Category Archives: Liberation Theology

Kingdom-World-Church and Liberation Theology

Posted by on September 7, 2010 34 comments

Among the many discussions that ensued after Nate, Ry, and I posted Kingdom-World-Church, one of the more interesting ones (to me) involved the precise nature of the relation between our theses and Liberation Theology. That there was some important connection was clear from the theses themselves, both in the citations and content, especially regarding the church as the church of/for/with the poor. But questions were raised regarding whether or not the affinity between the project the three of us are undertaking is engaged with Liberation Theology in more than a merely apparent manner.

A thorough exploration of the connection between this project in Liberation Theology will certainly be made clear in the course of the future developed work, but for now, it may be helpful for us to take note of this passage from the first pages of Leonardo Boff’s Church: Charism and Power, which, please note, none of the three of us had encountered prior to our writing of the theses:

Kingdom-World-Church [this is the actual subtitle!]

In order to go beyond mere phenomenological analysis, we must identify the theological poles that enter into our understanding of what it is to be Church. The Church cannot be understood in and of itself because it is affected by those realities that transcend it, namely the Kingdom and the world. World and Kingdom are the two pillars that support the entire edifice of the Church. The reality of the Kingdom is that which defines both the world and the Church. Kingdom–the category used by Jesus to express his own unique intention (ipsissima intentio)–is the utopia that is realized in the world, the final good of the whole of creation in God, completely liberated from all imperfection and penetrated by the Divine. The Kingdom carries salvation to its completion. The world is the arena for the historical realization of the Kingdom. Presently the world is decadent and stained by sin; because of this, the Kingdom of God is raised up against the powers of the anti-Kingdom, engaged in the onerous process of liberation so that the world might accept the Kingdom itself and thus achieve its joyous goal.

The Church is that part of the world that, in the strength of the Spirit, has accepted the Kingdom made explicit in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnated in oppression. It preserves the constant memory and consciousness of the Kingdom, celebrating its presence in the world, shaping the way it is proclaimed, and at the service of the world. The Church is not the Kingdom but rather its sign (explicit symbol) and its instrument (mediation) in the world.

These three elements–Kingdom, world, and Church–must be spelled out in their proper order. First is the Kingdom as the primary reality that gives rise to the others. Second is the world as the place where the Kingdom is concretized and the Church is realized. Finally, the Church is the anticipatory and sacramental realization of the Kingdom in the world, as well as the means whereby the Kingdom is anticipated most concretely in the world.

There is a danger of too close an approximation, or even identification, of the Church and the Kingdom that creates an abstract and idealistic image of the Church that is spiritualized and wholly indifferent to the traumas of history. On the other hand, an identification of the Church and the world leads to an ecclesial image that is secular and mundane, one in which the Church’s power is in conflict with the other powers of the world. And there is the danger of a Church centered in on itself, out of touch both with the Kingdom and the world, such that it becomes a self-sufficient, triumphal, and perfect society, many times duplicating the services normally found in civil society, failing to recognize the relative autonomy of the secular realm.

These dangers are theological ‘pathologies’ that cry out for treatment; ecclesiological health depends on the right relationship between Kingdom-world-Church, in such a way that the Church is always seen as a concrete and historical sign (of the Kingdom and of salvation) and as its instrument (mediation) in salvific service to the world.” (pp. 1-2).

Now, I should say that we would probably need to qualify what we mean when we speak of the church as the “mediation” of the kingdom in the world, but the affinity between Boff’s account here and the account we have gestured towards in the theses should be more than apparent in this quote. The point, if it needs to be said, is that for us, a sustained re-engagement with Liberation Theology is much, much more than merely a surface-level, or apparent concern. Indeed, one of the key concerns we have about about the state of much of contemporary ecclesio-concentric theology is the way in which it relies on a sort of back-door rejection of the specific concerns and critiques of Liberation Theology in favor of exalting ecclesial and sacramental practices cast in theopolitical verbiage (e.g. Bell’s Liberation Theology After the End of History and Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist).

Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses

Posted by on June 8, 2010 252 comments

by Nathan R. Kerr, Ry O. Siggelkow, and Halden Doerge

In a recent conversation on this blog regarding an important review, by Ry Siggelkow, I (Nate Kerr) suggested in the comments that to think rightly what it means to say that “mission makes the church,” that mission as lived proclamation of and witness to Christ’s Lordship is indeed constitutive of the church’s existence in the world, we will need to engage in a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the church’s relation to the world in light of the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Kingdom of God that happens in the historicity of Jesus Christ. In the course of those comments I offered to write a “guest post” in which I gave some indication of what I think those reconsiderations might entail. This is that post—which has come together with more than just a little help from my friends, Halden and Ry. Together we offer these reflections in hope that they may contribute to the task of theology in the service of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We should like to begin these brief reflections with an oft-quoted passage from the conclusion of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics:

The believing body is the image that the new world—which in light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way—casts ahead of itself. The believing body of Christ is the world on the way to its renewal; the church is the part of the world that confesses the renewal to which all the world is called. (Yoder, Body Politics, 78)

This passage and others like it from Yoder’s oeuvre have been the impetus for a number of contemporary modes of “ecclesiocentric” construals of the Kingdom of God in relation to the world. The church’s missionary thinking, so the argument goes, is ecclesiocentric just to the extent that the church ontologically precedes the world and, ultimately, supercedes the world with respect to the Kingdom’s eschatological fulfillment. As the late twentieth-century theologian and missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk has argued, however, such “church-centric missionary thinking” is itself a false start. For from within such ecclesiocentric thinking, Hoekendijk claims, the call to mission, or evangelism—that is, the call to proclaim and to embody “the gospel”—often turns out to be “little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the ‘Corpus Christianum,’ as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church” (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 15). That is to say, the church aligns itself with the Kingdom and against the world by way of the production of its own alternative, habitable culture. As John Flett has convincingly argued, mission thereby becomes tied inextricably to the extension of this “culture”; this culture, this particular way of life, just is the gospel that is proclaimed, and the church’s missionary relation to the world cannot but be a function of its own culture—gospel proclamation turns out to be a matter of the church’s propagation of its own way of life, and evangelism a mode of integrating the world into this particular habitable culture.[1] Thus, on such an ecclesiocentric reading of the church-world relationship, the church is most missionary precisely at that point at which the church is most intentionally “self-regarding” (Hauerwas). And herein lies the reason why we must insist upon resisting such an understanding of the church as ontologically “prior” to the world as such, in relation to the Kingdom: viz., it presents us with not only an ecclesiologically but missiologically idealist logic—such an intentionally self-regarding conception of mission requires the construction of another (“the world”) as productive and reflective of its own identity.

The problem with such an ecclesio-concentric understanding of the church’s relation to the Kingdom and the world, says Hoekendijk, is that it misconstrues the basic scriptural sense in which the kingdom of God is first and foremost the Kingdom for the world. The Kingdom is oriented from beginning to end towards the oikoumene—the whole world.

For this oikoumene the Kingdom is destined; world (kosmos/oikoumene) and Kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts: it is the world which has been reconciled (II Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John (16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the Kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38)—the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the Kingdom. (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 41)

In short: “Kingdom and world belong together.” The order of God’s economy is thus “God-World-Church, not God-Church-World” (71). This is the order of God’s own missionary existence in Christ. And by participation in this missionary existence of God, we must give new expression to the church’s own missionary existence: the order of this existence must be that of Kingdom-World-Church, not Kingdom-Church-World.

What we should like to propose, then, is that the quote from Yoder with which we began these reflections should be read through the perspective of this alternative Kingdom-World-Church order. Precisely as such, we might better come to understand the implications of Yoder’s insight that mission has to do with coming to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such’” (Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 78). The church only exists as “living from and toward the promise of the whole world’s salvation.” (Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 12).

As such, the church thereby exists as one dimension of a thoroughgoing apocalyptic realism. That is to say, the church exists insofar as it is constituted by the manner in which, in the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, “the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world,” proving victorious over the fallen powers of this world for the sake of this world’s salvation (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54). What really matters, then, for the church, is its mode of participation “in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today” (55).[2] And that reality is without reserve that of the apocalyptic rectification of all things to God in Christ. That event of apocalyptic rectification is constitutive of reality itself; and the event of the church takes place firmly within that reality of the reconciled world “that is real only through the reality of God” disclosed in Jesus Christ (54).[3] The church thus exists as an ergon Kyriou (a work of the Lord), which means to say that the church exists for the sake of the unique and special share that it is given in the cosmic meaning of the sovereignty of this world’s living Lord. But precisely as such the church does exist, and its existence is precisely that of a special function and task. As to the nature of that special existence, function, and task, we should like to conclude these reflections. We shall do so by putting forward some provisional theses on the existence, nature, and task of the church. There could be more, of course, and these could be articulated with more depth and precision. But these are, after all, mere theses—and provisional at that.

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The mystery of the poor

Posted by on May 22, 2010 3 comments

The mystery of the poor is prior to the ecclesial mission, and that mission is logically prior to the established church. What Jürgen Moltmann wrote many years ago is still true: “It is not that the Church ‘has’ a mission, but the reverse; Christ’s mission creates itself a Church. The mission should not be understood from the perspective of the Church, but the other way round.” It is not that the Church already existed, and later asked what to do for and with the poor, as if the Church were formally established prior to its relationship with them, or as if its way of carrying out that option were unrelated to the essence of the Church, which remains unchangeable throughout history.

Jon Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor, 21).

The temptation of the church

Posted by on May 21, 2010 5 comments

The greatest structural temptation for the Church arises out of its relational character. On the one hand, the Church is entrusted with the tradition of the kingdom and the requirement to make the kingdom a reality; on the other hand it is not itself the kingdom. This combination of factors puts the Church in a situation of “concupiscence,” that is, of wanting to be, by identity, that which in fact it can only point to and serve, namely, the kingdom of God. In consequence, the possibility of conflict is always present; and when a particular situation clearly shows the difference and distance between Church and kingdom, the conflict breaks out—and cannot but break out—spontaneously. The discovery that the kingdom of God is the ultimate reality has brought an elemental truth to light: the Church, even in its entirety, is not absolute and therefore its structure is open to criticism.

~ Jon Sobrino, The True Church of the Poor, 202.

God’s preferential care

Posted by on February 22, 2010 7 comments

Todd at Memoria Dei has a helpful post on the notion, put forth in liberation theology, of God’s preferential option for the poor. In conversation with Stephen Pope’s work he argues that the notion of God’s preferential love, he argues must be understood in connection with the concept of care. Here’s a quote:

[Stephen] Pope argues that we must clarify God’s “preferential love” with another concept: care.  Care is the response of love to someone in need. Love necessarily involves care in the face of suffering but it is not reduced to care since love can exist in the absence of need.  Thus, it would be more accurate to speak of God’s “preferential care” or “preferential loving care” towards those in need.  The latter would preserve the fact that the source of the preferential option is love but without seeming to limit the scope of divine love. The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Last Judgment, and Lazarus and the Rich Man all point to God’s preferential care for those in need; and “need” (and thus care) should not be restricted to material poverty as is shown by Jesus’ invitation to the outcasts, women, and tax-collectors.  God’s preferential care extends to all victims and “non-persons” of history. Furthermore, this divine praxis of preferential care is not only grace for those who receive it but also a demand for those who follow Christ.

Dorothee Soelle, anyone?

Posted by on October 29, 2009 11 comments

Anyone read much of Dorothee Soelle? I’ve only come across her recently and am definitely intrigued by what I’ve read about her work so far. For a small shotgun blast of some of her quotes, see Jeremy’s recent post on her hard to find book, Christ the Representative.

Martyrdom without Fetishization

Posted by on September 21, 2009 5 comments

Daniel Izuzquiza’s Rooted in Jesus Christ is a very stirring addition to contemporary theology, and in particular is a helpful engagement with and extension of the project of liberation theology. The book focuses on four central features of liberation theology: method, God as liberator, the martyrs, and the poor. Some of his statements about martyrdom are particularly good:

If our discourse about martyrdom focuses on the violence, suffering, and death operating against the poor people—instead of highlighting their fortitude and endurance—the unwanted effect might be a victimization of the people themselves. In this scheme, the poor would be mere passive recipients of the violence exerted on them, while the real protagonists would be the executioners. The paradoxical outcome of such a theology of martyrdom would be a factual dis-empowerment of the victims, who are left with no other option than silent suffering of their unjust fate. Considered from another perspective, this approach seems to mimic the dominant discourse, with its emphasis on dramatic excesses, that may get attention from the mass media. In a sense, the recent film The Passion of the Christ might be an example of what a distorted theology of the cross and martyrdom may look like: a bloody and dreadful affair with little connection to human praxis in daily life. (p. 13)

In other words, if a theology of martyrdom is fixated on the violence suffered by the martyrs rather than on their courage and witness, we end up simply valorizing violence itself, making martyrdom something of a fetish.

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