The Reemergence of Liberation Theologies

Models for the Twenty-First Century

T. Cooper

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137292445, 9781137305053
• eBook ISBN: 9781137311825
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory

This book brings together prominent voices from the global North and South to present brief analyses of liberation theology's future. It includes leaders in the field along with the newest voices. Each of these pieces was presented in the American Academy of Religion in the first five years of the Liberation Theologies Consultation. 

PART I

Overall State of Liberation Theology

CHAPTER 1

Resisting Imperial Peace: Theological Reflections

Dwight N. Hopkins
[email protected]

My starting point on this topic of “Resisting Imperial Peace: Theological Reflections” is the assumption of the intent of the creation narrative or myth in the book of Genesis. That is to say, that God created humankind in order to share in the beauty of all of creation, especially nature—earth, wind, fire, and water. All that exists in these four realms are God’s gift to humankind insofar as human beings recognize that we are stewards of the natural and human ecology belonging to God.

God saw that all of creation, all of the ecology, is good. And this goodness takes its meaning from the fact that something greater than the human capacity and the human will crafted this creation. Because this creation is greater than human capabilities and because this creation originates from an ultimate divinity, creation, all of it, belongs to God. And so, stewardship, in this respect, is the human vocation to accept as a blessing all of creation. In addition, it is to accept the human role of cultivators and nurturers of minerals in the earth, the space of the wind, the water ways of life, and the energy of fire.

If we are blessed by God to assume the awesome and loving responsibility to embrace all dimensions of creation as part of us, since the same God made everything and everything made is both part of God and part of each other, then stewardship suggests an equal participation in all of creation. The first theological principle of divine creative act is a mutual and equal participation in human responsibility. In this sense, to be human is to realize that one’s full potential is realized through this equal and shared participation in and with creation.

The question of imperial peace disrupts both the creative act of the divinity and the purpose of being human. The phrase “imperial peace” itself is by definition a contradiction in terms. To be “imperial” is to export a domestic way of being where divine creation is hoarded in private ownership. Stewardship and what it means to be human both become synonymous with privately owning God’s creation—specifically the earth, wind, fire, and water. The disruption caused by the “process of the imperial” brings an entire baggage of human centered lifestyles. At the level of political economy, it denotes developing, first, in the domestic realm a rapid redistribution of economic wealth and society’s capital upward into smaller numbers of hands. The force of this definition of stewardship and human purpose cuts against the grain of the original narrative of the creation story. Restated, God owns all that God creates, gifts it to all humanity, and this gift provides the possibility for human equal sharing as stewards. To be human is to accept God’s ownership, God’s offer of stewardship, and God providing the possibility for full maturation of human potential.

Yet the imperial contradicts all of this. Its monopolized private ownership and accumulation of the earth, wind, fire, and water becomes so saturated within the borders of its own country that it is forced to seek international outlets for more accumulation, more privatization, and more monopolization of creation. But this pursuit of a warped and sinful understanding of both stewardship and what it means to be human meets global societies which claim, likewise, to be stewards of the divinity’s creation. These countries, also, are stewards of God’s creation in their own domestic realms. So the thirst for human accumulation, privatization, and monopolization, on the part of the imperial, inevitably produces violence. On a state to state level, this violence is armed conflict. The armed conflict of war is the most obvious logical extension of the imperial.

There are, however, other forms of imperial extension of its domestic monopolization into the international realm. In today’s realities, it is often more effective to be imperial not by the violence of war, the rituals of armed conflict, and occupation of other countries’ share in creation. Rather, perhaps a more subtle, sinister, and baffling act of the imperial is the negative globalization of culture. Here the transcendent reach of the global becomes its own god.

Acting as its own god over against God’s creative act in Genesis, the imperial tries to create a false peace. It gives the appearance of peace by not producing violent war. Instead it conjures and spreads its own values. It hopes to export transcendent values of the imperial. The imperial hopes that other countries will internalize new values. The point of the religion of globalization is to craft new values to accompany the new person. First is the value of individualism. If the imperial is to succeed as the new god throughout the earth, it has to decouple the idea, particularly in Third World indigenous cultures, that the individual is linked to, defined by, accountable to, and responsible for his or her family and extended family. A sense of communalism and sacrifice of individual gain for the sake of a larger community stands in stark contradiction to the imperial. When an individual converts to the values of the imperial and reorients his or her self-worth and feeling of worthiness to a mode of individual gain, regardless of the well-being of those around him or her, this person has participated in imperial peace. The spread of the value of individualism is a central value for the successful spread of the imperial without the imperial using violent war.

Individualism opens up the additional value of accumulation of things for the individual’s primary benefit. In other words, gaining and amassing personal possession as a means of acquiring more personal possessions flows from a focus on the self for the self. This acquisitive desire manifests itself in diverse ways. It downplays sharing. It weakens the art of negotiation and compromise. It blinds a vision of mutuality. And it fosters a utilitarian way of being in the world where people, places, and things become tools for and stepping-stones toward increased personal profit. On the political level, such a value breeds a type of “monopoly capitalist democracy” constituted by subordination of the many for the few. This form of democracy employs the many to attain more resources for the few. As a political value, such a democracy equates the common good and the larger civic welfare with pragmatic results for the elite. In the economic sphere, it is an internal feeling that prompts the individual to pursue profit to gain more personal profit. It privileges the importance of commodities and material goods. Economic wealth is valued as one of the highest virtues in the definition of the new human being. Akin to an addiction (when left to mature), it motivates, gnaws at, and compels the new converted person to make life-and-death decisions based on the amount of wealth he or she has. The ownership of wealth commodities and/or the hunger for this ownership controls the person’s perception of the worth of life and death.

A return to our initial discussion about a theology of creation helps us to figure out how to resist this imperial peace by advancing an alternative theological vision. Actually, it is a recasting of the initial creation story of Genesis. God created all there is and all there is belongs to God for human beings to share equally.

Kim Yong-Bock (Korean) adds another theological dimension to a theology of creation. Yong-Bock approaches the subject matter with the theme of covenant between God and the poor. More specifically, the new covenant appears in the divine spiritual revelation in Jesus and his relation to those lacking material resources for a wholesome life. Yong-Bock explains:

The most dramatic expression of the socio-economic dimension of the new covenant is found in the early church, especially in Acts 2:42–47 and 4:32–5:11. This is the protection of the community of the faithful, who are the new people of God: “The faithful lived together and owned everything in common; they sold their goods and possessions and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each needed.” “None of their members was ever in want.” That is, there were no poor. (1991, 80)

Young-Bock goes on to infer how in today’s human family, established on the monopolization of private ownership of wealth and resources for a small sector of society, the cited book of Acts passages are dismissed as utopian or eschatological or hyperbole. That is, Christians and other readers of the Bible utilize a hermeneutics of me-first to misinterpret the community, communal values, and common good accent of this sacred history. Quite the contrary, asserts Yong-Bock, the early church provided a radical paradigm in the hierarchical and exploitative context of the slavery political economy in the Roman empire. Original Christian communities challenged the overall political and economic make up in the accepted social normalcy. Consequently, due to a revolutionary hope offered by Christianity, freed persons and slaves joined the counter-status quo Jesus movement. Thus, the “way” for the poor became a communal calling.

And, from a closer reading of Acts, sacred political economy yielded collective benefits for all members of the community when one prioritized the poor. The group of believers united in their hearts and souls without monopolizing possessions because all materialities were held in common. This social arrangement left no one wanting; each received according to her or his condition. Moreover, the epistle of James 2:1–9 amplifies the clarification of the early church: “My brothers [and sisters], do not try to combine faith in Jesus Christ, our glorified Lord, with the making of distinctions between classes of people. . . . It is those who are poor according to the world that God chose, to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom which [God] promised to those who love [God].” Prior to Roman emperor Constantine co-opting Christianity to serve the wealthy of the empire, the early church lived with a faith that opted on the side of the majority of the people, the poor, the enslaved, the working sectors, the marginalized, and those generally without material hope: those “economically destitute—because of their loss of property or their lack of inheritance, or because of their having been robbed by the powerful and rich” (Yong-Bock 1991, 81–2).¹

In such a way, the early church’s economic and political configurations provided interactions starting with the poor, the majority, and, through them, the rest of the society, including the wealthy. The primordial gathering of believers, thereby, was able to experience the new social benefits of equal ownership and proportional advantage to all. The political economy for the poor, Yong-Bock concludes, permeated the primal Christian community and the biblical text. Because the God-human covenant as the content of theological anthropology defended the poor via covenant codes, legal statutes, and the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures (so-called Old Testament) and by Jesus’s mission and covenant in the Christian Scriptures (so-called New Testament), the poor became the protagonists in biblical history and become the criteria for faithful Christian (and, one could imagine, humanist²) witness today.

Theologically, we therefore can reason, the first organized Christian communities and the Bible view God in a definitive political economy manner. God stands as the ultimate creator, owner, and giver of all wealth and resources found on, beneath, and above the earth. The question of the earth, wind, water, fire, and the components of technologies derive from the grace or granting of the divine. In broader strokes, the entire creation and ingredients currently harnessed by woman and man find their origin before the arrival of human communities and appear as a consequence of some power greater than human capabilities. Creation just is. And we partake of and benefit from it.

Imperial peace is a deceptive peace. It can spread internationally without the presence of violent war, at least for a period of time. It gives the appearance of peace while it extends its imperial tentacles through imperial values that are just as effective as outright violent war. So in this respect, this imperial peace produces the same results as violent war. The phrase “imperial peace” is a contradiction in terms. Most fundamentally it contradicts the God of creation of mutual sharing, collective stewardship, and realization of the full human potential.

Notes

1. Yong-Bock supplies additional biblical passages as data: Micah 2:2–5; Deuteronomy 10:17–18, 14–15, 16:19; Psalm 82:3; Exodus 23:3; Samuel 22:28; Isaiah 1:21–23, 25:4, 61:1; Amos 2:6, 4:1; Leviticus 19 and 23; Hosea 12:8–9; Luke 1:53, 4:18ff, 5:29–32, 6:5, 20, 21, 24, 25, 14:15–24, 16:19ff, 18:18ff, 21:1ff; and Matthew 22:1–1, 26:31–46. Also see Engelbert Mveng (1994, 163) for further biblical warrants for a communal political economy.

As we employ biblical pointers, we are aware of shortcomings even in the text itself. For instance, one has to be careful how the exodus theme is used. Robert Allen Warrior cautions against such a theme because there existed indigenous people already in Canaan who were v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Overall State of Liberation Theology
• Part II   United States
• Part III   Around the World
• Part IV   Practice
• Part V   Future
• Further Suggested Readings
• List of Contributors
• Index