An Integral Liberation
If the key to Guti rrez' method is the option for the poor, the content of his theology is centered on the notion of liberation. Note, again, that Guti rrez never claims that the content of his theology of liberation is dramatically new on the contrary, the call to liberation has always been at the very heart of the Christian kerygma. That notion must also be viewed integrally, without separating its various dimensions. According to Guti rrez, liberation should also be understood as...
Creation History and Covenant
An agenda emerges the doctrine of creation provides a theological context for the consideration of political norms of goodness in the determination of what is the case universally, and by which the polity is referred to God. To develop this point, some account of the origins of the doctrine is required, as well as a reading of its political implications, especially in connection with covenant. How might a Christian doctrine of creation be construed First, creation is the free, unconstrained act...
The Caribbean and Britain
The Caribbean is the convenient name for the 40 island nations, including two mainland states, stretching in an arc of nearly 4,000 kilometers from Cuba in the northwest Caribbean Sea to Trinidad and Tobago off the Venezuelan coast. With the exceptions of Haiti, Cuba, and Grenada, the region tends to be reduced by most Europeans and North Americans to an exotic tourist site the history of brutal force which its natural beauty conceals is ignored. Diverse in language, race, culture, religion,...
Christology 1
What kind of Christological reflection is demanded of black political theologies What can it mean to tell poor and despised, unemployed, diseased, imprisoned black women and men that God in Jesus is also alienated, a stranger, a despised other These are questions for Christological meditation that foreground the black political situation. Robert Beckford offers a collection of pithy essays, Jesus is Dread 1998 , which probes several symbols and icons functioning within the black pentecostal...
J Matthew Ashley
Johann Baptist Metz has frequently asserted that his is a theology oriented not by system concepts, but rather by subject concepts. Subject concepts are to be evaluated not so much by how they cohere into a system as in terms of their capacity to articulate and undergird the ways that specific persons in specific times and places struggle to become and remain subjects agents of their own histories, persons who recognize the symbols and narratives that make up that history to be their symbols...
Biblical hermeneutics
The Bible is intimately connected to the dispossession and oppression of African-descended people. Consider the following anonymous orally transmitted story When the white man came to Africa he had the Bible and the Africans had the land. The white man asked the Africans to bow their heads and said, Let us pray. After the prayer, the white man had the land and the Africans had the Bible. For black political theologians in sub-Saharan Africa, this story captures their peoples' experience of...
Michael Hollerich
The twentieth-century godfather of political theology is the controversial Catholic jurist and sometime Nazi Carl Schmitt. This Martin Heidegger of political theory and German Hobbes of the twentieth century Schmitt 1996b xii Meier 1998 100 , as he has been called, is usually credited with reintroducing the concept of political theology into modern discourse. This chapter provides an introduction to Schmitt's life and work, an account of his political theology as he understood it, and a review...
South Africa
Black theology turned political in South Africa on March 21, 1960 with the Sharpeville massacre, when police opened fire at a peaceful demonstration, killing 67 blacks and wounding 186 others. In response, the African National Congress ANC , for nearly five decades the primary and moderate voice of black resistance to apartheid, and the relatively new and militant Pan Africanist Congress PAC , along with white South African liberals, initiated public demonstrations that gained worldwide...
Future Prospects
A glance at the current state of feminist theory reveals an intriguing agenda for the theological community, but also exposes a number of weaknesses in feminist theology as it is currently conceived. Despite - perhaps because of - its emphasis on the crucial impact of the category of women's experience, for example, Latina, womanist, and feminist theologies have tended to be somewhat undertheorized in terms of critical theories of gender. While recent publications have gone some way toward...
The Right Question
From its beginnings, feminist theology addressed itself to perceived biases in the construction of core theological doctrines. Valerie Saiving's 1960 article posed the question of whether Christian understandings of sin and virtue were at root, gendered whether, far from sharing a common human condition in this respect, women and men inhabited radically different moral universes. In dialogue with the theological ethics of Reinhold Niebuhr, Saiving claims that conventional renderings of sin as...
Asian feminist theology
One of the anomalies of Asian religiousness is that practically all the major metacosmic religions in Asia have had their origin and growth in androcratic societies. Since the Dalits and the Minjung suffered discrimination from the hierarchies of such metacosmic religions, Asian women sometimes have referred to themselves as the Minjung of the Minjung or the Dalits among the Dalits. For even the scriptures of these religions are not free from misogyny or gyno-phobia. Hence it is not a case of...
The black body sex sexuality and sexual orientation
The black political subject is an embodied subject. Since the days of the transatlantic slave trade, the bodies of African and African-descended women and men have been sites of political, economic, and sexual desire. European and European American representative esthetics further scaled these black bodies as primitive, lascivious, repugnant. This evaluation was at once religious and moral. It reflected white Western Christianity's ambivalence toward the body, sex, and sexuality. Yet Stuart...
The Four Gospels Jesus Prophet and Embodiment of the Kingdom of God
According to Mark's Gospel, Jesus of Nazareth preached the reign of God and thus oriented his heaven to that alternative horizon which Jewish eschatologi-cal hopes had kept in view as is evident from texts like 4Q 521 from the Dead Sea Scrolls see Vermes 1995 244 . Present political and social arrangements were not the norm, therefore. The imminent arrival of the messianic age heralded new priorities and broadened horizons Luke 4 16 Matt. 11 2 ff. . Political authority in Jerusalem was in fact...
Elaine Graham
Feminist theology has shown that our societal oppression and ecclesial exclusion is not women's fault, it is not the result of Eve's sin nor is it the will of God or the intention of Jesus Christ. Rather it is engendered by societal and ecclesiastical patriarchy and legitimized by androcentric world-construction in language and symbol systems. Insofar as religious language and symbol system function to legitimate the societal oppression and cultural marginality of women, the struggle against...
Ecojustice and the Struggle for Life
Colonization does not mean only the domination of people, but also the exploitation of natural resources for the development and benefit of the colonizers. In the 1920s Western powers controlled almost half the world's territory. With neocolonialism and globalization, national boundaries are less significant and the whole earth has become fair game for unbridled profiteering. Women in the South witness their subsistence and their role as managers of water and forest eroded and changed by the...
Christian democracy
Temple rejected certain exaggerated claims for democracy. The first is that there is an inherent sovereignty in the people. True, all government rests in the last resort on consent. But there are grave difficulties in knowing who the people are, and in the French Revolution the resumption of popular sovereignty was marked by cant and fanaticism. Inherent sovereignty is an attribute of no human person or collection of persons it is an attribute only of the Moral Law, and of God who is Himself...
The Dalit theology of India
The 1970s also saw the emergence of this theology from among the Christian Dalits, that is, those broken, downtrodden, destroyed by the nefarious system of discrimination between the so-called high, low, and scheduled castes in India. Their weak self-identity as untouchables and outcastes is derived from centuries of cruel segregation religiously sanctioned by the Hindu canon law dharmasastra . Today all the backward castes the current euphemism for so-called low castes and outcastes , tribal...
The public character of worship
The historical roots of Christian worship are found in two different sources the public worship of the Jewish synagogue, and the celebration in private homes of the Lord's Supper. While these two forms of liturgical celebration - the synaxis following the model of the synagogue, comprising reading, sermon, and prayer and the Eucharist - first existed independently of each other, from the fourth century onward they are regularly linked together in a single service. In order to understand the...
Christology
In the Reformation, the theology of the cross was expounded as a criticism of the church how can it now be realized as a criticism of society Moltmann 1974 317 . Just as in Theology of Hope, Moltmann insists that eschatology makes all finite human action questionable, so in his second major book The Crucified God 2nd edn. 1973 , he insists that the cross stands as a permanent objection to human certainties. It enables people to criticize and stand back from the partial historical realities and...
Augustine on Social Life
Human beings are, I noted above, social all the way down. Created in the image of God, we are defined by human relationality. The self is not and cannot be freestanding. Social life is full of ills and yet to be cherished. Thus, civic life, among those social forms, is not simply what sin has brought into the world but what emerges, in part, given our capacity for love and our use of reason, as well alas as a pervasive lust for domination attendant upon human affairs. The philosophers hold the...
Natural order
Alongside the method of principles Temple spoke interchangeably of natural order or natural law. He was rather ambivalent about its basis and relation to the Christian faith. He described it as the proper function of a human activity as apprehended by a consideration of its own nature, discovered in practice partly by observing the generally accepted standards of judgment. This was a task for human reason. Thus it was a natural, not a supernatural order but as God was the Creator, this natural...
Vii
We may conclude with two sorts of observations. First, it is possible to draw up a grid that suggests that certain kinds of literature perform certain political functions for this community, with its acute self-consciousness as the people of YHWH mandated to live its public vision of faith in a world of real power. The Torah the five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy provides the founda-tional account of faith in history, an account that is to be understood primarily as paradigm and not as...
The Fragments that were Bonhoeffers Life and Work
The primary confession of the Christian before the world is the deed which interprets itself. If the deed is to have become a force, then the world itself will long to confess the Word. This is not the same as loudly shrieking out propaganda. This Word must be preserved as the most sacred possession of the community This is a matter between God and the community not between the community and the world. It is the Word of recognition between friends, not a word to use against enemies. This...
Politics as Parable of the Kingdom of God
The church works for a better kind of state, in its own way, from its knowledge of the Word of the God. Barmen V's single word, reminding, now blossoms into a great tree of political imagination, suggestion, and participation. Between church and state, a simple and absolute heterogeneity is as much out of the question as a simple and absolute equating, so there is only one possibility left the existence of the State is an allegory, a correspondence and an analogue to the Kingdom of God which...
The Christian Community and the Civil Community
The influential essay of 1946, The Christian Community and the Civil Community Barth 1954 , is the fruit of Barth's intensive thinking about faith and politics through the Nazi period and the war. It reflects a changed situation. After 1945, the focus of concern was less on saving the church from the seduction of political religion, or justifying and fighting a necessary war, and more on building effective humane society out of dehumanized ruins. Barth had not spent the years since 1934 merely...
Augustine on War and Peace
A full treatment of this theme would require an assessment of Augustine's complex theodicy. That is beyond the scope of this essay. But a brief discussion is needed in order to grasp Augustine's theology of war and peace. Augustine acknowledges the seductive allure of evil. He famously tells the story of a youthful prank - stealing pears - that was done not from hunger but from pleasure in the deed itself and in the fellowship with others who took part in the deed. It took Augustine many years,...
Christ as political deity
The political nature of Christian worship has been recognized from the first, not least by those who opposed it Horsley 1997 . This recognition lies at the heart of the charge of atheism that was leveled at the primitive Christian communities. While the Romans knew Christianity to be a religious movement, they still regarded Christians as atheists because they did not partake in the public cult of the state gods, thereby undermining the unity and stability of the res publica. Hence Christian...
Conclusion
One can look at the pages of the New Testament and find in the synoptic Gospels, the letter of James and the book of Revelation that indomitable, uncompromising spirit which set itself against the values of the present age. Such clear-cut counter-cultural strands are, as has already been suggested, a common feature of early Christian texts. Yet, as the Pauline letters indicate, the new converts, particularly those in the urban environment of the cities of the Empire, had to learn a degree of...
Conclusion 1
When we take seriously Paul's ministerial characterization of those in power as God's liturgists and God's deacons to serve you towards the good Rom. 13 4, 6 , worldly authorities must be reminded of what they actually, yet perhaps unknowingly, are. The church owes this remembrance not only to Christian statesmen but also to every ruler and actually to all who are in a state of power at various levels of social life such as parents and therefore bearers of political responsibility. It is not,...
Maria Skobtsova
A similarly radical view of the Gospel's call to transform the world in love is found first and foremost in the life and writings of Mother Maria Skobtsova Hackel 1981 . One of the most colorful and original figures in the Orthodox Church in the modern era, Elisabeth Pilenko, as she was born, was a gifted poet and part of the circle of the Russian poet Alexander Blok. She was involved in the political turmoil of the Russian Revolution, may have been involved in the plot to assassinate Trotsky,...
Sergius Bulgakov
The son of a priest and a seminarian, like many other intellectuals of his generation Sergius Bulgakov left the church and Christianity to follow the Marxist vision of the transformation of society and the individual. Trained in sociology and political economy, he challenged Plekhanov's ideas about the restructuring of Russian society and economy, particularly agriculture, understanding like Max Weber the importance of the family, the village, cultural customs and individual motivation....
Michael J Baxter
The question is sometimes raised, whether Catholicism is compatible with American democracy. The question is invalid as well as impertinent for the manner of its position inverts the order of values. It must, of course, be turned round to read, whether American democracy is compatible with Catholicism. The question, thus turned, is part of the civil question, as put to me. An affirmative answer to it, given under something better than curbstone definition of democracy, is one of the truths I...
Bernd Wannenwetsch
In contrast to the prevailing modern tendency to identify the political meaning of the church primarily or exclusively in respect of its relationship to the state or the influence it seeks to bring to bear on civil society, this essay explores the political nature of the church as a politeia in its own right Wannenwetsch 2003 . The church as a political entity finds its constitutive and restitutive act in worship, which is the central praxis of the fellow citizens of the saints Eph. 2 19 ....