An Eerdmans Reader in Contemporary Political Theology

Introduction

Why This Volume?

It may be hard to believe now, but it was only a decade ago that The Economist magazine ran a headline-grabbing obituary for God. The Almighty, it editorialized, after a lengthy career, has passed into history.¹

Such a judgment reflected longstanding assumptions for many in the West. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the disappearance of God from public life was increasingly taken for granted. Not only the popular media, but much of academia followed the eminent sociologist Peter Berger’s confident secularization thesis predicting that as cultures became more modern they would increasingly throw off the yoke of faith. To be modern, they assumed, was to be secular.

The paradigmatic example of this was Europe. Europe was once the seedbed for Western Christendom, but now churchgoing had become the preserve of a mere remnant of the European population. America, which remained both modern and pious, was simply viewed as the quirky exception. Europe embodied the understanding that history, as Max Weber told us, was marching inevitably toward the disenchantment of the world. And by the mid-twentieth century it appeared that the example of Europe was, indeed, spreading elsewhere: Kemal Atatürk had instituted a secular government in Turkey; Jawaharlal Nehru tried to make a clean sweep of institutionalized religion in India; the Pahlavi shahs of Iran argued that modernity was in opposition to the Mosque. Even the oddity that was America appeared to be catching up: by 1960, with evangelical Christians in full retreat, John F. Kennedy assured the electorate that his Catholicism would not affect his politics, and a 1966 cover of Time magazine could ask Is God Dead? Atheism became the new intellectual vanguard, and by the early 1990s Francis Fukuyama would affirm the triumph of secular liberalism with his book The End of History and the Last Man. It appeared that faith had been permanently exiled to a peripheral, or at least privatized, sphere.

Few believe that anymore. Today atheism is in retreat in former communist regimes: unregulated practices like Falun Gong flourish in China, while former KGB heavyweight Vladimir Putin is busily reclaiming Christianity for the state, conspicuously wearing his baptismal cross, visiting churches, and publicly maintaining a small chapel next to his office in the Kremlin. We witness clashes in North Africa between evangelical Christians in the north and fundamentalist Muslims in the south. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks appear locked in ongoing conflict with Hindu Tamils. Conflict in the Middle East has, in comparison with earlier decades, increasingly adopted theological language. Atatürk’s Turkey is now ruled by an Islamist political party, and increasing numbers of Turkey’s educated, elite women have taken to wearing the headscarf. In America, of course, the return of evangelicals to the public square has been amply documented: President George W. Bush opened each cabinet meeting in prayer, Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was an unabashed Pentecostal, and President Barack Obama wrote freely of his adult conversion to Christianity and his appreciation for the political theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. Even in Europe, the loosening of church-state connections appears to be creating space for religious life to once again flourish in embryonic ways: Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing branch of religion in France, for example, while British Prime Minister Tony Blair, notably open about his Christian commitments in comparison with most European leaders, started a high-profile Faith Foundation within months of leaving office. In addition, the arrival of millions of Muslims throughout Europe is forcing Europeans to grapple with questions of religious identity in new and profound ways, while arguments over the membership of new states in the European Union is leading Europe’s leaders to debate their Christian heritage in unexpected ways.

Thus it should perhaps not be surprising that in 2009 the Editor in Chief of The Economist would pen a bestselling book contritely titled God Is Back,² or that Peter Berger would begin rattling the world of sociology with frequent and public renunciations of his earlier theories of secularization (it is Europe, he now asserts, not America, that should be viewed as the exception in the world).

What is perhaps most interesting, however, is that it is not some deracinated, abstract category called religion that is back; it is committed faith, in all of its messy particularity and with its distinctly theological ways of speaking, that is back in the public realm. As the intellectual historian Mark Lilla wrote in a front-page article for the New York Times magazine in 2008, "We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men … we had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It is we who are the fragile exception."³ Of course, to say theology is back does not quite capture it. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that theology, despite the hopes of some, never really went away; it simply masqueraded in other guises throughout modernity. But that time is past. Theology is learning to speak to the public realm in its own voice once again.

It is with an awareness of this shift that we put this collection of essays together. For both in the media and across various disciplines in the academy, it is being increasingly recognized that debates about faith in public life, if they are to be conversations of any substance, are debates about theology, about the way a tradition has reasoned about God and God’s relationship with the world. To engage in such debates, however, requires that one become theologically literate and develop the knowledge and skills to enter into a conversation that has been taking place across a diversity of contexts for generations.

This volume aims to contribute to that conversation by bringing together some of its most important voices from the recent past, with selections of writing that capture central trajectories of thought. In that respect, we are attempting to extend those projects which have brought together some of the most important voices from earlier eras; a prime example is the wonderful volume edited by Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Eerdmans, 2000). We believe that a similar type of volume is needed to bring together key voices from the contemporary period, roughly from the twentieth century (though we have included some texts that predate this slightly) to the present. Hence we draw on leading essays that explore everything from Reading the Bible Politically to After 9/11.

We also engaged in this project convinced that, with the locus of Christianity shifting to the global South, we needed to include voices that were not always in the standard accounts of political theology. Thus, in addition to important texts within the Western canon of contemporary political theology, we have sought to include key voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. We know that theological voices from these parts of the world will only increase in importance, and hope that their inclusion here will function as something of a foretaste, however inadequate, of more to come in future editions.

We have also put this collection together as teachers, as those who introduce political theology to students often encountering the topic for the first time, who would profit from having in one place key texts that we have deemed of sufficient importance, provocation, and, in some cases, difficulty in locating. We have done this in close consultations with colleagues around the globe.⁴ We have not followed everyone’s advice on every occasion, but the selections that follow are the result of collegial conversations that have taken place over the last several years, and for which we are very grateful.

In the process of putting this volume together, we were also struck by the need to make careful use of limited space, in the hope that important elements would not be sacrificed in pursuit of clarity and ease of use. We have not been able to include everything we would have liked to. Despite our consultation with others in putting together the final reading list, we remain responsible for its inevitable shortcomings.

The thematic, rather than chronological, arrangement of this book was made partly to enable us to invite contemporary experts to provide short introductions to each group of essays. Our hope is that a dialogue between certain classic writings and some of the most interesting contemporary voices in political theology will prove stimulating to the ongoing conversations that are central to the task of theology. The responses are not meant to provide the final word on any subject, but to draw attention to important motifs, alternative readings, and potential questions, in hopes that readers might be inspired to make the task of political theology their own.

What Is Political Theology?

For many years, one of us lived within walking distance of a neoclassical, city amphitheater where members of the community would gather on summer evenings for free, local entertainment. Above the cypress-flanked stage, in faux Latin lettering, was inscribed an eminently political slogan taken from Proverbs 29:18: Without Vision a People Perish. It is a striking phrase. In some ways it frames some of the key loci for thinking about political theology in a contemporary context, which the readings we have compiled here aim to show.

Vision

In response to an advisor’s counsel to concentrate not on particular issues but on a broader political vision, the first President Bush was reported to have said dismissively, Oh. The vision thing. (He was not reelected.)

Decisions in any community — such as how much space for parks should be protected, or if it is right to go to war in a particular situation — depend upon a prior vision of what constitutes that community, and what goods it believes it should be pursuing. H. Richard Niebuhr once reminded Christian thinkers that a narrow focus on the question What should we do? can be answered only in the wake of a more basic question, What is going on? Being able to see reality clearly is crucial to the ethical questions that are at the heart of political theology. For Christians, seeing reality clearly begins with reflection on God. What kind of God do we serve? What is the nature of the human person who has been created by God? What is the end of human history? What is the relationship of divine and human authority? From a Christian point of view, fundamental issues such as these shape the way in which tangible questions about the political arrangement of human communities will be answered.

There are those, however, who will object that such questions should be kept out of politics. The vision that united the Hebrew people was, for the writer of the proverb, the revelation of the God of Israel and his prophetic word, which sustained Israel in faithfulness to this God’s covenant. But surely this vision of a community is too particular to bring together a people who think of themselves primarily as a civic body. Despite the fact that Mark Lilla, mentioned above, recognized the ongoing role that political theology has played throughout history, he doesn’t think this is a good thing; Lilla argues that what makes politics in the contemporary situation so dangerous is precisely the introduction of theological questions into the political. In this view, the modern separation of politics and theology is the salutary, but fragile, achievement of the modern West. Political philosophy can perhaps provide a circumscribed vision of limited goods that a secular, democratic polity should pursue. But a fairly loose and ambiguous political rhetoric is in fact what unites a people who, perhaps subconsciously, fear that their commonalities would dissipate should they begin to deliberate over a robust vision of the good life. It was by design that the framers of secular society sought ways of uniting citizens around things other than orthodox Christianity. Some suggest that, for a nation like America, religion is summarily pushed into the private sphere by maintaining a public expression that is acceptable only so long as it serves civic aims conceived on secular terms.

Part of the problem is captured by the double meaning of the word vision. On the one hand, it denotes a clear view of reality, a taking stock of what really is, which provides a sound basis for action in the world. On the other hand, vision is not about what is, but about what could be. Vision is about seeing into a future that is often hidden from the ordinary gaze. Indeed, visions are had by people whose sanity is sometimes questioned. John, the seer of Patmos, had visions of dragons, and of horses with serpents for tails. Some might ask, do we really want these kinds of visions welcomed in our politics?

As some of the essays in this volume make clear, however, there are those who not only believe that political theology is possible and worthwhile but also question the very idea that politics could exist without a theological vision. The ambitious revolutionary projects of the twentieth century have, of course, been widely viewed as thinly veiled theological eschatologies. Carl Schmitt, for example, sees all modern theories of the state as theologies in disguise, as evidenced in battles over the desecration of the national flag. This is what sociologist Robert Bellah, in 1967, called American civil religion. Every society, nation, and people must either be able to point to those things which unify them or else risk disastrous and poisonous fracture. In America, which started with such denominational pluralism, it could not be a distinct theological vision that unified; yet in its absence a covertly theological faith in America quickly filled the void, allowing notions of sacred election to elide from Israel and the Church to the nation-state of America. It was a profoundly theological vision masquerading as political policy, in other words — an implicit doctrine of election — that supported the politics of Manifest Destiny. Such arguments suggest, therefore, that when theology is banished from the public realm, it simply reasserts itself in other guises.

People

Who is a people that is the subject of political vision? Since the Westphalian solution in the seventeenth century, politics has been focused on states and nations. Christian churches melded seamlessly with the new reality, creating new forms of Christendom. In late modernity, however, such models of a people have been challenged from within and without. From within, a late-capitalist economy and social world produces individuals whose idea of freedom is expressed in terms of a take-it-or-leave-it relationship to the traditions that produce them. Charles Taylor contends that what makes the contemporary world different from previous cultures is the optional nature of faith traditions. Many relate to the feeling of standing neutrally before a set of options even while remaining distant enough from all of them to preserve the ability to take flight at any moment. What constitutes a people under such circumstances is sometimes little more than a collection of individuals united by common self-interest.

From without, the Westphalian focus has been challenged by globalization and the increasing way that capital, people, and identities overflow national borders. For Christians in particular, being a people has been enhanced and challenged by a keener awareness in the twenty-first century that the faith is global and is spoken and represented by a host of disparate voices. For Christians in Europe and North America, who had grown accustomed to being the center of gravity for all things Christian in the world, the global reality can be perceived as a shift, or even as something new. In truth, centuries of colonialism in various forms have obscured Christianity’s long history in places like Japan, India, South America, and Africa. For those in the global south, who live in those regions which are becoming Christianity’s center of gravity, the urgent need to bring their faith to bear on their political and social realities often means doing theology as a stark counterpart to Christendom.

What have been emerging are often radical alternatives to the long-established ways of thinking about peoplehood and sovereignty. Produced in a situation where bending the ear of politicians or ascending the ranks of government is impossible, Christian political thought in the Two-Thirds World takes seriously the ways in which popular forms of organization — such as base ecclesial communities in Latin America — are themselves political even apart from the levers of sovereign power. In situations such as Africa, where various states exercise only a weak form of sovereignty, churches have stepped into an organizational vacuum and provided spaces for nonstate forms of politics to emerge. The West, on the other hand, has a long tradition of viewing sovereign power as the only legitimate source of political organization. (As Michel Foucault once put it, the West has yet to cut off the king’s head.) Whatever one’s assessment of the ongoing power of the nation-state, however, globalization has clearly contributed to the sense that politics is no longer exclusively tied to territorial sovereignty.

The meaning of people has, in this setting, prompted many thinkers to reconsider what it means to be the church. Benedict Anderson famously applied his term imagined communities to the modern nation-state, which relies strongly on the power of a people’s imagination to police invisible borders or to fight for invisible collective loyalties and contingent ties. But this imagination is only as strong as the alternatives to it are weak. For many, the Christian alternative — an international, catholic people who are materially constituted as a people through baptism as one body in Christ — asserts a political significance once again. Some of the readings in this volume exemplify the shifting currents that have made such thinking possible. It can no longer be taken for granted that sovereign definitions of people are straightforward and unproblematic.

Perish

The current resurgence of interest in political theology can be attributed in part to the explosion, both figurative and literal, of militant Islam. Terrorism has raised the stakes on all sides, and one’s vision does indeed seem relevant to one’s ability to survive. For Osama bin Laden, it is precisely secularism’s lack of vision, its attempt to quarantine Islam from public life, that appears as a mortal threat. In a videotape from October 7, 2001, Osama bin Laden referred to the humiliation and disgrace that Islam had been experiencing for more than eighty years. But as Bernard Lewis observes, most people in the West did not know what he was talking about. Bin Laden was referring to the 1918 defeat of the Ottoman sultanate and its subsequent abolition by the new, nationalistic Turkish government in 1922. The sultan was also the recognized caliph, head of Sunni Islam, a leader whose lineage could be traced all the way back to the death of Mohammed in 632 CE. For bin Laden, the ascendancy of the secular disgraces Islam and does not sit well for a faith that countenances much less easily the secular settlement reached within the Christian West.

This raises new challenges for Islam. Though we are beginning to hear emerging Muslim voices calling for new political theologies suited to contexts in which Islam is not the religious majority, it is still early days. For the West, the mortal threat that militant Islam poses raises more than military and diplomatic questions. Defenders of the West must ask, Do we have a kind of vision that can match the vision of Islam? Are we, in some sense, a theologically inspired social order, a Judeo-Christian country in our roots? Can a non-theological secularism on its own provide the principles necessary to survive?

Despite the attention that the clash between militant Islam and the West has brought to political theology, the field of political theology is much broader and deeper. As a self-conscious scholarly field of inquiry, political theology in the twentieth century originally took shape in the wake of European wars, but quickly spread beyond the West. In the Two-Thirds World, the clash of civilizations is of less importance than the daily perishing of people from poverty. Vision seems less urgent than food when it comes to what causes people to perish, but the question for political theology in many contexts is, What kind of vision is required to see those who die invisibly and quietly, not in spectacular explosions but in silent deprivation of the basic necessities of life? Politics is defined not only by the concerns of those within the Beltway but also by the daily, material concerns that threaten to disintegrate both individual bodies and communal bodies of people. It is our hope that this volume can help nourish robust responses, in both theory and practice, to such suffering.

WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH,

JEFFREY W. BAILEY &

CRAIG HOVEY

1. The Economist, 23 December 1999, p. 43.

2. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), p. 24.

3. Mark Lilla, The Politics of God, The New York Times Magazine, 19 August 2007.

4. We are especially grateful for input from Jeffrey Stout, Rusty Reno, Kwok Pui-Lan, Duncan Forrester, Emmanuel Katongole, Jennifer Herdt, Dan Bell, Scott Bader-Saye, Craig Carter, and Michael Northcott.

I. Reading the Bible Politically

Introduction

Walter Brueggemann

A cynical form of the Golden Rule goes like this: "The one with the gold makes the rules. Transposed into our topic, the dictum is, The one with power determines the mode of interpretation. Both slogans acknowledge the way in which power controls (or seeks to control) the categories of knowledge and imposes a particular shape on truth. This has certainly been the case in the modern world in which Euro-American interests have completely dominated and determined modes of scriptural interpretation that have been everywhere accepted as not only legitimate but normative. For much of the modern period, for over two centuries, the dominant mode of interpretation has been historical critical, an approach that sought to interpret texts within their own proper historical context."

The practical effect of this dominant approach, without for now suggesting this was the intent, was to accommodate the biblical text to the requirements of Enlightenment rationality. This entailed a preoccupation with historical questions, and a derivative distancing of the text from any whiff of contemporaneity with the interpreter or the community of the interpreter. It resulted, moreover, in making texts plain and unambiguous, and so dispelling the play of contradiction, ambiguity, or irony that pervaded the text and that in an artful way summoned the reader beyond any taken-for-granted world. A commitment to historical explanation led inexorably to the elimination of an active God who could be taken seriously as a character and agent in the world of the text. This in turn eventuated in a history of religions approach whereby any articulation of God is regarded simply as construction or projection, without any potential for the revelatory. Thus the text no longer offered much that constituted an inconvenient truth, because everything that might be rationally objectionable was explained away.

This sort of critical perspective was taken, in good modernist fashion, to be objective and interpretively neutral. In retrospect, however, it is easy enough to see that such interpretation served an important political agenda, namely, leaving the world safely in the hands of human reason; any portrayal of God in the text that violated that reason could be situated in a past world that had no pertinence to present-tense interpretation. The presentation of an active, transformative agent, moreover, was reduced to a benign memory in a way that readily served a religious and therefore a political-economic status quo.

To be sure, many practitioners of such criticism were theologically serious and intended better than that. Consequently such modernist criticism was often linked to a vigorous theological enterprise, but it was a linkage that was sustained only by a lack of clarity. That passion for serious theological-ethical work did not in fact derive from such critical practice with the text, but was offered in spite of such critical perspective.

Given such an understanding and practice of the critical project, the title of this section of essays, Reading the Bible Politically, is something of a misnomer. It is a misnomer because all reading of the Bible is political, that is, read with dimensions of power and vested interest operative in the interpretive process. The Bible is supple enough that it can be read from and toward almost any socio-political agenda. A case can be made that historical criticism came to be a prominent and persuasive method precisely in order to resist the reductionist claims of church orthodoxy, and so to serve a more-or-less liberal agenda. But it was a liberal agenda that had no great bite to it and reflected a bourgeoisie concern of establishment types in both church and academy. It was a liberalism that accorded with Enlightenment rationality that had little patience with much of the testimony of the text itself. As a result, historical criticism came to serve particular interests through the categories that were imposed upon the text.

The big news of the last half century, reflected in these essays, has been the remarkable process through which interpretive voices from outside the Euro-American hegemony of historical criticism have gained a hearing and have begun to reflect the faith and the interests that are not committed to the assumptions of hegemonic interpretation. These outside voices of interpretation arose first of all in Central America in the 1960s and 1970s, accompanied especially in the United States by feminist interpreters and more recently womanist interpreters; since that time there has been a broad emergence of Asian and African voices of interpretation of those who have worked both within the historical critical consensus and against it as well.¹

Thus we may say that all interpretation of the Bible is political and that it is not objective but, either knowingly or unwittingly, explicitly or implicitly, is a voice of advocacy. Given the generic meaning of the term political reading, the essays in this section do not serve political reading of a generic kind, but refer to a quite specific political agenda and advocacy. While I do not suggest that all of these voices speak in the same way or toward the same end, it is evident that there is a shared core conviction among them that was classically articulated by Central American Roman Catholic bishops as God’s preferential option for the poor. That claim can be given nuance in many variations. Taken as a core conviction, it is the epitome of the essays represented here, namely, that the God of the Bible is not an even-handed God with an indifferent agenda, nor an ally of established power as the church has often attested in its practice, but is a passionate partisan who is deeply committed precisely to those who have been excluded from the material and political gains of the modern world. Political reading of the Bible in this sense begins in the recognition that God has taken sides in history and is the sponsor and agent of revolutionary transformation of the world. This revolutionary impetus, moreover, makes possible a new socioeconomic arrangement that is of peculiar benefit to those presently denied access to the material resources that make for well-being. It goes without saying that some biblical texts serve this interpretive perspective better than others. Thus it is the case that this particular political theology (better termed liberation theology, for the dominant interpretation is also a political theology of another ilk), like every interpretive program, prefers some texts to others. It is for that reason urgent that the exposition of the Magnificat by Ernesto Cardenal is included in this set of essays (as the only text-specific one among these essays), so that Mary’s song may be taken as the National Anthem of this interpretive movement, an anticipation of a messianic time when there is a radical moral inversion with material implications. No wonder Cardenal can have Mary sing:

He has filled the hungry with good things,

And sent the rich empty away.

(Luke 1:53)

Such a liberationist perspective is not usually much preoccupied with the negative of the rich being sent empty away; but the implication is clear enough. That exposition of Cardenal identifies the way in which wealth and power are linked to pride. Characteristically, the spiritual condition of pride draws close to the material, for pride belongs with wealth and power.

A more recent variation on this particular political theology is the articulation of post-colonial theology that pays primary attention to the specific interpretive context and condition of those who have been kept in a dependent colonial status. The background of such post-colonial reading is a refusal to continue to read colonially, that is, in deference to the (critical?) interpretive assumptions of empire.² It is the way of empire to assume that its own privileged socioeconomic status is normative, and therefore readings congruent with that status are readily taken to be immediately and everywhere normative. The contextual specificity of the post-colonial is the firm insistence that empire has no legitimate right to impose its own preferred reading on others so that it is everywhere normative. For what now determines what is normative in interpretation is the experience of the interpreting community. This contention is at the heart of every liberation hermeneutic, for hegemonic interpretation always pretends to be contextless, but is in fact congruent with the interpretive interests of those who occupy hegemonic space. Thus the interpretive revolution of the last half century is the gaining of leverage by other interpretive voices who could claim no legitimacy in the empire or in the critical establishment of academic study. The outcome is pluralistic interpretation, readings that arise from and serve many contexts and therefore many interests. Such an array of interpretive offers is a vexation to those accustomed to a single reading, but pluralism is the inescapable condition of interpretation that honors many voices in many contexts, every voice to be taken seriously and valorized in the very act of interpretation.

Such a pluralism, as pluralistic as the many voices of interpretation that insist upon being heard, poses two kinds of problems. On the one hand, such pluralism may strike old authority as hopelessly relativistic. On the other hand, such openness to new interpretation permits or even invites readings that are manifestly silly and not to be taken seriously. The task, in such a rich and problematic context, is to develop criteria that exclude such silliness and that recognize the broad possibility of faithful reading, without return to an orthodoxy that is excessively exclusionary. The process of the last half century will remind us that every effort at exclusion contains both a bid for truthfulness and a more-or-less self-serving agenda. Sorting out faithfulness in such a process is never easy or obvious; nor is it likely to be sustained for very long unless the self-serving aspect of the enterprise is acknowledged.

The essays themselves invite the reader into this interpretive revolution on which there is no going back. No insistence of church orthodoxy or of guild objectivity will silence the voices. No authority can say silencio with any effect. The silencers have been at work forever, but the new voices make a claim out of suffering, marginality, and vulnerability that finds a warrant for speaking without waiting for any external validation.

Christopher Rowland traces the rise of grassroots reading through the experience of oppression, poverty, hunger, and the death of God to an awareness that the old objectivity would never contain in its reading. The old objectivity presented the reader as silent before the text as a recipient. Now we know better!

Richard Bauckham considers the complex issue of the relation between the Testaments (old and new dispensations) and arrives at canonical context as a frame of reference that allows freedom in interpretation, but as a task that requires qualities of insight, imagination, critical judgment, and expert knowledge of the contemporary world.

R. S. Sugirtharajah considers the misguided, silly, and trivial uses to which the Bible can be put in popular reading. Such poaching is accountable to no reading community and proceeds by taking texts out of context and imposing meanings on texts that are clearly against the grain of the text. He notices, moreover, that such exploitative practices regularly appeal to the King James Version of the Bible, a translation that has now become a totem and an eccentric cultural artifact sans religious authority or theological clout.

Néstor Míguez traces, in more specificity than does Rowland, the rise of a new hermeneutical sensibility in Latin American reading. Of special note is the crucial impact of Vatican II and the new reading that celebrates God’s poor as a revelatory factor in history. I note in passing that among the many writers whom he mentions in his survey, Míguez does not include José Miranda; I take the liberty of mentioning him because Miranda, in his book of 1973, was my own access point into this interpretive perspective.

A. Maria Arul Raja writes of what will be for many readers a quite fresh field of interpretation, the Dalit communities of the poor in India who are unlettered but who, out of their lived experience, have grasped the revelatory power of the biblical text. Such a venue for interpretation exposes the ideology of much conventional reading and draws us back to the dangerous specificity of the text.

It is fitting that the concluding pages of this section, containing the Magnificat (to which I have already referred), are placed in the volume just after the essay on the Dalit. The Dalit are a community about which Mary sings, among the hungry who will be fed with good things. The juxtaposition of the Song of Mary and this people of need calls attention to the way in which the text is good news that generates new worldly possibilities, the possibilities that settled imperial readings never want us to dream of. We may risk a new dictum that arises out of these several studies: "Those with emancipated imagination, rooted in suffering, may coin new rules that outflank and confound old truth practiced by the ones with the gold."

1. For helpful bibliographical summaries of more recent post-colonial interpretation, see Leo Perdue, Reconstructing Old Testament Theology: After the Collapse of History, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), pp. 280-339, and Leo G. Perdue et al., Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), pp. 91-97, 176-85.

2. For an assessment of the deep grip that imperial assumptions have on conventional scriptural interpretation, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

1 The Foundation and Form of Liberation Exegesis

Christopher Rowland

The Biblical Perspective of the Poor: The Challenge of Grassroots Exegesis

Most faculties of theology and religious studies have not moved too far from the well-trodden paths of the historical-critical method, with its painstaking quest for the text’s original meaning and context. The hegemony of this interpretative approach is firmly rooted in theological education and the churches. Indeed, successive generations of ministers have been taught to read the Bible using the historical-critical method.¹ In the process of acquiring the tools of historical scholarship we have all been enabled to catch a fascinating glimpse of the ancient world as it has been reconstructed for us by two hundred years of a biblical scholarship of increasing sophistication. But all too often our devotion to the quest for the original meaning of a Pauline text or a dominical saying has left us floundering when we are asked to relate our journey into ancient history to the world in which we live and work. While the journey into the past has offered us insights aplenty, our historical preoccupations have left us with the feeling that the biblical world we have constructed is alien to us. So the biblical text, instead of being a means of life, can become a stumbling-block in the way of our contemporary discipleship. When we use the Bible in wrestling with the contemporary problems of Christian discipleship we find that our exegetical efforts frequently have not been matched with the skills necessary for the provision of illumination from the Bible on the exploration of those questions which our generation is asking.

There is a deep divide among contemporary interpreters of Scripture. On the one hand there are those who think that the original meaning of the text is not only retrievable but also clearly recognizable, and that it should be the criterion by which all interpretations should be judged. On the other hand there are those who argue either that the quest for the original meaning of the text is a waste of time or that, even if it is possible to ascertain what the original author intended, this should not be determinative of the way in which we read the text. It believes that whatever the conscious intention of the original author, different levels of meaning can become apparent to later interpreters, granted that the text is free from the shackles of the author’s control and has a life of its own in the world of the reader.

Understandably, the first group is worried that the freedom implied in the second approach might lead to exegetical anarchy.² It wants some kind of control over interpretation, and where better to find it than in the original meaning of the text? No doubt most biblical exegetes would chafe at the imposition of any kind of hermeneutical control on their endeavors, yet there is today a magisterium of the historical-critical method in the Church. The magisterium of the Holy Office has been replaced by the critical consensus of the biblical exegetes, preoccupied as most of them are with the original meaning of the text and its controlling role in the quest for meaning of the Scriptures.³ As part of that quest, the search goes on for history, whether it be that of Jesus, the mind of the evangelist or Paul, or the situation of the early Christian communities. But history is such an elusive quarry. Not only is it never directly accessible to us, but our involvement in the search casts such a shadow over the whole process that the significance of our investment in time and effort itself demands an explanation. Frederic Jameson reminds us that

History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.⁴

Of course, that political unconscious has been at work in the multifarious attempts to get at the real meaning of the text during the last two hundred years (though all too frequently it has remained unrecognized). That said, the quest for the original context (or for better contexts of the biblical texts, since many of them show signs of being part of an ongoing community of interpretation) is necessary as a component of any historical approach to the reading of texts. It is part of the history of the interpretation of a text. But the starting-place is the way in which and the place in which the texts are being used in the contemporary world, whether by millions of ordinary Christians or the sophisticated researchers of the First World academic institutions.

But it is not just ancient history that is important. Recently, the application of sociological theory to the study of early Christianity has enabled us to look at familiar issues in a new light.⁵ The new insights which the sociological approach affords, however, present a challenge to a preoccupation with the original meaning of the text. Sociology of the New Testament must involve a penetrating analysis of the social formation of the contemporary reader too.

Of course, the truly historical method will also attend to the specific historical situation of the various interpretations on offer. But it must be conceded that we have been singularly negligent over the application of historical criticism to our world, and to ourselves as interpreters. We may want to suppose that the exegetical enterprise is an autonomous one, to be kept distinct from the various ways in which the text is being used. Nevertheless, we have to accept the fact that the historical-exegetical project owes everything to the interpreter and the interpretative culture of which he or she is a part. The reconstruction of that past world in which the texts originated can therefore enable the contemporary reader to view present prejudices in a fresh light.⁶ The world of the New Testament is, after all, our creation from the fragments, both textual and otherwise, that have come down to us. The sort of people we are and the kind of interests that we have must necessarily determine, or at least affect, the biblical world we create.

There is an unease among many biblical readers about the way in which the Bible has been studied. Those who use the Bible as part of Christian ministry wonder at the enormous investment in biblical interpretation which seems to enable so little fruitful use of the foundation documents of the Christian religion. Something similar is said about the crisis facing biblical interpretation by Carlos Mesters as he writes from the perspective of one whose work has involved him in interpreting the Bible with the poor of Brazil.⁷

Mesters points out the indebtedness of liberation theology to Enlightenment methods and contrasts its original vitality with the weariness which characterizes its contemporary use. He regrets the way in which the scientific study of Scripture has had the effect of distancing the Bible from the lives of ordinary people, so that its study has become an arcane enterprise reserved for a properly equipped academic elite. In its early career the historical-critical method had the power and courage to contribute greatly to the revival of interest in the Bible. Its historical concern played a major part in the critique of the ideology of ecclesiastical dogma. But that negative function, now so well established, has not been matched by the positive encouragement of methods of reading which would enable the people of God to respond to the needs which the life of faith in a changing world is placing upon them.

Mesters points out that the same weariness was also to be found in Brazilian biblical study, with the growth of learned works on exegesis which had little appeal or relevance for the millions seeking to survive in situations of injustice and poverty. In that situation, however, a new way of reading the text has arisen, not among the exegetical elite of the seminaries and universities but at the grassroots. Its emphasis is on the threefold method: see (starting where one is with one’s experience, which for the majority in Latin America means an experience of poverty), judge (understanding the reasons for that kind of existence and relating them to the story of the deliverance from oppression in the Bible), and act. Ordinary people have taken the Bible into their own hands and begun to read the word of God not only in the circumstances of their existence but also in comparison with the stories of the people of God in other times and other places. Millions of men and women abandoned by government and Church have discovered an ally in the story of the people of God in the Scriptures.

This new biblical theology in the Basic Christian Communities is an oral theology in which story, experience, and biblical reflection are intertwined with the community’s life of sorrow and joy. That experience of celebration, worship, varied stories and recollections, in drama and festival, is, according to Mesters, exactly what lies behind the written words of Scripture itself. That is the written deposit which bears witness to the story of a people, oppressed, bewildered and longing for deliverance. While exegete, priest, and religious may have their part to play in the life of the community, the reading is basically uninfluenced by excessive clericalism and individualistic piety. It is a reading which is emphatically communitarian, in which reflection on the story of a people can indeed lead to an appreciation of the sensus ecclesiae and a movement towards liberative action. So revelation is very much a present phenomenon: God speaks in the midst of the circumstances of today. In contrast, the vision of many priests is of a revelation that is entirely past, in the deposit of faith — something to be preserved, defended, and transmitted to the people by its guardians.

So for Mesters the Bible is not just about past history only. It is also a mirror to be held up to reflect the story of today and lend it a new perspective. Mesters argues that what is happening in this new way of reading the Bible is in fact a rediscovery of the patristic method of interpretation which stresses the priority of the spirit of the word rather than its letter. God speaks through life; but that word is one that is illuminated by the Bible: the principal objective of reading the Bible is not to interpret the Bible but to interpret life with the help of the Bible.⁸ The major preoccupation is not the quest for the meaning of the text in itself but the direction which the Bible is suggesting to the people of God within the specific circumstances in which they find themselves. The popular reading of the Bible in Brazil is directed to contemporary practice and the transformation of a situation of injustice. That situation permits the poor to discover meaning which can so easily elude the technically better equipped exegete. Where one is determines to a large extent how a book is read. This is a reading which does not pretend to be neutral, and it questions whether any other reading can claim that either. It is committed to the struggle of the poor for justice, and the resonances that are to be found with the biblical story suggest that it may not be unfaithful to the commitments and partiality which the Scriptures themselves demand.

Of course, Mesters recognizes the difficulties of this approach.⁹ He expresses his unease about the way in which the biblical story can become so identified with the experiences of the poor that any other meaning, past or present, can be excluded. So the story of the deliverance of God’s people from oppression in Egypt can become for the poor our story, its message being directed solely to the outcast and impoverished. Mesters’ emphasis on the importance of a historical dimension of scriptural study in a quest for the original meaning is a remedy against this kind of tendency. It can remind readers that the text has been the property of many who have read it in many different situations. The original readers would not have had identical concerns with the contemporary poor, whatever else they may have had in common.¹⁰

Mesters asks us to judge the effectiveness of the reading by its fruits: is it a sign of the arrival of the reign of God … when the blind see, lepers are clean, the dead rise and the poor have the good news preached to them? The experience of poverty and oppression is for the liberation exegete as important a text as the text of Scripture itself. The poor are blessed because they can read Scripture from a perspective different from most of the rich and find in it a message which can so easily elude those of us who are not poor. The God who identified with slaves in Egypt and promised that he would be found among the poor, sick and suffering demands that there is another text to be read as well as that contained between the covers of the Bible: God’s word is to be found in the literary memory of the people of God. But that is a continuing story, and is to be heard and discerned in the contemporary world, among those people with whom God has chosen to be identified.

The biblical text is therefore not a strange world which can come alive only by re-creating the circumstances of the past. The situation of the people of God reflected in many of its pages is the situation of the poor. What such biblical interpretation dramatically reminds us of is that the pressing issues for any critical exegesis must be the rigorous analysis of the complex production of meaning, the contexts in which that production takes place, and the social and economic interests which an interpretation is serving. There must be a continuous dialogue between that present story told by the poor of oppression and injustice and the ancient stories they read in the Bible. Indeed, the knowledge of that past story is an important antidote to the kind of unrestrained fantasy which then binds the text as firmly to the world of the immediate present and its context as historical-critical exegesis bound it to the ancient world. That twofold aspect is well brought out by Carlos Mesters:

the emphasis is not placed on the text’s meaning in itself but rather on the meaning the text has for the people reading it. At the start the people tend to draw any and every sort of meaning, however well or ill founded, from the text.… [T]he common people are also eliminating the alleged neutrality of scholarly exegesis.… [T]he common people are putting the Bible in its proper place, the place where God intended it to be. They are putting it in second place. Life takes first place! In so doing, the people are showing us the enormous importance of the Bible, and at the same time, its relative value — relative to life.¹¹

This understanding of theology as a second-order task (viz., one of critical reflection on life and practice) is not new to Christian theology. That subtle dialectic between the text of life, viewed in the light of the recognition and non-acceptance of unjust social arrangements, and the other text of Scripture and tradition is the kernel of a lively theological, or for that matter any, interpretative enterprise.¹² The world of the poor, as well as their imagination, provides shafts of light which can often throw into the sharpest possible relief the poverty of much First World interpretation.

A similar point is made about the contribution of liberation theology by Charles Elliott in his 1985 Heslington Lecture:

Liberation theology is about a fundamental change in the way in which persons, personal relationships and therefore political relationships are conceived and structured.… Why is liberation theology so important intellectually? … Firstly, it is true to elements … of the biblical tradition which were long neglected by the colonialist church.… Neither a colonialist church nor an established church can bear to think that the biblical tradition is actually about challenging power: but, if you see the essence of the nature of God as being to free the oppressed from their oppression, then you are necessarily engaged in a challenge to power.… Secondly it marks a quite different theological method … what liberation theologians are saying is … the only way you will derive theological truth is by starting where people are, because it is where poor and particularly oppressed people are that you will find God. Now that stands on its head sixteen hundred years of philosophical tradition in Christendom. From the third century, Christians have thought the way to establish theological truth has been to try to derive consistent propositions, that is to say propositions that are consistent with the facts of the tradition as revealed primarily in the Bible.… What the liberation theologians are saying … is that this will not do as a way of doing theology. If you want to do theology, you have to start where people are, particularly the people that the Bible is primarily concerned with, who are dispossessed, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the prostitute, the pimp and the tax collector. Find out what they are saying, thinking and feeling, and that is the stuff out of which the glimpses of God will emerge. Thirdly … this method of thinking about God solves the problem of verification.… It has always been a puzzle to theologians to know how you test for truth any proposition you want to make about God. The fundamentalist Protestants still say It’s fine. The Bible will tell you whether it is true or not.… The sophisticated liberal theologian will say Test it against the tradition, against the mind of the church, against other propositions and see if it is coherent with those. … The liberation theologians will say very simply the test for truth is the effect it has on people’s lives. Is this proposition … actually liberating people or enslaving them?¹³

A New Way of Doing Theology?

Most exegetes who are influenced by liberation theology would not want to claim that they have the hermeneutical key to the reading of Scripture (though there are some who think the perspective of the poor is the criterion for a true reading of Scripture). They are insistent that the immediacy of the relationship between the biblical narratives and the situation and experiences of the poor has enabled them to glimpse interpretative insights which have so often eluded the sophisticated, cerebral approach of First World biblical exegesis.

The evangelical and popular roots of liberation theology need to be recognized. It is known in this country as a result of the translations which have been made of many of the writings of the leading liberation theologians from Latin America. The Boff brothers from Brazil, Sobrino from El Salvador, Pixley from Mexico and Nicaragua, Segundo from Uruguay, and Miguez Bonino from Argentina have become leading spirits of that theology.¹⁴ The form which liberation theology takes is normally not unfamiliar to the sophisticated theological readership of the First World. Often buttressed with footnotes, and demonstrating a wide knowledge of the philosophical and cultural tradition of European thought, these books seem to offer an alternative (but no less sophisticated) approach to the theological task which uses the familiar language of conventional theological discourse. It is a façade which needs to be pierced in order to understand more clearly what precisely energizes these writers.

At the heart of the theology of liberation is the twofold belief that in the experience of oppression, poverty, hunger, and death, God is speaking to all people today and that God’s presence among the millions unknown and unloved by humanity but blessed in the eyes of God is confirmed by the witness of the Christian tradition, particularly the Scriptures themselves.¹⁵ It is this dual conviction, nurtured by the thousands of Basic Christian Communities, which is the dynamic behind liberation theology. Liberation theology would not exist in any meaningful sense without it and the corresponding preferential option for the poor. It is, as Derek Winter has remarked, theological reflection that arises at sundown, after the heat of the day when Christians have dirtied their hands and their reputations in the struggle of the poor for justice, for land, for bread, for very survival.¹⁶

Liberation theologians have themselves drunk deep at the well of European biblical scholarship, and are grateful for it. Nevertheless, their method of work differs from what is customary in this country. Many spend a significant part of each week working with grassroots communities in the shanty towns on the periphery of large cities or in rural communities. As part of their pastoral work they listen to the poor and facilitate the process of reflection on the Bible which is going on in the grassroots communities. Unlike many European and North American theologians, their writing has not taken place in the context of academic institutions which have rendered them immune from the personal and social pressures of the countries in which they live. Thus Leonardo and Clodovis Boff are closely identified with grassroots activities among the poor and marginalized in various parts of Brazil. Jon Sobrino has known what it is like to be a target of death squads in El Salvador and to have seen his dear friend Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated. It is that experience of identification with the poor and involvement in the injustices of their environment which is the motivating force driving the liberation theologians’ theology and the spirit which fills an apparently European edifice with insight and power.

Thus those involved in liberation theology stress the importance of the wisdom and insight of the poor as the focal point of theology. They gain insights from listening to the poor, as they read and use Scripture in the whole process of development and social change. The exegetes find that this process of listening and learning has given them a stimulus to their exegesis and, more importantly, has opened up new vistas and questions in the interpretative enterprise. This grassroots biblical interpretation provides a basis for the more sophisticated theological edifices the liberation theologians wish to build. Yet it is clear that the different experiences and the worldview of the poor offer an unusually direct connection with the biblical text. This approach, whatever its shortcomings in terms of exegetical refinement, has proved enormously fruitful as far as the life of the Christian Church is concerned. The liberation theologians are what Antonio Gramsci, the distinguished Italian Marxist theoretician, described as organic intellectuals,¹⁷ something that is brought out in this description of the theological task by Leonardo Boff:

Obviously this recapturing of the original import of Christianity entails a break with hegemonic religious traditions. Normally it is up to the intellectual of the religious organism to sew a new seam when the rupture takes place. On the one side, through their links with the oppressed classes these intellectuals help them to perceive, systematize, and express their great yearnings for liberation. On the other side, they take up these aspirations within a religious (theological) project, pointing up their coherence with the fundamental ideas of Jesus and the apostles. Thanks to this breaking of the ice, important segments of the ecclesiastical institution can ally themselves with the oppressed classes and make possible the emergence of a people’s church with characteristics of the common people.¹⁸

Rooted in the Basic Christian Communities, an agenda is being set for liberation theology which is firmly based in the struggles of millions for recognition and justice. The text becomes a catalyst in the exploration of pressing contemporary issues relevant to the community; it offers a language so that the voice of the voiceless may be heard. There is an immediacy in the way in which the text is used because resonances are found with the experiences set out in the stories of biblical characters which seem remote from the world of affluent Europe and North America.

The Bible offers a typology which can be identified with and at the same time be a means by which the present difficulties can be shown to be surmountable in the life of faith and community commitment. To enable the poor to read the Bible has involved a program of education which teaches the contents of the biblical material so that it can be a resource for thousands who are illiterate. In such programs the value of the primary text, experience of life, is fully recognized. Therefore, the poor are shown that they have riches in plenty to equip them for exegesis. This is balanced with the basic need to communicate solid information about the stories within the Bible themselves, of which many remain ignorant.

So when we talk of the theology of liberation we are not just speaking of the works of the theologians but of a theological approach which gains its inspiration from the activities of the Basic Christian Communities in