Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Part 328. Out of the silo.

I have posted before on the need to consider the interactions of politics, economics, law, cultural and social trends, ethics, and theology both in terms of practice and theory.  This post has been triggered by the recent death of Gustavo Gutierrez, the 'father' of Liberation Theology, and the following statement by  Noam Chomsky.

'I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and
domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.'

This statemen set off thoughts on the interplay of Liberation Theology, the Sociological School of Jurisprudence, and Marxist Theory. However before delving into this, a few words on gatekeepers, sentries and guardians.  People with power: politicians, senior state employees, leaders of business and trades unions, church leaders, media owners and others in positions of authority have a self interest in maintaining the status quo and using it to their advantage. It is in this context that those seeking to achieve systemic change have to engage and hopefully achieve positive results. The power of the state should not be underestimated.  The state doles out patronage and demands loyalty from the recipients.

Two potential allies of those seeking systemic change may be some faith organisations and the judiciary.  However this may well not be the case.  The rise of Liberation theology was triggered in part by the failure of the Roman Catholic Church to engage with the poor and instead to cosy up to government.  The judiciary cannot be regarded in some nations as truly independent and even when it is judges have, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'inarticulate major premises' that basically are attitudes derived from their background and class.  In the United Kingdom the use of judicial review to oppose decisions of government and other statutory bodies enables challenges to authority.  However judicial review can only delay proposals, the courts have no power to instigate change. So the judiciary is not a driver of systemic change in this regard.

But let's not be too despondent.  In common law jurisdictions the principle of certainty and  being bound by decisions in earlier cases is enshrined in the statement that judges are bound by precedent. If that was what happens is true the common law would never have been shaped to deal with modern society. Judges do make law.  The major achievement of the Sociological School has been to inculcate the idea that the law must respond to current public, social and public interests and resolve cases where those interests do not coincide. Clearly this is in conflict with the concept of certainty. Adopting this approach may help alleviate the worst of systemic social injustice but usually governments have to legislate in order to effect change.

Marxist legal theory posits the opinion that law is the product of economic forces, the state and its laws are instruments of class oppression and wil wither away in the Marxist utopia.  The reality is somewhat different! However Marxism does bring to the forefront some of the causes of systemic injustice.

Gutierrez was wrongly lambasted by some in the Roman Catholic Church as promoting Marxist Theory.  It was a caricature of his position that is stated so well in the following article by Joseph Nangle OFM.

I came to know Gustavo in 1968, when he already was recognized as an outstanding scholar. He invited me with dozens of other ex-patriot priests working in Peru to weekly conversations centered on our pastoral work.

From the beginning Gustavo’s methodology gave evidence of what would become known as Liberation Theology, although at that time the phrase had not as yet been articulated.

He would invite us to share our day-to-day experiences as parish priests – the ordinary and sometimes dramatic events in our ministries. He was a great listener and for an hour or more at these meetings never interrupted us.

Toward the end of our sessions then, he would summarize what he had been hearing, but never correcting us or giving directions as to how we should be conducting our parish work. Instead, he would tell us that what we were sharing was the “raw material” of his theological reflections.

Looking back on these weekly meetings, it is clear, whether or not any of us realized it, that a new theological methodology was emerging, one that was simple and profound: an inductive, “reality to conclusions” process rather than the traditional deductive approach which repeated the tenets of the faith and applied them to every given situation.

A back story about this “new way” was one I heard years later. According to this account, several Latin American priests who had been sent to study theology in academic centers of Europe during the 1960s (the years of Second Vatican Council), returned home and began teaching. They quickly saw that “were answering questions no one was asking.” That gave rise to the obvious question: where does one begin to theologize in a way that is pertinent, appropriate, relevant to Latin America?

Gustavo Gutiérrez was a leading figure in this process. He discerned that lived experience, reality, what is going on, is a proper starting place for theological reflections which then had the task of wrestling with the follow up question, “What does God’s word have to say about each of these situations.” His questioning extended beyond personal matters to much broader issues. Much later he would put it this way: “What do the Scriptures have to say to ‘non human beings,’ impoverished people living in a world (Latin America in this case) where they are considered useless, nameless, even non-existent?”

Gustavo began expressing that what we were doing in our sessions was elaborating a “Theology of Development.” However, as I recall, he quickly laid aside that idea and suggested that our pastoral work with and for these “non-human beings” was connected with the Exodus story in the history of salvation; that our pastoral efforts were about that same movement – from slavery to freedom and dignity. A theology of liberation!

This concept and its consequences spread quickly through the post-Vatican II Latin American Catholic Church.* Thanks in great part to Gustavo’s influence and with the backing of the institutional Church, new kinds of pastoral practices began:

a preferential option for the poor guiding every aspect of our catechesis, sacramental life, bishops’ pastoral letters, lifestyles
an expanded spirituality based on a reading of the Gospel in the light of “structural, systemic, institutionalized injustices”
a growing awareness of the causes for the chasm between the “haves” and the “have nots,” both people and nations
preaching the “full Gospel”
I and millions more were fortunate beneficiaries of this, thanks to a spirit-filled thinker and firm believer in the Word Incarnate: Gustavo Gutiérrez, OP. Bless him now as he journeys home.

*It was not by any means universally accepted, however, but that is another story.

Joe Nangle OFM is a Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace and the 2023 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace. As a member of the Assisi Community in Washington, D.C., he is dedicated to simple living and social change. Joe also serves as the Pastoral Associate for the Latino community at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Arlington, Virginia.  













Saturday, 26 October 2024

Part 327. Gustavo Gutiérrez


Edited version of The  Daily Telegraph obituary dated 24 October 2024. The Guardian obituary and other commentaries on the theology and impact of Liberation Theology may be read on the Facebook Group: Liberal, and and deconstructivist theology.


Father Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, seismic Catholic reformer who launched ‘liberation theology’
His movement was investigated by the modern equivalent of the Holy Inquisition under John Paul II, but his ideas entered the mainstream

Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino: taught that poverty is not something to be accepted, but a challenge to be overcome, and the structures that bring about poverty are 'structures of sin'
 

Father Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, who has died aged 96, was probably the most original and contested theologian of the 20th century, who made an enormous contribution to Catholic thought through liberation theology, a term he himself coined.

Though opposed by many within the Church itself, liberation theology still had a lasting effect on Catholic life as well as a profound influence well beyond the confines of Roman Catholicism.

Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino was born on June 8 1928 in Lima, Peru. He grew up in poverty, and in his teenage years was afflicted with osteomyelitis, a painful inflammation of the bone marrow, which meant that he was confined either to bed or to a wheelchair. He endured this thanks to prayer, reading, and the company of his family and friends, he later said. The poverty of his surroundings was to have a lasting effect on his thought.


Father Gutiérrez was small of stature, unassuming and humble in demeanour, and gifted with a sense of humour. His original ambition was to be a psychiatrist, and he first studied medicine and literature at the National University of Peru, while also being involved in Catholic Action, a group dedicated to spreading the ideals of Catholic social teaching. But he soon felt drawn to theology and the call of the priesthood. He was eventually ordained at the age of 30, by which time he had been to Europe, and studied at the Catholic University of Louvain, as well as the Catholic University of Lyon. 

During this period, he worked under or studied all the big names in contemporary theology such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Johann Baptist Metz, all of whom would go on to be the formative influences of the Second Vatican Council.

In addition, he became familiar with the work of the leading Protestant theologians of the day such as Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann, as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who had been hanged for resisting Hitler. While the Catholic Church’s seminarians were still using outdated Latin manuals, generally written in the 19th century, Gutiérrez was way in advance of most of his contemporaries.

Gutiérrez in 2003: much of liberation theology – a concern for the poor, the importance of social justice, and the idea that salvation was not purely otherworldly – became mainstream, largely thanks to his pioneering work

Gutiérrez was to spend most of his life in academic institutions, such as the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, with various visiting professorships in Europe and North America. His groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation was published in 1971, an English translation appearing some two years later. It was this work that essentially launched the movement known as liberation theology.

Liberation theology was, and remains, a movement that works from the bottom up, using lived experience as a basis for theological reflection. The lived experience in question was that of the people of Latin America, the overwhelming majority of whom were mired in seemingly insoluble poverty.

Rather than theology originating in the cloister, it is theology originating in the slum. Poverty is by no means something to be accepted, but a challenge to be overcome, and the structures that bring about poverty are characterised as “structures of sin”. 

The essential watchword is that “True orthodoxy is orthopraxis”, or, in more accessible terms, that right beliefs must be put into practice. This approach was a useful antidote to a Catholic theology that often seemed cut off from the world and the experiences of ordinary people, or worse, which saw the problems of the world as something to be meekly accepted rather than changed.

Much of Gutiérrez’s writing was dense, erudite and somewhat inaccessible, but this did not stop non-theologians characterising him and other liberation theologians – for a movement was soon born – as Marxists, or, more critically, as Catholics who had imported Marxist concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism into Catholic theology, and undermined it from within in the process.


This was in fact a caricature of what Gutiérrez was doing, but the oversimplified criticism stuck, and brought conflict with the authorities in Rome, as well as fierce opposition from those in Latin America who saw liberation theologians as turbulent priests fomenting rebellion against the landowning class and the interests of big business. Political opponents did indeed have a point: liberation theology, with its “preferential option for the poor”, was seeking to detach Catholicism from those who sought to maintain the status quo.

As the 1970s wore on, liberation theology became more and more popular, and entered the mainstream of Catholic institutions. Gutiérrez became a hero to those who were standing up for the oppressed in Latin America, in the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in Africa. In Europe, no theological course was complete without a reference to the theology of liberation. Liberation theology also became the one theology acceptable to European Leftists who were otherwise not enamoured of the Catholic Church. However, there were dissenting voices, and in high places too.

John Paul II, though a supporter of liberation in Poland and Eastern Europe generally, as well as a stern critic of unregulated capitalism in his social writings, was wary of the way liberation theology, as developed by Gutiérrez and his followers, was making seemingly uncritical use of Marxist categories of thought. This resulted in an investigation into Gutiérrez’s work by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Inquisition), the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, leading to a report published in 1984 authored by Cardinal Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, a theologian of similar calibre but very different bent to Gutiérrez himself.

This highly nuanced document took the emphasis on class struggle to task as incompatible with Christianity, while stressing the traditional doctrine of the Church as means of salvation. Yet it found many aspects of liberation theology of merit. It could hardly do otherwise, as concepts such as “structures of sin”, the belief that sin is not simply an individual act, but can become a corporate one too, were presupposed in the writings of John Paul II himself.

Gutiérrez, ever the faithful priest and servant of the Church, took these criticisms of his theology in good part. When Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, succeeded the former Cardinal Ratzinger, the subject of liberation theology, thought by some to be a spent force, came to the fore once more, as it was widely thought that, as Cardinal Bergoglio, Pope Francis had been an opponent of liberation theology. 


In September 2013, Francis received Father Gutiérrez in the Vatican, though what was said between them remained private. This visit was interpreted as a coming in from the cold for the then 85-year-old theologian. But in 2015, at a press conference in the Vatican, Gutiérrez gently corrected this idea: liberation theology was not in need of rehabilitation, he said, because it had never been condemned in the first place. Indeed, many of the key concepts of liberation theology – a concern for the poor, the importance of social justice, and the idea that salvation was not purely otherworldly – had become mainstream, largely thanks to the pioneering work of Gutiérrez himself.

Father Gutiérrez was loaded with honours for his work: these included, apart from numerous professorships, election to the Peruvian Academy of Language, appointment to the Légion d’honneur and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Príncipe de Asturias award from the Spanish government.

In 1998, already an old man, Father Gutiérrez joined the Dominican order, motivated in part by his admiration for Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th-century Dominican friar who had fought so strenuously for the rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America.

In an interview in 2013, he remarked of his difficulties with the Vatican in earlier decades thus: “I learnt that you ought not to lose your sense of humour, a virtue that helps you not to feel as if you are at the centre of the world or a perpetual exile; not to take myself too seriously, which keeps you from becoming bitter. I like to laugh a lot, and I think this has helped me in difficult times. One should get on with it, without feeling indispensable, because theological reflection will carry on without me too.”

Father Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, born June 8 1928, died October 22 2024



Thursday, 24 October 2024

Part 326. A ramble.

In the 1980s I read Faith in the City, a report commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Robert Runcie. It was a study in deprivation and marginalisation in urban areas and listed recommendations on how the Church of England should press for change to overcome the causes of poverty and exclusion.  It was followed by Faith in the Countryside.

One aspect of the earlier report intrigued me: the call for not simply 'ambulance' work, helping individuals at point of need, but also a demand to engage with politicians to tackle causes of the ills set out in the report.  The report made reference to Liberation Theology. Thus it was that I became much more aware of and drawn to the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff. I was drawn into reading the ideas of Jurgen Moltmann and then into the writings of Martin Luther King Jnr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, James Lawson, Desmond Tutu, Dominic Crossan and Richard Rohr. 

Gutierrez, Moltmann and Lawson died this year. They leave a legacy of love, and hope, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the marginalised and discriminated against.

Alongside the importance I attach to social justice issues and the need for Christians to engage in demanding systemic change has been a shift towards support for concepts found in liberal, progressive, radical and deconstructivist thinking.  Thus it is that I have been influenced by concepts articulated by, amongst others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jacques Derrida, Don Cupitt, Marcus Borg, Walter Brueggemann, John Robinson, Jim Rigby, Jim Palmer, Colin Coward and John Caputo.

I no longer describe myself as Christian.  I seek to understand, follow, and promote the concepts of love and social justice attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels.


Thursday, 17 October 2024

Part 325. Call my bluff. Will the bishops fold?

I detect an element of desperation in the following statement by John Dunnett. When a poker player has a poor hand it is not recommended to raise the stakes. A bluff may be called with dire consequences.  I cannot see the House of Bishops folding. It almost as though the CEO of the Church of England Evangelical Alliance is going 'all in".  A risky strategy.

The statement is a demand for a Third Province. If it is rejected what then?  Does the departure lounge await?

"Following countless conversations with members of CEEC, General Synod, the Alliance and many others, I've noticed widespread consensus about what the so called PLF ‘provision’ or ‘reassurance’ needs to deliver, as the House of Bishops have chosen to proceed with their proposed changes regarding Living in Love and Faith. 

Let me highlight just three of them for you:
 
ONE We need to be in a part of the Church of England that has one biblical doctrine of sex and marriage. It's just not possible to hold two contradictory doctrines side by side. 
 
TWO We need to have bishops who believe, teach and lead out of orthodox convictions. Bishops who believe and uphold biblical teaching. Laypeople are saying to us, that's the kind of bishop they long to be overseen by. Clergy are saying that they need to be licensed and overseen by such bishops. 
 
THREE We need to guarantee what you might call ministerial pathways for the future. By that I mean securing the ongoing supply of people, being trained for ordained ministry, the ongoing supply of clergy, being appointed into parishes.
 
And of course, we're talking here about the guarantee of future appointment of orthodox bishops. We don't want anyone to be barred from ordination, parochial ministry, the episcopacy, because they can't, in good conscience, use or allow the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith. 
 
And if the provisions that are being explored and possibly brought to General Synod cannot guarantee at least those three things, then we have to see it as insufficient provision. So… 
 
> Please do pray for the challenging meetings that are currently going on about how Orthodoxy can be provided for, secured, going forwards. 
> Please do pray for those who are feeling vulnerable, even being squeezed at this time because of their stand for orthodoxy. 
> Please do pray for wisdom for those who are having to live out the reality of impaired fellowship at this time."

John Dunnett, National Director CEEC

Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Part 324. Personal opinions (2)

I was active in the voluntary sector as a trustee, director, volunteer, employee and self employed for 30 years, mostly in the  fields of poverty, debt, mental health, community engagement and homelessness.  Most of my activity was with faith and secular charities.

Twelve years ago I started attending my local Salvation Army corps as I was impressed by the work of the Army with the deprived and marginalised. Two years later I became an Adherent.  Latterly I became disenchanted with the Army as it failed to become inclusive on matters of sexual orientation. I had been prepared to pay little attention to the Army's doctrine that is conservative evangelical. However as my theological stance has shifted considerably in recent years that, together with its lack of movement on sexual orientation issues, led me to resign as an Adherent.

Readers of this blog will have noted the changes in my theological ideas.  It is a mish-mash of liberal, progressive, deconstructivist and radical thoughts.  A work in progress.  Underpinning it is my desire to follow Jesus and love my neighbour, not simply by intellectual assent but by practical action.







Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Part 323. Personal opinions.(1)

This blog does not seek to promote opinions with a view to influencing people to support them.  It is a commentary on how I perceive what is happening and what should be happening in the world.  I do not set out to be provocative, nor do I seek to act as a gatekeeper of "the truth".  It's more a case of finding it helpful to me to commit my thoughts to paper.

Evangelical free churches, The Salvation Army (TSA) and the Church of England (CofE) have been major influences in my faith journey. For many years I attended and preached at free churches.  Basically it was a diet of biblical fundamentalism and conservative evangelical doctrine.  However over time I became convinced that the most important element was to follow Jesus and love your neighbour. And so I slowly drifted away from the free churches and landed in the CofE.

What a glorious mish-mash of theology and ecclesiology!  High church, low church, Anglo-Catholics, liberals, and conservative evangelicals rubbing along with the odd elements of friction and yes, loathing.  Unity in diversity.  The CofE found a mechanism (flying bishops) to preserve an uneasy peace when it decided to ordain women.

 Now battle has been joined on the issue of church blessings for couples in same-sex civil marriages. There is an orchestrated campaign afoot for the creation of a new province within the CofE, not based on geography, but on an opinion that to permit such blessings is a fundamental breach of the CofE's doctrine and tradition and a refutation of biblical truth.

There is the threat of schism and departure from the Church.  How much of this is mere sabre-rattling is hard to tell.  Loss of homes and church buildings will doubtless make clergy think very carefully. The issue is having a debilitating effect within the Church which it can well do without given falling congregations, deteriorating revenue and major safeguarding issues. The vicar of the Church I attend has stated support for the blessings.

To follow: The Salvation Army.  Also  my theological shift.



Thursday, 10 October 2024

Part 322. Significant change?

The UK & I Territory of The Salvation Army has decided that, in addition to officers, it will employ staff on contracts of employment to lead corps.  What will be the terms of contracts? Will they be attractive enough to encourage individuals to apply?  

One downside is that the contracts will not offer long-term security whereas officership does. As the Territory's Chief Personnel Officer (CPO) puts it:

Employed spiritual leaders will have more self-determination in terms of where they live and serve, provided that there is an opportunity for ministry in their chosen location. However long-term security will be less sure as, if the need or a role ceases or a different strategic direction is taken, they would not be automatically moved to another appointment as an officer would.  

The CPO states:

This change has emerged as a pragmatic response to missional need at local level, but it is also the result of a strategic decision rather than a reactive response.

Make of that what you will.


Wednesday, 9 October 2024

Part 321. What to believe?

What to believe? by John D Caputo is an interesting volume on radical theology.  It is in the context of seeking (and never finding) words to conclusively 'explain' or 'define' God that Caputo writes.  The following statements may be of interest.

REALITY IS A PLACE LANGUAGE CANNOT QUITE GO

Many people avoid the word "God" because the symbol is so easily misunderstood. Everyone means something a bit different by the word. It is always important not to fall asleep into religious argon. Religious language is a poetic attempt to capture in words what can often only be experienced in silence. 

Whatever our source of being is, it is beyond the verbs and nouns of human thought. Words may lead us to the threshold of this experience, but only silence can truly experience reverence before a fitful ocean or starry night.

When biblical poetry said, “Be still and know that I am God,” perhaps it was reminding us that the word “God” is a symbol, not an idea or definition. The symbol “God” is a place marker reminding us there is always a mysterious infinity between our clearest distinctions, something infinitely deeper than our most profound value, and something infinitely larger than our vastest understanding

Language is incredibly important when it comes to communication but we must never forget that reality is a place language cannot quite go. 

To reduce the symbol “God” to a mental image means to lose the awestruck experience to which the symbol may refer. The symbol refers not to a belief but to an awareness, not to linguistic understanding but to a sense of awe most reverently expressed by silence. 

The Persian poet Rumi had a teacher named Shams Tabrizi who made this point very well I think:

“Most of the problems of the world stems from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”
JIM RIGBY

“I have in lectures often described this interesting situation by saying: we never know what we are talking about. For when we propose a theory, or try to understand a theory, we also propose, or try to understand, its logical implications; that is, all those statements which follow from it. But this, as we have just seen, is a hopeless task : there is an infinity of unforeseeable nontrivial statements belonging to the informative content of any theory, and an exactly corresponding infinity of statements belonging to its logical content. We can therefore never know or understand all the implications of any theory, or its full significance.”
Karl Popper, 'Unended Quest', Chapter 7.
KARL POPPER 


"We are now in a position to see why it is inherent in Popper's view that what we call our knowledge is of its nature provisional, and permanently so. At no stage are we able to prove that what we now 'know' is true, and it is always possible that it will turn out to be false. Indeed, it is an elementary fact about the intellectual history of mankind that most of what has been 'known' at one time or another has eventually turned out to be not the case. So it is a profound mistake to try to do what scientists and philosophers have almost always tried to do, namely prove the truth of a theory, or justify our belief in a theory, since this is to attempt the logically impossible. What we can do, however, and this is of the highest possible importance, is to justify our preference for one theory over another. In our successive examples about the boiling of water we were never able to show that our current theory was true, but we were at each stage able to show that it was preferable to our preceding theory. This is the characteristic situation in any of the sciences at any given time. The popular notion that the sciences are bodies of established fact is entirely mistaken. Nothing in science is permanently established, nothing unalterable, and indeed science is quite clearly changing all the time, and not through the accretion of new certainties. If we are rational we shall always base our decisions and expectations on 'the best of our knowledge', as the popular phrase so rightly has it, and provisionally assume the 'truth' of that knowledge for practical purposes, because it is the least insecure foundation available; but we shall never lose sight of the fact that at any time experience may show it to be wrong and require us to revise it.”
Bryan Magee, 'Popper'. (The US-edition of the booklet has the title 'Philosophy and the Real World: an Introduction to Karl Popper).
BRYAN MAGEE

Tuesday, 1 October 2024

Part 320. My Facebook posts

I administer a Facebook group entitled Liberal,  progressive and deconstructivist theology.

There you will see posts on mostly progressive, liberal and deconstructivist theological  topics. There are posts also on controversies and disputations within denominations, mostly centred on inclusion issues.

A significant number of posts are on social justice issues. They highlight the activities of faith and secular organisations campaigning for changes in government policy, both in terms of alleviating the effects of social injustice and systemic change to overcome the causes of discrimination, marginalisation, poverty, destitution and deprivation.  Clearly this requires campaigning for political action. These posts are, for followers of Jesus, illustrative of the application of the commandent to love your neighbour.

Overall my hope is that the posts illustrate faith in action from liberal, progressive and deconstructivist standpoints.  

I have also a page entitled John Hopkinson Theology. it is somewhat similar to the group mentioned above except it does not have posts on the activities of faith and secular organisations on social justice activities. Instead it concentrates on a broader range of theological discourse.