One of the catastrophic consequences of capitalism is what it does to rich people at the heart of this economic system by reducing humanity to the individual. One an see how American commercialism presents all items as being 'quite personal to you', even if millions of them exist. Your initials must be on your T-shirt, on your ball-point pen, on your bag--and on your Jesus. He too is quite personal to you. The spirit of commercial culture is also alive in this religion: for fundamentalism, which is massively effective, Jesus is 'my quite personal Saviour', and really no more can be said about that. The confession of 'Jesus Christ--my personal saviour' brings no hope to those whom our system condemns to die of famine. It is a pious statement which is quite indifferent to the poor and completely lacking in hope for all of us. In the light of this individualistic reduction we must put the question of Christ 'for us today' in the age and place in which we live.
A friend of mine once said that one of the things that surprised him the most about me is that I go to church. I won't lie and say people say that stuff to me all the time; most people even in lefty Brooklyn still keep religion away from the dinner table. But I'm sure he's not the only one to be surprised by it, and there are times that I'm surprised by it myself.
Why is that? Why is religion--and specifically, Christianity--such an antiquated piece of the furniture of life? Dorothee Solle, in her book Thinking About God, writes about all the people she has known that have discovered, late in life, a form of Christianity that does not resemble the one they grew out of as children, a kind of poisoned orthodoxy that is reduced to claims of obedience and authority. She calls these the "unholy Trinity," the "authority of the father, the state and of order," and it's hard not to recognize in those three nouns much (all?) that is wrong with the world. Who would want to be associated with all that except masochists, Jesuits, and tradwives?
Living in 2020 (holy shit), in New York City, I think my friends understand that the orthodox mode of Christianity is not the only one. There are alternatives, as Solle illustrates, grown out of the Reformation and Enlightenment, which might be called "liberal" Christianity. Liberal Christianity embraces reason, historicity, and the separation of the church and state. When pressed, most secular American probably look more kindly on it, but with a mix of bemusement and perplexity. It's not as bad as the alternative, they might say, but what exactly is the point of it? Even growing up in an evangelical Christian church, this is the kind of Christianity I professed, but more and more it seems rather feckless, insisting on engaging a secular world on secular terms that hardly seem commensurate with Christ's insistence that he is not "of the world."
But in Thinking About God, Solle separates from these two a third theological understanding, which she calls "radical," but which is really the liberation theology developed by Latin American, black, and feminist theologians in the 20th century. The first few chapters of the book focus on big topics--creation, sin, grace--in theology through each of these three lenses--orthodox, liberal, radical--although her method reminds me of Terry Eagleton's approach to literary criticism, who lays out all the options without hiding that he thinks Marxist criticism is the only approach that really works. For Solle, radical theology is the only way of thinking capable of speaking to who Christ is "for us today," and for the most part, I agree.
One example of Solle's that sticks with me is her exposition on the story of the Virgin Mary. To orthodox traditions like Catholicism, the story of the virgin birth is literal and meaningful because it is miracle: it signifies the miraculous nature of Christ and elevates Mary to an exalted place by virtue of God's favor. To liberal traditions, the virgin birth presents a problem: it is not attested for in every Gospel, and furthermore, its suggestion of the primal importance of obedience (Mary obeys God's messenger without complaint) is a little icky. A little textual criticism, poof, voila, it's thrown out. It doesn't matter. And indeed, in the evangelical church I grew up in, the virgin birth was of very minor importance. But to radical traditions, what matters about Mary is that she is a woman, a refugee, and poor, an oppressed person three times over; her special place in the Gospel story is a representation of the special place of oppressed people in God's eyes.
This is one of the important tenets of liberation theology: only theology which comes out of oppressed communities can have any validity. The "personal savior" of liberal theology, which reduces everything--grace, sin, Jesus, whatever--to the individual not only fails to account for the state of the world, it fails to account for much of what goes on in the Bible. Only the ideologies of the powerful could spend so much time trying to get around Jesus' love for lepers, prostitutes, and beggars, or the simple insistence that a rich man has just as much chance entering the Kingdom of God as a camel does passing through the eye of a needle.
The differences between orthodox/liberal theologies and radical ones aren't small ones--they aren't merely reduced to a greater interest in the poor. The cross, as in James Cone's work, becomes not a site of mystical sacrifice so much as a symbol of God's identification with the sufferers of the world and against the powers and institutions which, like the Roman state, inflict suffering. The word "heaven" barely appears in Solle; the kingdom of God is moved to the here and now. The latter parts of the book expound on the tenets of radical liberation theology for which there are no ideological analogs in other traditions: feminist theology, Black liberation theology, and the theology of peace.
I wasn't sure what to say to my friend. I never am when people ask me about this stuff. I know that there is no possible answer in orthodox or liberal theology that would make any sense at all. But when I think about the rottenness of the world right now--its bloodthirstiness, its hatred of the poor, of women, of marginalized peoples of all kinds--I start to think that liberation theology is the answer to more questions than these. If nothing else, as Solle describes so articulately here, it's the difference between an unfeeling theology which cares only about life after death, or the state of the hidden soul, and one which insists on the wholesale transformation of a bloody and poisonous culture.
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