Christian is "called to liberty" (Gal. 5:1 and 13), a liberty which is both an anticipation of the definitive freedom to come and a stimulus for a new life (Rom. 8:15-27), a liberation that the whole creation desires and awaits (v. 22).
What kind of liberation?
But what does this liberation mean? Christian thought and practice, in part constrained by circumstances but mainly influenced by the philosophic and religious view of the surrounding world (Hellenistic), interpreted liberation in terms of inwardness, the emancipation of the soul from the cares, appetites, and ambitions of the body and the world, in order to be dedicated to contemplation and communion with God. The Gospel demand of love for one's neighbour often hindered total self-absorption, but even so, charity was often conceived of as a second movement that grows out of a "liberated soul" and not as a part of liberation itself (the negative consequences of a false understanding of "by faith alone" in Protestantism must be admitted, of course). [69]
The crisis that modern thought produced in theology challenged many of the traditional schemes, but in general did not alter this concentration on liberation as something primarily internal and individual. Sometimes liberation is linked to the integration of man with the universe of moral values; sometimes to the emancipation of the spirit in a vision of the dialectic that governs history. Sometimes, in the existential moment of decision liberation is related to a flight from the "objective", from the world of things, from the "brute" processes of history, a flight, that is, to a world where objective reality can be explained, dissolved, or ignored in mental and mystical processes. All this is done together with and by means of an apparently plausible biblical interpretation: the New Testament is considered to have "spiritualized" the overly materialistic worldly hopes of the people of Israel and to have focused them on the interior or heavenly world (or on both) and to have stripped them of their "apocalyptic objectivism".
The Marxist critique
It is this concept of liberation and the related understanding of slavery which Marxism has severely criticized and attacked. Man is effectively enslaved, Marx tells us, "alienated", broken in his own being and separated from his neighbour. He is a truncated man who ought to be reintegrated and made whole. But this alienation is not due simply to an internal split or to some transcendent fall but to a falsification of his relationship to his world. In the context of the historical situation in which he moves, Marx explains and illustrates this affirmation by analyzing the relation of man to the product of his work under the capitalist system of production. The worker is separated from the product of his creation, it does not belong to him. He does not dispose of it; all he gets from it is a salary which has no intrinsic relation to his creative act. This work forms part of a process that is foreign to him and on which he is dependent. His own action, his effort, his energy, in short, his life, become something alien, adverse, independent of him. This alienated work relates him to other men as an alien force, one that can only serve as a means of his individual existence. "It alienates man from his own body, from nature, from his spiritual being, from his human being".[1] There is no need to offer an explanation, a speculative, mystical, philosophical or religious theory, which will allow man to accept his alienated [70] situation and install himself comfortably in it. That is what religion has always done, says Marx. Religion expresses the protest and the groaning of a truncated humanity. By satisfying man in his truncated state, religion has been the opiate of the people.
The need is to "transform", not to "explain", and for this it is necessary radically to change the alienating means of production. Marx thus offers the socialist model as a way to a totally unalienated situation, the communist utopia.
This is not an attempt to offer a detailed analysis of the Marxist concept (our's has been very schematic and incomplete), nor a theologically precise analysis of the shades of the concept of alienation (sin?) or liberation (redemption?). But in the confrontation of these perspectives perhaps we can point out some elements of value for a Christian conception and practice of liberation.
1. We must agree with Marx that liberation should not be considered as an explanation but a project. The Bible always speaks of it as action — the acts of God — that changes the conditions of human existence, that moves history, that transforms relations in all orders, and not simply as "a new understanding of himself" for man. The new understanding is rather — and here we have another agreement — the consequence of a new situation. God does not call on man to feel free in his slavery; he liberates him to understand what freedom is. Thus, neither in the field of doctrine nor in Christian ethics can we escape the active dynamic character of liberation.
2. We must also agree with Marx that liberation has to do with man's whole being and not with an abstract and privileged inwardness (mystical, speculative, or ethical) opposed to the rest of his being and relationships. A man and a humanity thus divided are as "truncated" for the Christian faith as for marxism.
I believe that this insistence on the "integrity" of man as an explication of alienation is more essential to Marx than his insistence on the relations of production.
"To be radical", he wrote, "is to seize a thing at its root. But the root for man is man himself". At all events, this search for integrity signifies [71] for Christians, especially in view of our history, careful avoidance of the tendency to "spiritualization", or the separation of the project of liberation from the corporal, historical, social and political reality. For this we have the backing of all Scripture. It should be observed that Paul himself (who is customarily accused of "interiorizing" Christianity) never distinguished between interior and exterior "works".
The distinction that interested him was the distinction between a "work of the law" (alienated, subject to slavery) and the work of faith (liberated, springing from love). Neither the Christian hope ("a new heaven and a new earth"), nor the work of Christ ("made flesh"; "death on the cross", bodily resurrection), nor the practice of faith ("glorify God in your bodies", "be not conformed to the structure of this society, but offer your bodies..."), authorize us to truncate man and the process of liberation.
3. Precisely because of what has been said in the preceding point, we must criticize the insufficiency of the Marxist project of liberation, both in theory and in practice. Marxist practice now shows clearly that alienation, including the facet of production, does not disappear with socialism. The problems posed by Stalinism, government bureaucracies and technocracy, which continue to interject themselves between the worker and his work, show clearly that socialization, although it is necessary, is not enough. The Maoist idea of cultural revolution, whatever its merits, is an attempt to overcome, by constant prolongation of the process of liberation, the limitations of purely economic planning. But the shortcoming of Marxist theory is even more serious for Christians; it concerns basically the denial of God. In this sense, Marxism can be understood by Christians as: a) a scientific theory of society which, corrected and perfected as all theory should be, becomes significant and useful for a necessary transformation of the conditions of man's life; and b) a humanism that presides over and stimulates the search for liberating action, legitimate as a motivation, positive as a corrective to deformations of which we Christians share the guilt, but ultimately insufficient and unfounded, seeing that it "alienates" men from the fundamental structure of their being, their relation to God. The distinction we have made may seem unacceptable to many Marxists, but I believe that theoretical discussions in contemporary Marxism justify it. On this point anyway the Christian has to testify to the total nature of [72] both alienation and liberation, since in the end there is no full liberation except through faith in Jesus Christ, because there is no other mediator of reconciliation with God.
4. When making this last affirmation, however, it is imperative to take precautions not to fall back into the dualism and separations that have detracted at one time or another from the Christian project. Full liberation, reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ by faith, does not occur in a vacuum but in the concrete conditions of human existence, as a judgment and an action that have to do with the totality of the alienation which man suffers. To be reconciled to God is to be an enemy of all that attacks full and genuine human existence. And this, not as a separate or secondary "consequence" but as an intrinsic dimension of reconciliation. This judgment and this action have to do with a concrete historic situation, and demand, therefore, a concrete analysis of the slaveries to which man is subject. For this the Christian does not have an adequate instrument; but he makes use of existing theories and models, in terms of the lucidity of his analysis and of its efficacy in the elimination of the existing forms of slavery. It is in the midst of these concrete projects of liberation that Christians and the Church affirm the total projection of liberation: to give witness to their faith in God, to bind themselves together as defenders of the integrity of man, to point out the limitations of all historical projects. But this testimony is empty unless it starts from an action congruent with the full liberation that it proclaims.
If these reflections are adequate in some measure, a theology of liberation signifies and demands a liberation of theology from a series of mental structures, of derived philosophical categories and of religious overtones (it is not that faith is opposed to religion, but that it demands a religious practice congruent with faith) that have made theology so frequently an accomplice in the alienation of man. However, it will not be the isolated speculation but the practice of a believing people committed to a liberating task that will stimulate theology to its own liberation. And at the same time, liberation will clarify and stimulate theology.
Rev. Dr. J. MÍGUEZ-BONINO is President of Union Theological Seminary, Buenos Aires, Argentina Montevideo Cuernavaca , Mexico
Source: International Review of Mission
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