A Look Ahead

Posted on Jan 04, 2010 - 12:38 PM

Selections from Joerg Rieger, “Developing a Common Interest Theology from the Underside,” in   Liberating the Future: God, Mammon and Theology  , ed. Joerg Rieger (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 137-141.

Copyright © 1998 Augsburg Fortress.  www.augsburgfortress.org.  All rights reserved. 

Liberation theology understands itself as common interest theology. For this reason it is not just the business of nontraditional sections of the academy or of those who are forced to live at the underside of history. While those are the places that gave rise to liberation theology, today no theology can afford not to give an account of what God is doing among those who suffer the most. The theologies of God’s liberating work with those who suffer and those who (often unconsciously) inflict suffering, pose a major challenge to theology in general. The fact that most people belong to both camps in some way or another makes this challenge all the more real. In conclusion let me offer some impulses for theology as it continues into the twenty-first century.

Becoming New Theologians

When I mention to people that I am involved in the liberation theology project as white Western male with a German and North American theological background, I sometimes notice this blank look on their faces. If liberation theology is simply another contextual theology, this indeed does not make a lot of sense. Frederick Herzog was among the few theologians in a similar situation who blazed the trail. In response to another colleague who deals with liberation issues but does not feel entitled to call himself a liberation theologian because he does not belong to an oppressed group, he puts it this way: “Is it not rather the other way around, that theology needs to describe what God is doing in any group?”³¹

Even Western white male theologians need to understand that we are no longer free to pursue our own special interests. Upon entering the academy, too many of us still feel “like a kid in a candy store,” as one of my colleagues put it to me recently. This is one of the major challenges for the twenty-first century. While not necessarily opposing the development of liberation theologies, we need to admit that we often have left liberation theology to those who hurt, not realizing that we, too, are involved in their stories. Already the apostle Paul understood that if one member hurts, all members of the body hurt. Liberation theology has taken a next step in reminding us that the pain is not coming out of nowhere and that we need to do a better job listening to the symptoms of suffering in order to understand our own role in the system.

How do white males come to join the liberation theology project?  The encounter with the otherness of God must no longer be separated from the encounter with the human other. It will not happen merely at the level of ideas. When I entered seminary, my mother had just received her license as a local preacher in the German United Methodist Church. Although she did not have to suffer terrible injustices, observing the way she was received by the church, the places she was and was not sent to preach, was a first step in a long process that gradually opened my own eyes to the underside of history. I never looked at theology and the church in quite the same way again. In recent times my involvement in one of the most devastated neighborhoods of Dallas has brought me in contact with situations that I was only dimly aware existed in the First World on such a broad scale. I found once again that meeting God at the underside of history can change your life.

The new theologians will be “organic intellectuals.” This notion of Antonio Gramsci has accompanied the development of liberation theology from the outset. Gramsci distinguishes between organic and traditional intellectuals. The difference between the two camps is not that one group is contextual while the other is not. The difference is that one group is not aware of its context while the other group is trying to gain greater clarity about it.  The so-called traditional intellectuals, according to Gramsci, “put themselves forward as autonomous and independent.”³² They do not realize that they are in fact shaped by their own context. As a result, they often become functions of the status quo and end up preserving it. It is interesting that Gramsci found many of those intellectuals in the church. The organic intellectuals, on the other hand, include their context in their intellectual reflections. In this way they are forced to take into account their own biases. This is not only an analytical move but a constructive one as well: Organic intellectuals are led to put their intellectual capabilities to work for the improvement of real life.

Paradoxically, mainline contextual theology is often closer to the position of Gramsci’s traditional intellectuals than to that of the organic intellectuals since one’s own context is presupposed but not further examined. First World contextual theology thus often ends up as celebration of its own context. There is not much room for God’s praxis at the underside of history which at times challenges and calls into question our social locations. Organic intellectuals, by contrast, seek to reduce the constant temptation to render their own context absolute. In relating to a different context, the context of those at the grassroots, self-critical reflection becomes possible. In this process, the primary task for organic theologians is to learn again how to listen and to find out to whom to listen.

On this backdrop the words of an Australian Aboriginal woman to a person of good will make sense: “If you’re coming to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”³³  Liberation theologians are not those who save the world by their own actions. Liberation theologians are those who are aware that their own actions need to be constantly transformed by God’s liberation, which sets free the oppressors as well as the oppressed.

Toward a Common Tradition

The search for context always starts at home. One of the theologians most concerned about things on a local level that I have ever met was Frederick Herzog. At the same time he understood that liberation theology is not special interest theology. In his last years he became increasingly involved in struggles for liberation on a global scale. He saw the need to uncover what he called the “common tradition” of the Americas and Europe, which is first of all a common tradition of violence that produced the death of 100 million Indians from Hispaniola to Wounded Knee.³⁴ Herzog became more and more convinced that “the vast masses of the poor and the destruction of the environment on both continents have become an all-encompassing challenge for our interpretation of the Bible, of the whole Christian tradition, and of our modern human selfhood.”³⁵ While he was not able to continue this work, this is the continuing challenge for liberation theology in the twenty-first century.

Herzog’s example reminds us that this common tradition must not be based on a romantic idea. There is no use in harking back to the universal starting points of early contextual theology.  What ties North and South together is not first of all a common essence, common tastes, or a common history of ideas, but the reality of massive suffering at the hands of European immigrants that has never been fully accounted for. Like common interest theology, the common tradition grows out of an account of the suffering of humanity and creation that often goes unnoticed. Such an understanding of a common tradition does not impose uniformity but will allow for a listening to diverse voices of pain.

One of the prime challenges for the theologies of liberation at the turn of the century is to continue to develop better understandings of common structures of oppression. The different modes of liberation theology need to become even more aware of the links that are already in place at the underside of history.  Real solidarity can only grow where it becomes clear that the whole body suffers together. It is from this perspective that we then can address global structures of power, like the globalization of the economy which has so rapidly advanced in recent years.

The search for a common tradition does not end in the analytical mode. Practical solidarity leads to new relationships. To the common history of oppression corresponds a common history of liberation. In this process, liberation theologians hit upon new models for ecumenical relationships among Christians of different denominations.³⁶ Not even in the church can a common tradition be built from the top down any more, starting with conversations on the level of ideas and ending by issuing appeals to the people in the pews. A common tradition emerges where relationships are built at the grassroots, where people join in God’s work. The pressures of a global economy are bringing those who are left out closer together.

At the same time, neither a common tradition nor a common interest theology must do away with the different identities of the participants. One of the lessons learned in the Civil Rights struggle is that the idea of the “melting pot” is an illusion. The point is not to make everybody into one image, which is usually the image of the powerful anyway, but to value and acknowledge difference.  Herzog suggests a model: “The goal is to weave the separate histories into one history in which the single strands do not lose their original color.”³⁷ The main objective of the search for a common tradition is not the creation of a single identity in which everything becomes alike but a fresh encounter with the plight of the other. In this process the First World can finally learn from the Third World, those in power can finally learn from those at the margins, men from women, whites from blacks, the rich from the poor, and so on. Mainline theology is now provided a mirror in the encounter with liberation theology.

Still, the reconstruction and further development of a common tradition is a most sensitive issue, for any interaction will need to keep in mind the existing asymmetry between those at the margins and those who are in control. All attempts initiated by those in power that seek to “liberate” the oppressed, rather than to first examine their own position in the mirror-image of the other self-critically, are highly problematic. Common interest theology can only be developed further when all begin to share in God’s own concern for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, the “least of these” who cross our path every day.

ENDNOTES

31. Frederick Herzog, “New Birth of Conscience,” Theology Today       53/4 (January 1997), 481. This article is reprinted in this volume.

32. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks    , ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971),7.

33. This quotation was brought to my attention by an Australian colleague, Deidre Palmer. It is also referred to in Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics: A Practical and Prophetic Vision for Change                      , foreword by Garry Wills, preface by Cornel West (New York and Maryknoll, N.Y.: New Press and Orbis, 1994), 152.

34. According to the estimate of historians. Cf. Frederick Herzog, “New Birth of Conscience,” 479.

35. Frederick Herzog, “Tradicion Comun Shaping Christian Theology: Mutualization in Theological Education,” Working Paper Series 12 (April 1994), Duke-UNC Program in Latin American Studies, 6-7, also included in Theology from the Belly of the Whale: A Frederick Herzog Reader ,                          ed. Joerg Rieger, forthcoming from Trinity Press International. This paper reports on the preliminary results of an effort to initiate “research on the shared memories and interests as well as the complicities of North and South in order to arrive at a ‘mutualization’ of theological education.” (Cf. abstract.)

36. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson, revised 15th anniversary edition with a new introduction by the author (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988), xxxvi, sees the importance of international theological dialogues “not in the coming together of theologians, but in the communication established among Christian communities and their respective historical, social, and cultural contexts, for these communities are the real subjects who are actively engaged in these discourses of faith.” Cf. also Frederick Herzog, “Kirchengemeinschaft im Schmelztiegel—Anfang einer neuen Okumene?” in Kirchengemeinschaft im Schmelztiegel , ed. Frederick Herzog and Reinhard Groscurth (Neukirchen Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1989),28-70.

37. Frederick Herzog, “Wenn Supermacht zum Gotzen wird,” Evangelische Kommentare       8/8 (August 1975), 458 (translation mine).

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