Pondering Liberation Theology: Defining the Church's Responsibility to the Poor -Part 2

Recently, I have been acquainting myself with the fundamentals of Liberation theology. In some of the books I've read, I've come across some powerful ideas. I want to take some time here to communicate some passages from Raymond McAfee Brown's book: Spirituality and Liberation (The Westminster Press, 1988). 

Here, Brown continues to summarize Gustavo Gutierrez's understanding of genuine spirituality, this time from Gutierrez's first major work, A Theology of Liberation (esp. pp 36-37 and 176-181): 

"Liberation when radically understood includes liberation. We can make our point by calling once again on Gutierrez, who, as the practitioner of a life in which spirituality and liberation cannot be separated, has particularly compelling credentials. We need to call attention to only a single point made in his first major work, A theology of Liberation (esp. pp. 36-37 and 176-181). If this point is clear, the cause for inclusiveness of spirituality and liberation has been established. It is Gutierrez's contention that liberation has three levels of meaning but that no one of them is properly understood unless all three are simultaneously affirmed.

The first level is liberation from unjust social structures that destroy people. These structures may be political, economic, or cultural, they may grow out of warped attitudes based on race, class, nation, or sex, and they may also (as Gutierrez has personal reason to know) be embodied in church structures, operating in concert with any of the others. The attention of liberation theologians has been strongly focused on this level, since it is the most immediate barrier to full personhood that their constituencies face, and it has thrust many of them into conflictive situations.

The second level with which liberation is concerned is more subtle but equally devastating. It is liberation from the power of fate, from the sense that one's station in lie is foreordained, and that not only is there nothing one can do about it but it would be presumptuous and arrogant even to try. If one is born rich, that, too, is the way it is meant to be. Good news to the rich, bad news to the poor. Result: apathy or despair among the poor, and exhilaration among the rich who are determined to keep things that way. The counsel to accept whatever cards fate deals serves as a magnificent justification for the status quo, a fact not lost on the rich and powerful.

For hundreds of years, the church played a major role in supporting this position, by the simple device of substituting "providence" or "the will of God" for the pagan concept of "fate." Accept your lot without complaint, the sermons went, and God will reward you in the afterlife.

The liberation message on this second level is that things need not remain the way they are, that the biblical God  is working actively for justice and seeks to enlist all people in the struggle. The operative word is hope.

The third level of liberation is liberation from personal sin and guilt. This is not an add-on to the liberation agenda, inserted late in the day to forestall the critics, but has been there from the start, as any examination of the literature will show. Critics who fail to see it testify only to their own myopia. If the third level receives less quantitative treatment than the others, this is for the good reason that it has always been the central if not exclusive message of the institutional church, hardly in need of new champions, whereas levels one and two have only infrequently been acknowledged as part of the Christian agenda. Even so, the quantitative as well as qualitative attention given to such matters in Gutierrez's writings is impressive. Prayer, Bible study, worship, Eucharist, and (as we have seen) grace are central to his understanding of liberation." [pp. 121-123]

Tomorrow, we will let Brown sum up all that's been said thus far. Then, we will try and make sense of it ourselves. 

 

 

Pondering Liberation Theology: Defining the Church's Responsibility to the Poor -Part 1

Recently, I have been acquainting myself with the fundamentals of Liberation theology. In some of the books I've read, I've come across some powerful ideas. I want to take some time here to communicate some passages from Raymond McAfee Brown's book: Spirituality and Liberation (The Westminster Press, 1988). 

Here, Brown is summarizing Gustavo Gutierrez's understanding of genuine spirituality (from a book entitled We Drink from our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People.): 

"He would  be reminding them and us that his title comes from a comment of Benard of Clairvaus, that the place from which our spiritual nourishment comes is the place where we think, pray, and work; we begin our spiritual journey where we are, and not somewhere else. If the Latin Americans' "own wells" are located within the liberation struggle to which they are committed, our North American wells will likewise be found in our own situation, as we struggle, for example, with the affluence we so often use exploitatively. In either case, the life of spirituality will be located in the midst of the world's turmoil, rather than in safe havens of disengagement.

This cannot be done, Gutierrez would continue, with an individualistic spirituality, and we would call attention to the important subtitle of his book, the Spiritual Journey of a People, as the reminder that spirituality must be communal. To show that this conviction is not idiosyncratic to himself, he might cite the comment of John de Gruchy from South Africa, another continent where oppression and struggle are daily companions of the Christian:

"The Christian life, while intensely personal, is always communal...The privatization of piety is not part of the Christian tradition and it undermines the Christian life... Christian spirituality is, therefore, the spirituality of Christian community. But it is not Christian community lived in isolation from the world." (De Gruchy, Cry Justice, p. 25)

Having rooted spirituality in the immediate human situation, Gutierrez would then explore the riches of the biblical and historical traditions, in order to pave the way for five interconnected marks of the new spirituality of liberation. They are worth some attention,  because they are as true for us in our situation as they are in his.

The first of these is Conversion: A Requirement for Solidarity, and it involves a break with the past and the setting out on a new path that is both personal and social. Conversion involves both an acknowledgement of individual sin and a recognition that ours is a sinful situation, containing structural causes of injustice. So conversion will involve the option to live in solidarity with those who attack sin on both levels. Hunger for God and hunger for bread go together.

A second characteristic is Gratuitousness: The Atmosphere for Efficacy (which we might render in less cumbersome fashion as "Grace: The Basis for Action"). God's gracious love is the source of everything else, including our own ability to love. Such love starts with the concrete need of the other, not with "duty" to practice love. Drawing on Bernano's theme that "all is grace," Gutierrez reminds us that grace provides beauty for our lives, "without which even the struggle for justice would be crippled." Prayer expresses our faith and trust in the gracious God, a "living dialog" that becomes the touchstone of life. There is always "a twofold movement": a full encounter with the neighbor presupposes the experience of grace, and Christ, as our way to God, is also our way to neighbor.

The third note is Joy: Victory Over Suffering. Gutierrez does not gloss over the reality of suffering, be he also insists that the last word is "the joy born of the conviction that unjust mistreatment and suffering will be overcome." Such joy can be found even in a time of martyrdom, for to defend the poor easily leads to suffering and death. Martyrdom "is something that happens but is not sought." And Christians must never create a "cult of death." The only joy that can ultimately sustain us is "Easter joy," a joy that "springs from hope that death is not the final word of history." Those who encounter the cross are led to experience the resurrection.

The fourth mark is Spiritual Childhood: A Requirement for Commitment to the Poor. The task, as Gutierrez frequently remarks, is to be "with the poor and against poverty." The demands are severe: One must assume "voluntarily and lovingly the condition of the needy...in order to give testimony to the evil it represents." To do so will provoke opposition from the privileged, who are not enchanted when those within the church "disassociate themselves from the injustices of the prevailing system." Commitment to the poor means looking on the world of the poor "as a place of residence and not simply of work," sharing in exploitation, inadequate health care, and all the rest but also making new friends, experiencing a new kind of love, and developing "a new realization of the Lord's fidelity."

The fifth mark is Community: Out of Solitude. To be with the poor will mean going through "the dark night of injustice" oneself, enduring ostracization, fear, weariness, cowardice, and despair, not to mention having to make crucial decisions when "nothing is clear." This is when we move "out of solitude" and into community. God does not call us to remain in the desert but to pass through it on our way to the promised land. As we are drawn more deeply into community, we find foretastes of the promised land, even in midst of the desert, places where the death and resurrection of Christ are remembered, and where the Eucharist becomes a point of departure and arrival. The mood is celebration.



Throughout, Gutierrez has been describing spirituality. Throughout Gutierrez has been describing liberation." [pp. 118-121]

Tomorrow, we will look at Redefining Liberation.