A Cross-Disciplined View Meets Gutierrez’s Unified View

(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Liberation Theology - Peter Bisson



There are many resources available to Christians in order to promote social justice, with four large resources being: God as Creator; Christ as Liberator; the present Information Age of Globalization; and the differing branches of theology and their communities. Theologians and scholars are willing to handle ambiguity, conflict, and sometimes even persecution in order to promote dialogue that centers on the promotion of justice and peace. Some of these people are from circles concerning Latin American liberation theology (Gustavo Gutierrez), feminist theology (Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki), mysticism (Dorothee Soelle) and religious pluralism (John Knitter). It is these people and more who are reaching across the intellectual divides that are between their disciplines in order to synthesize their knowledge into a foundation for worldwide social action that promotes social justice for the entire world.

Social justice is concerned with liberation which Gutierrez has designated as having three levels of meaning ; the surface meaning expresses itself in the tangible expression of the conflictual process that includes social, political, and economic aspects that is responsible for creating oppression in society and results in the liberating aspirations of the oppressed peoples to be highlighted as needing social justice to appease their call. A deeper level shows how the liberation process is seen throughout humankind’s history as humans assume conscious responsibility for their own destinies. Gutierrez explains this process in detail in Chapter nine. Soelle summarizes the purpose of doing so in her definition of liberation theology as being the process of applying knowledge learned through the Babylonian exile into “a long-term praxis” of resistance. Soelle sees this process as one of growing into the reclamation of power that has been given to all living things through the reappropriation of “one’s own power” . It is the reappropriation of objective truth and subjective dignity that the bible calls ‘the strength of the weak.’”

This “strength of the weak” leads to the deepest level of the meaning of liberation; Christianity brings liberation through universal salvation by leading humanity towards communion and away from sin, which is the root of all injustice. Communion occurs as a universal call of people to people within communities and their communion with God. It is this experience of oneness with God that “supports the dignity of human beings” and different traditions give varied expression to this. In Christianity this is known as “cognitio Dei experimentalis” and is “the knowledge of God through and from experience.” This is the essence of Christian mysticism.

Christian mysticism is structurally marginalized inter-ecclesially and is hinted at behind Gutierrez’s construction of a unified point of view towards liberation, as well as within his many concepts, such as “conversion to the neighbor” and of being open in “our spiritual childhood”. Mysticism is the theology of experience, of communion and, as Soelle frames it, of resistance against social injustice as sin.
Meister Elkhart states that “we have ‘not been created for small things.’” Creation of the universe is achieved with the participation from the created (being human) as part of the process since human beings are made in the likeness of God. It is this process of co-creation where our faith fuels our actions, making us into agents of social change.

Social injustice is the “Silent Cry (of) God that “fulfills the cosmos and the soul” giving Christians hope in seeing God’s love by taking part in relieving injustice. Similarly, Sufism, grounded in Islam, has two tenets or pillars of faith, one of charity and one of dhikr, a recollection and remembering of God’s names that works to keep one filled with the presence of piety that seeks its expression in charity that promotes social equality between all in the Muslim community. Gutierrez and other liberation theologians can learn much by seeking communication with Muslims and members of other faiths through inter-religious dialogue. As Jacques Dupuis believes, religious pluralism is God’s grand plan for humankind and follows Gutierrez’s advice that “knowledge of humankind” is a prerequisite for knowing God.

It is this unified view that answers Rosemary Radford Ruether call addressed in feminism; “(f)eminism speaks of new contexts where the divine needs to be localized.” Gutierrez points out that God is universally in relationship with humanity through an integration of God’s presence within each and every human being. This is similar to the beliefs of Hasidim, an eastern Jewish movement of mysticism for the masses, where hidden sacred sparks makes “nothing in the world … unworthy of God.” Salvation lies in these hidden sacred sparks being found, raised up to its source, and thus set free or “liberated by means of ordinary, everyday deeds.” It is through the action of the pious that the sparks are raised up to source, much like Eckhart‘s sense of sunder warumbe, of “action without ulterior motive.”

It is God’s presence within humanity that creates the call for a “conversion to the neighbor”, where Christians can follow Christ’s example when “the Son of Man has made himself one with all… in solidarity with the whole of human misery.” As the Jewish mystic Emmanuel Levinas states, to “know God means to know what has to be done.” Knowing and acting is indivisible from one another and to know God and to exploit others “is to offend God.”

Gutierrez shares the “one history of salvation” that leads to the “creation of a new humanity” which we help to create. Soelle emphasizes that God encounters us in “the very now” of our interactions with the world and the “mysticism of the poor” shows how the oppressed first act from their faith and then from reflection. It is through solidarity with the poor and the oppressed that social justice will lead to the liberation of humanity, through the expansion of a concept of John of the Cross who reassures that “the dark night of the soul is reclaimed with the light and blessedness into the wholeness of God.” Humanity is going through a ‘dark night of the soul’, and Christians can help in providing the light of Christian understanding to the world in respectful dialogue with others. This will allow the church to address Helder Camara’s conception of God as “born into the midnight of hunger and beaten-down life”, opposed to orthodoxy’s separation of God and human beings.

Whereas Gutierrez works with reflection and praxis within the ecclesial sense and brings the two into a relational process, Buber sees confrontation between gnosis (knowledge) and devotio (dedicated and pious) people. Gnosis people do not want to serve and devotio people are in service so that “the holy can manifest in the now” through relationships found in community. It is in the everyday experience of “necessity versus freedom” where mystical experience fuses together with liberation theology where “(c)hoosing the way and being chosen are the same.” As C.S. Lewis states, “I am what I do.” This is a new vision of relating with the world and allows the Christian to see “through the eyes of God and using God’s senses.”

Gutierrez’s unified view of liberation theology is his process of attempting to transcend the duality found within theological formulations by showing how the constructs of oppositions “are complementary components of the One.” He successfully brings together: theology and praxis; theology and liberation; the individual and the collective; the secular and the ecclesial; and rationality with social conditioning in order to provide a unified working foundation to help shift Christian awareness (and action) towards social praxis. What he has forgotten to address is bringing together the dualities of the maternal with the fraternal, the philosophies of other religions and their values to those of Christianity’s, and the mystical union of tribal features of pre-colonized Latin America to the base ecclesial communities and their worship . His ‘closet mysticism’ could be consciously integrated with his liberation theology in order to enhance his argument since he would then be in a better position to combat the criticisms that have arisen of the immanence found in his theory with the tools of the various other theological disciplines fore mentioned and utilized. Maybe he would, as Thomas Merton puts it, “become free from the need to find… affirmation. For then ‘you can be more open to the power that will work through you without you knowing it.’” This would allow Gutierrez to walk his talk by being open to act as Teresa of Avila did stating, “God has no other hands but ours.”

Teresa of Avila’s life contained both praxis and prayer, a concrete example of the mystic model that can replace the domination found in today’s world. It is through a model of mutual dependence where prayer is a language of love that can defeat domination “by knowing itself to be dependent.” Prayer petitions while teaching a reframing of our desires into a framework of life and togetherness while delivering our self into God’s grace, knowing we are not self-sufficient. It is this dependence that is the essence behind Rudolph Otto’s concept of God as voluntaristic” ; it is the knowledge that “God as the divine will build up the reign of the kingdom of God.” This knowledge is based on love that retains the dignity of the other and participates “in sacred power, the shared power of the Holy.” The polarizations of opposites are brought together into an interrelatedness that eliminates “the Aristotelian male/female break into gender roles and allows activity and passivity to mutually coexist and flow in relationship with each other.”

Breaking the boundaries that interrupt the mutual coexistence between the varieties of religions is the domain of religious pluralists, such as Paul Knitter. He criticizes the Christocentric focus as having “served to hide an unconscious desire to dominate other traditions” rather than taking active part in committing to the promotion of eco-human well-being. Distinctions and discernments on the uniqueness and/or finality of Christ are seen as unimportant to “seeking first the kingdom and its justice.” With all religions working to achieve justice, Knitter states that “Jesus’ would be universal savior – with other universal saviors. His universality and uniqueness would be not exclusive, nor inclusive, but complementary.” As a Christian reading the “signs of the times”, Gutierrez points out that one can see the oppression through sin that moves people away from communion, but more importantly, the signs of the times can be read from within the present history of humankind, specifically within the diverse religious and spiritual systems of the world and the communications resulting from this diversity. These systems can all be seen as moving towards communion, through dialogue and the critical analysis of the social orders (including self-critical analysis of each religious structure) present within this moment of history. For Christianity, the fullness of Christ and his actions in the world makes him the Liberator within the Christian frame of reference, alongside Buddha for Buddhists, and White Buffalo Calf Woman for Lakota Amerindians, and many more.

When grappling with the signs of the times in a more globalized view and context, the argument between the truths of “Buddha-nature” versus “Christ-in-me” seems nonsensical : As a Christian, the larger frame of reference allows us to experience the higher levels of feeling God’s grace within the Christian context. This frees us for both praxis and reflection in light of social justice and allows us to reflect on life as God’s gift so that we can stand equally with the oppressed in solidarity against the pressures of living in society. By committing to praxis and the option for the poor we can transform ourselves and become more spiritually child-like which entails letting go or maturing our conceptions of intellectual categories, relationships of power/privilege, and in how we identify God. Transformation also occurs in how we view our relationship with Jesus by gaining an understanding of other religions and how they identify and define their relationships with God and/or process within their own manifestations.

Knitter uses criterion that comes from liberation theology when dealing with dialogue on religious pluralism and can show Gutierrez the value of seeking a cross-cultural use of theology. Knitter successfully weaves the “suffering Other” of liberation theology into the “religious Other” concerning Christianity’s views of other religions. Gutierrez seems to be a little slow in picking up the tools from the other areas of liberation theology in order to maintain his utopian ideal found within his unified conception. Aloysius Pieris, in agreement with Knitter, warns that “the common thrust remains… soteriological, the concern of most religions being liberation (vitmukti, moksa, nirvana) rather than speculating about a hypothetical (divine) liberator.” Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki affirms and refines Gutierrez’s utopian ideal: “it is possible that each religion’s deepest valuation of what physical existence should be lies, not in its coping with the exigencies of history, but in its projection of the ideal.” This works out into a conception of the utopian ideal as providing hope where “one vision of justice can temper, criticize, and deepen another and through dialogue each vision might grow richer in understanding and implementation.” Gutierrez can benefit greatly with such sharing of visions, avoiding the creation of another male-dominant Universalist theology that is not grounded in humanity but within a church structures, albeit the Latin American structure.

Suchocki points out that “universalizing one religion such that it is taken as a norm whereby all other religions are judged and valued leads to oppression.” She suggests justice is the norm that “creates well-being in the world community.” She uses the example of the historical oppression of women, blacks and other minority groups that was progressed through Christianity’s persistence that their suffering is to be called spiritual well-being, whereas using “justice as an internal basis for criticism, I name such practices evil, and call for their reform.” This is why Rosemary Radford Ruether calls for all religions to recognize their patriarchal exclusion of women from experiencing the divine and recommends that inter-religious dialogue can lead to the self-awareness to critically assess each religion of their own affiliation. For example, Hans Kung notes that, as of 1995, the Vatican is “the last absolute monarchy in Europe, (who) has not yet signed the declaration of human rights of the Council of Europe.” This leads him to search and recognize that, in the third world, “the history of colonization and the history of mission mixed up with it are still by no means forgotten.” This recognition still must be expanded to include the effects of colonization and missionizing to the first world populations that have been oppressed within the process of modernization and its pseudo-colonial processes, such as those labeled by the First Nations peoples of Canada. The abundance and diversity of dialogue and testimony concerning the social wounds inflicted by Christianity need to be addressed through Christian confession that is without the apologetic attitudes officials have had in the past concerning their own historical participation. It is through the ritual of confession that Christianity can use its own process in taking responsibility for its structural support in the historical state of affairs that oppression has manifested into.

Responsible confession may lead Christianity to recognize the diverse aspects of Christianity that have manifested from pagan influences and additions that have beneficially supported Christianity’s longevity in history. The more recent additions and syncretic influences are from Latin America’s tribal flavors into the Roman Catholic Church. As Gutierrez states, Latin Americans are contributors to the “enrichment of the universal church” but he fails to understand how much contribution they have made. This realization may deepen his understanding and lead him, and others, to viewing liberation theology through “new lens to understand their own traditions” and “a new voice for communicating and learning” that creates new “inter-religious communities of justice.”

Christianity has many resources to promote liberation through social justice. By participating in inter-ecclesial and inter-religious dialogue a new process can be established that breaks through the boundaries that separate the different paths aimed towards liberation, thus allowing each of the theologians a full range of resources and tools to serve their base communities within the larger church of Christianity. These resources include varying interpretations that expand the concepts and ways of calling on God the Creator through his relationship with the history of humankind; calling on Christ as Liberator with his mediation in the past and its lessons and examples concerning the historical Axial Age, and calling on his mediation as Liberator within the coming arrival of the Kingdom of God; and by using the tools, the theological diversity and dialogue, and the multi-media products and services of this Information Age. These resources combined together can be used to build up a soteriological base of communities working towards liberation in the fullest sense of the word and seeks expression within the diverse paths that lead to social justice.




Bibliography

Coward, Harold. (2000) Pluralism in the World Religions: A Short Introduction. Boston; Oneworld.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. (1988). A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Ed. New York: Orbis.

Hennelly, Alfred T. (1995). Liberation Theologies: The Blobal Pursuit of Justice. Connecticut: Twenty-Third.

Soelle, Dorothee. (2001). The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, trans. by B & M Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress.